"Suffocating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... silence, deep and complete, had fallen on the house, Hollyhock took down an old cloak from where it hung in a certain part of the hall, and wrapping it firmly round her shoulders, went out into the night. It was better out of doors—less suffocating, less lonely—and the girl's terribly low spirits began to rise. She was in for an adventure, and what Scots lassie did not love ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... he felt dazed, half-stunned, suffocating, much as he had felt with Greggs' fingers tightening on his windpipe, that week-old night at Troyon's; he experienced real difficulty about breathing, and was conscious of a sickish throbbing in his temples and a pounding in his bosom ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... a voice interrupted by suffocating sensations, gave some account of the state of ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... of the marvellous properties ascribed impartially to the worm, the eel, and the snake, Bobby and Johnny succeeded in gaining a place in the court-room for the afternoon session. It was not a very good place. Breast-high in front of them was a rail. Behind them pressed a suffocating crowd. On the other side of the rail were many benches on which was seated another crowd. This second multitude concealed utterly whatever occupied the floor of the court-room. Only when one or another of the actors in ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... dust, that come and come, and never cease, long after it seems as if every particle in that rainless land must have been driven by. It is in the "Great Basin," and the south wind is the broom that sweeps it clean. Not only dust does the south wind bring, but heat, terrible and suffocating, like that of a fiery furnace. Before it the human and the vegetable worlds shrink and wither, and birds and ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... been five weeks on our journey—the flatboat was floating slowly along, as if it were tired of going, between the narrow banks of a bayou marked in red ink on Carlo's map, "Bayou Sorrel." It was about six in the afternoon. There had been a suffocating heat all day. It was with joy that we came up on deck. My father, as he made his appearance, showed us his flute. It was a signal: Carlo ran for his violin, Suzanne for Alix's guitar, and presently Carpentier appeared with his wife's harp. Ah! I see them still: Gordon ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... him a profligate name and a ghost story which Dr. Johnson thought the most extraordinary he had ever heard. It was in November, 1779; Lord Lyttelton had just returned from Ireland, and was seized with suffocating fits. One night he dreamt a dream. A dove hovered over him, changed to a woman in white, and spoke to him. It was a dead face, and he knew who it was; her two daughters were under his roof. Her words were few: "Lord Lyttelton, prepare to die!" "When?" he gasped. "In three ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... his observations carried him. Suddenly a suffocating cloud was thrown over his head from behind and drawn ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... overtaken, by taking refuge in some unexpected transformation. Sometimes the scene changed, and it was the dreamer that was flying, while Sandford, shod with swiftness, pursued him, swinging a lasso; and as often as the fierce hunter whirled the deadly coil, Fletcher awoke with a suffocating sensation, and a cold sweat trickling from his forehead. At breakfast, his wife noticed with intense anxiety his sharpened features and his evident preoccupation of mind. He hurried off, snatching a kiss from the baby and from the mother who held it, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... fits—of a suffocating nature," he said. "He suffers from a too sensitive conscience. The fits come upon him when he has made a mistake ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... ever inhabited. We all sleep on the floor and keep our clothes in our trunks—except Lilly, who has an armoir without doors. Knives and forks for dinner to-day, though the table still consists of a single plank. The house really has a suffocating effect on me, there is such a close look about it. The front is fully a foot below the level of the street, while quite a flight of steps leads from the back door to the yard. In fact, the whole town consists ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... him, who was no longer sensible either of human grief or of human joy. Close at the head of the bed stood an old man, with his face buried in his hands; the latter reposing against the wainscoting of the room. He, too, wept, but his weeping was more audible, more painful, and accompanied by suffocating sobs. It was the humble, yet almost paternally attached servant of the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... accepted the invitation, the place was packed, but nowhere was the crowd so suffocating as round the entrance ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... days which filled me with ennui and a yearning for my own clear city of Paris, where, if we are ever visited by a slight mist, it is at least clean, white vapour, and not this horrible London mixture saturated with suffocating carbon. The fog was too thick for any passer to read the contents bills of the newspapers plastered on the pavement, and as there were probably no races that day the newsboys were shouting what they considered ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... to which Loo Loo was conveyed was a wretched place. The walls were dingy, the floor covered with puddles of tobacco-juice, the air almost suffocating with the smell of pent-up tobacco-smoke, unwashed negroes, and dirty garments. She had never seen any place so loathsome. Mr. Jackson's log-house was a palace in comparison. The prison was crowded with colored people of all complexions, and almost every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... life away, I watched and waited as women are wont to do. Then dark rumors were afloat of foes making a desperate advance, and of bloody battle pending. One night a horror fell upon my troubled sleep—an appalling gloom, a shuddering, suffocating sense of some impending doom. Battling fiercely and blindly with this dread, invisible something, I awoke in deadly fright, to find the terror no less clear to my perceptions, no less palpable and real, and to wrestle with it still. Some blind ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... give a thorough draught across the top. The beds had spring mattresses of steel, and three striped blankets each, and spotted red and white counterpanes such as give pauper dormitories such a cheerful look. Looney and Clem slept side by side. Before midnight the dormitory was full of suffocating smoke. The alarm was raised. For a time it was thought that all the boys had escaped down an iron staircase lately erected outside the building. But when the flames had been put out in the store-room below, the bodies of Looney ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... mortal stenches. A vapour, suffocating and malignant, scarcely allowed me to breathe. No suitable receptacle was provided for the evacuations produced by medicine or disease. My nearest neighbour was struggling with death, and my bed, casually extended, was ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... description. Old seamen, who had been in many a hard-fought battle, and had stood at their guns under the most deadly fire the enemy could pour upon them, without flinching, now deserted their stations, and ran about through the blinding and suffocating smoke that filled the turret, with blanched cheeks, trampling each other under their feet, and utterly disregarding the commands of their officers, who ran among them with drawn swords, and endeavored ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... furnished, and heated to a pitch of suffocation by a stove. There was a bed in a curtained alcove at the end of the apartment; an easel stood near the large window; and the proprietor of the chamber sat in a cushioned arm-chair close to the suffocating stove. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... flames of a few poor slender tapers which flicker against the walls in stone arches, a dense crowd of human figures veiled in black, in a place overpowering and suffocating—underground, no doubt—which is filled with the perfume of the incense of Arabia; and a noise of almost wicked movement, which sirs us to alarm and even horror: bleatings of new-born babies, cries of distress of tiny mites whose voices are drowned, as if on purpose, by ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... much is it? Twelve dollars? For the privilege of suffocating in this compact little Black Hole? By my halidom, Comrade Gooch, that gentleman whose name you are so shortly to tell us has a very fair idea of how to charge! But who am I that I should criticise? Here are the simoleons, as our young friend, ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... There they stood in the water to their necks, and watched the great fire as it divided at the little prairie, and swept around them, passing to left and right. It was a grim sight. All the heavens seemed ablaze, and the clouds of smoke were suffocating. Even there in the river the heat was most oppressive, and at times the faces of the boys were almost scorched. Then they would thrust their heads under the water, and keep them there as long as they could hold their breath, coming up again greatly refreshed. The wild ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... LOBELIA'S suffocating breath Loads the dank pinion of the gale with death.— 195 With fear and hate they blast the affrighted groves, Yet own with tender care their kindred Loves!— So, where PALMIRA 'mid her wasted plains, Her shatter'd ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... his neck to save his jaw, but his right cheek was pounded, one eye closing. It was only a matter of moments before he must relax and then Russell would pin him down with one arm and send in the final smashing blow. He felt himself suffocating, sinking—the noise of roaring waters dinned in ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Rockefeller won't be in it!" said Skippy, who was suffocating. "Snorky, what I said goes! Money isn't everything. No—sentiment's bigger. Fifty-fifty, I said, ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... Whether the natural inducements to sloth are not greater in the Mogul's country than in Ireland, and yet whether, in that suffocating and dispiriting climate, the Banyans are not all, men, women, ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... five suffocating minutes in the public sitting-room of the Beau Soleil. It was a hideous room, with abominable flowers sprawling over the wall paper and carpet, and all the windows were shut, but he did not notice these things; nor did he recognise the heavy scent that ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... handsome eyes were on her mercilessly—she was suffocating besides with a wild desire to laugh, her breath coming short and quick. She gave one agonized look at Brother Skates, and then, lifted her eyes to ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... come. Conversations about hair styles, about business. And so on. The conversation moves haltingly. Suddenly stops, like a defective clock. Fear that it will stop entirely. A young girl blushes-But at one point everything is still. It feels suffocating. It feels unsafe, like in a swing, helpless, like in a slide... it feels ridiculous. One hears something like the wind sweeping across the roofs. Rain beats ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... talk about carrying him back to the town, calls for a gate or a shutter, and the little crowd constantly on the increase, till the pressure grew suffocating. ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... from it. They little knew how much pain their sufferings caused me; how earnestly I endeavoured to lessen or neutralise the nuisances which the pursuit of science entailed. But I could not consume my own smoke, or prevent explosions, or convert bad and suffocating odours ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... re-entered my hotel at ten o'clock, the little reptile of a portress handed me your gracious lines. I was in a villainous humour. I had been having an over- dressed dinner in a stuffy restaurant, and had gone from there to a suffocating theatre, where, by way of amusement, I saw a play in which blood and lies were the least of the horrors. The theatres over there are insupportable; the atmosphere is pestilential. People sit with their elbows in your ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... for a moment from the sense of his formidable power. It formed the undercurrent of her consciousness; whatever she might be doing or thinking, it went on, involuntarily, like her breathing, sometimes welling up until suddenly she found herself suffocating. There was a moment of this tonight, and Caroline rose and stood shuddering, looking about her in the blue duskiness of the silent room. She had not been here at night before, and the spirit of the place seemed more ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... with lighted candles, and thus put into the oven, the mouth of which was closed this time. He was there nearly five minutes, when all the spectators cried out, "Enough, enough," and anxiously hastened to take him out. A noxious and suffocating vapour of tallow filled the inside of the oven, and all the candles were extinguished and melted. The Spaniard, whose pulse was 200 at coming out of this gulf of heat, immediately threw himself into a cold ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... and thinke she is not: I thinke that thou art iust, and thinke thou art not: Ile haue some proofe. My name that was as fresh As Dians Visage, is now begrim'd and blacke As mine owne face. If there be Cords, or Kniues, Poyson, or Fire, or suffocating streames, Ile not indure it. Would I ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... and Gentlemen,—I won't keep you one single moment in this suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr. Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very grateful. I do not wish to appear ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... replied the other, kissing his friend's forehead. "Yes, I am proud of my office, and it is one which the king only gives to his friends. Still it is a great plague to have to stay so long in this hot, suffocating Babylon. Shall we ever be off for the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... with suffocating powder smoke that he could not see across it, but he had seen the dull-red flash from the muzzle of a revolver and ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... mob of Pangerans came on board, in number not fewer than fifty, and with a multitude of followers. They awoke us out of our first sleep, and crowded the vessel above and below, so that we could scarce find room to make our toilet in public, while the heat was suffocating us. However, we did manage it, and sat talking till daylight. Our visitors were chiefly relations or adherents of Muda Hassim, and some of the first men in the country. Pangeran Budrudeen and Pangeran Marsale were in their glory, and happy; and it was evident at once that our affairs ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... our lonely duty was not enhanced in pleasure by the contemplation of scores of stretcher bearers carrying out men who had been caught unprepared by the gas and who were choking and suffocating from ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... I knew moreover, that Chirac had continually told him that the habitual continuance of his suppers would lead him to apoplexy, or dropsy on the chest, because his respiration was interrupted at times; upon which he had cried out against this latter malady, which was a slow, suffocating, annoying preparation for death, saying that he preferred apoplexy, which surprised and which killed at once, without allowing ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... to weary the reader by detailing at length the progress of Madame's Saturday campaign. Her methods of offence will, by now, have become clear. To the "suffocating gas" of her smiles, and the "liquid fire" of her eyes she had added the devastating "Tank"—her despatch-case. She worked its mysteries unceasingly. When it was not under her own hand it reposed—during ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... I make my difficult way are strung with washing as far as the first bend. The dampness of the atmosphere has converted the dust and grime on banisters, wall, and stairs into a muddy dew. The little doll's-house of a place reeks with the suffocating odour of gas, fried fish, onions, and steam. In one of the two rooms on the first floor, the door of which stands open, I see—and myself am seen, not to say scowled at, by a couple of pipe-smoking ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... we knew absolutely nothing of what was taking place around us. Not one word did we dare even whisper to each other, our only means of communication being through our hands. The night was intensely dark and the air was close—almost suffocating. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... here a banquet smiles, A common cheer for all;... e'en humble Giles, Who joys his trivial services to yield Amidst the fragrance of the open field; Oft doom'd in suffocating heat to bear The cobweb'd barn's impure and dusty air; To ride in murky state the panting steed, Destin'd aloft th' unloaded grain to tread, Where, in his path as heaps on heaps are thrown, He rears, and plunges the loose mountain down: Laborious task! with what delight when done Both horse ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... against a considerable propaganda of disease. A more serious argument for the good of war is that it evokes heroic qualities that it has brought out almost incredible quantities of courage, devotion, and individual romance that did not show in the suffocating peace time that preceded the war. The reckless and beautiful zeal of the women in the British and French munition factories, for example, the gaiety and fearlessness of the common soldiers everywhere; these things have always been there—like champagne sleeping in bottles in a cellar. But ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... doors. Snow, the familiar snow, was falling from a sombre sky; already it lay deep on the boundless plains. It fell without ceasing. The sky grew darker. Hours seemed to pass, and still the flakes descended. It was not cold snow. It was warm snow—warm and rather suffocating. Very suffocating. It began to choke her. Suddenly she found she could breathe no more. She gave a ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... despised him. If at once he were ashamed and became apologetic, she despised him even more. And if he did not, would not, give way to anger—then she hated him. And worst of all was the silence which for days together would rise like a wall between them. A suffocating, crushing, maddening silence which brings even the gentlest creatures to fury and exasperation, and makes them have moments when they feel a savage desire to hurt, to cry out, or make the other cry out. The black silence in which love reaches its final stage of disintegration, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Guy's peregrinating proclivities! I am getting too old to jump up every three seconds, to keep somebody's baby from jerking itself into a spasm or suffocating with the croup. Hartwell ought to be here to take all this practice ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... in the new fields became an ugly and a troublesome thing. Roads there were none, and supplies became difficult to secure. The surface of the land melted and spinning wheels churned it; traffic halted, vehicles sank, horses drowned. Between rains the sun dried the mud, the wind whirled it into suffocating clouds. Sandstorms swept over the miserable inhabitants; tornadoes, thick with a burden of cutting particles, harried them until they cursed the fate that ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... an opportunity, for you never asked me to do so," said the soft tones of the princess immediately behind me; and as I turned she added: "but these rooms are suffocating, so if you will give me your arm now, Mr. Dubravnik, we will lead the way, and perhaps the others will follow. I know that the gentlemen are longing for ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... which my mind is persistently filled. Despite an almost overpowering desire to sleep, despite the torpor that is coming upon me in this suffocating atmosphere, I am resolved not to close my eyes. I will keep awake till daylight, and there will be no daylight for me till it is let into my prison from the outside. Perhaps even if the door were open it would not penetrate to this black hole, and I shall probably not see it again ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... have won his way into the bedchamber, concealed himself in the armoire, and in the dead of the night, and in the deep and helpless sleep of his victim, have done the deed. What need of weapons—the suffocating pillows would stop speech and life. What so easy as escape,—to pass into the anteroom; to unbolt the door; to descend into the courtyard; to give the signal to the porter in his lodge, who, without seeing him, would pull the cordon, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the fir needles which lay two inches thick on the ground. It was still, dark, and only here and there in the tops of the trees shimmered a bright gold light casting the colours of the rainbow on a spider's web. The smell of the firs was almost suffocating. Then I turned into an avenue of limes. And here too were desolation and decay; the dead leaves rustled mournfully beneath my feet, and there were lurking shadows among the trees. To the right, in an old orchard, a goldhammer sang a faint reluctant song, and he too must have been old. ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... these winds is mentioned in the note on Chunda in Vol. II. of this work; it must here be added, that Professor Vairo at Naples found, that during the eruption of Vesuvius perpendicular iron bars were electric; and others have observed suffocating damps to attend these eruptions. Ferber's Travels in Italy, p. 133. And lastly, that a current of air attends the passage of electric matter, as is seen in presenting an electrized point to the flame of a candle. In Mr. Bruce's ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... complete, scarce knowing what he did, (So goes the tale,) beneath the altar there In the high church the stiffening corpse he hid, And then, to 'scape that suffocating air, 460 Like a scared ghoul out of the porch he slid; But his strained eyes saw blood-spots everywhere, And ghastly faces thrust themselves between His soul and hopes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... liberty, in freedom to be itself, in order that it may perform its own, its peculiar and appropriate function, in harmonious connection with others performing theirs. Despotism is the binding, compressing, suffocating of individual life; first of the three functions of government, which should always be kept separate, and next, as a natural and inevitable consequence, of those who come under that solidified administration. The nation governed by a despotism must be moulded after the same pattern; it must ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... were locked up at the fixed hour for locking up, and found dead at the fixed hour for opening. How they had died—no one knew. At what hour they had died—no one knew. Whether in some choking struggle a human hand might have saved them by changing a suffocating position or the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... to the gentleness that was in his heart. The fight was over, and he had won—the man of him had won. She was in that room where the lights were,—waiting for him. The moment was not far off when she would be in his arms. He was suffocating with the thought of the nearness of ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... which were carried off by the artery-like vein (φλεπς αρτηριωδης {phleps artêriôdês}, the mediaeval vena arterialis, our pulmonary artery) to the lung and then exhaled to the outer air. These impurities and vapours gave its poisonous and suffocating character to the breath. Having parted thus with its impurities, the venous blood ebbed back again from the right ventricle into the venous system. But for a small fraction of the venous blood that entered ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... as she would, she could not keep some of them from igniting the dry shingles. From side to side she scrambled, sweeping, beating, fighting the fire with all the strength in her little body. Her eyes smarted fiercely, her feet were bruised, the heat was suffocating; but 'Mazin' Grace never thought of deserting the post: she worked, as she had danced, with all her might and main, pitting her puny strength valiantly against ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... radical difference between the two was that when I was permitted to quench my thirst that particular form of torture was alleviated for a few brief seconds, while the other was continuous and distracting almost to the point of being unendurable. It seemed to me that I lay for an age in that suffocating sick-bay, every moment of the time being heavy with indescribable torment; but as a matter of fact I was there little more than forty-eight hours, the skipper cracking on for Jamaica, in order that several bad cases—of which I was one of the worst—might have the advantage of the lofty, airy ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... stupor was profound. I shook him as roughly as was safe in his depressed condition, but elicited no resistance or responsive movement. As it seemed very doubtful whether he was capable of swallowing, I dared not take the risk of pouring the liquid into his mouth for fear of suffocating him. A stomach-tube would have solved the difficulty, but, of course, I had not one with me. I had, however, a mouth-speculum which also acted as a gag, and, having propped the patient's mouth open with this, I hastily slipped off one of the rubber ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... muttered Bongrand, suffocating with grief, as indignant as at the outburst of some low-bred fellow beside ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... and flung aside By drunken brawlers as they shuffled past, A man was groping to what seemed a light. His eyelids burnt and quivered with the strain Of looking, and against his temples beat The all enshrouding, suffocating dark. He stumbled, lurched, and struck against a door That opened, and a howl of obscene mirth Grated his senses, wallowing on the floor Lay men, and dogs and women in the dirt. He sickened, loathing it, and as he gazed The candle guttered, ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... beneath the dense foliage grew depressing—suffocating. Each one longed breathlessly for the minute when he should emerge from this heavy timber-growth, even to do more rugged climbing. Distant rumbles were heard. Herb's prophecy was being fulfilled. Pamolah was grumbling at the trailers, and sending out his Thunder Sons ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... when he thought he could do so unseen. One day, however, when he had reached some distance, he dislodged a large stone which blocked up the opening towards his cell. His terror was frightful. Not only was the air suffocating and the darkness dreadful, but he knew that if any of the guards were unexpectedly to come into his cell, the opening must be discovered, and all his toil again lost. For eight hours he stayed in the tunnel paralysed by fear. Then he roused himself, and by dint of superhuman struggles ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... those gleaming Gatling barrels, the stern, brief orders and the rapid, confident advance combine to overcome all idea of resistance. On both sides, at the head of the train, the huge crowd, half laughing, half suffocating, is heaved back upon itself and sent like a great human wave rolling up to the iron lattice at the office end. Meantime, without an instant's delay the battalion springs out from the cars, forms ranks on the north platform, counts ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... foot. A rug is an essential, but it should be of a sort that will not readily absorb and retain water. Speaking of the window, it must be observed that outdoor ventilation, without disturbing privacy, should be made possible. Often a bathroom becomes quite suffocating, and with weakly persons the danger of being overcome in a locked room is not to be left ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... all these ladies, and, with angelic devotion, remains shut up for hours in this dark, narrow, suffocating box, through the grating of which two penitents ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... sucker," he heard some one say. Kicks and blows rained on him. He seemed to be suffocating. Then two men seemed to be dragging him off and he wrestled ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... on the clay floor like a litter of young puppies, and breathe the foulest air until morning, at which time they are released from the suffocating oven, to be suddenly exposed to the chilly daybreak. Their naked little bodies shiver round a fire until the sun warms them, but the seeds of diarrhoea and dysentery have already ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... had delivered that excellent woman into the care of her liege lord and had seen them securely packed into the horse-car that was to drag them tediously homeward in company with a great multitude of suffocating fellow-sufferers, he felt it; and all the way out the dark street and up the hill that ran, or seemed to run, into outer darkness—where his home was—he felt as if he had never been the man he was until now, and that it was all for her sake and through ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... she seized a hook that projected from the chimney. She reached a second and supported her foot on the first; a third, a fourth; and now the opening grew narrow and more narrow, and she struggled along through the black, suffocating hole, until her breath had almost failed her, and she had nigh been choked to death! Poor girl! She could not reach her eyes to clear them of the soot that was blinding and maddening her with pain, and she began to tremble ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... not of a rank to make suggestions, or I would have suggested that if we went faster we should get by sooner. It seemed to me that it was an ill-judged time to be taking a walk. Just as we were drifting in that suffocating stillness past a great cannon that stood just within a raised portcullis, with nothing between me and it but the moat, a most uncommon jackass in there split the world with his bray, and I fell out of the saddle. Sir Bertrand grabbed me as I went, which was ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... "The poppy has grown apace and is killing gods and fairies. Its fumes are suffocating the world, and its roots drain it of its beautiful strength." And I asked him why he sat on the hills I knew, playing ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... silly maid had muddled all her packing; then, late already, had hurled herself into a cab, and observed, half-way to the station, that the horse was on the point of collapse; had changed cabs and had arrived at the station to see her train just going out. 'So there I paced up and down like a caged, suffocating lioness for over an hour, had a loathsome lunch, and read half a dozen papers before my train started, I came third class with a weary mother and two babies, the sun beat in all the way, and I had three changes. I'm hardly fit to be seen, and not fit to speak. But, yes, I'll have a bath ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... into the trackless veldt, it being estimated that a compass bearing due east would bring it by daybreak within easy reach of the parallelogram of hills in which Fauresmith and Jagersfontein lie. But the favour of Providence was withdrawn: the night, which had been born in suffocating heat, suddenly changed to piercing cold, and great zigzags of white lightning, clutching at the heavens like the claws of some gigantic dragon, heralded a tempest of unwonted fury. And presently it came preceded by a blinding sandstorm, which told how much the burnt surface ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... the wrongs done in private grievances. Since the Kingdom of God is the highest thing there is, an attempt to block it or ruin it is the worst sin. Our hope for the advance of the race and its escape from its permanent evils is conditioned on keeping our moral perceptions clear and strong. Suffocating the best specimens of moral intelligence and intimidating the rest by their fate quenches the guiding light of ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... close and sultry, not a cloud in the sky, and not a breath of wind stirring; and I confess I felt sick with a suffocating sense of horror when I reflected on the terrible sight I was ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... risky course of action in sending his boats and so many of his people away in the face of that threatening sky; the boats had no sooner shoved off than he became consumed by anxiety, and, oblivious of the suffocating heat and closeness of the atmosphere, proceeded to pace the deck to and fro with hasty, impatient strides, halting abruptly at frequent intervals to scrutinise the aspect of the sky, and, anon, to watch ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... aspurt with spears of flame, leaping, meeting, and crossing. We looked round. The dance stopped, the organ gurgled away to rubbish, the crowd took open order, and stared at the narrow alley of Back Hill. Blankets of smoke moved from its mouth, pushing their suffocating way up the street. Twenty people hurt themselves in shrieking orders. Women screamed and ran. From an open window a tongue of flame was thrust derisively; it tickled a man's neck, and he swore. Then a lone woman had the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... morning, small clouds are seen on the horizon. They may be no bigger than a man's hand, but they are blessed harbingers of rain. To those who know not what is coming, there seems at first no improvement on the previous sultry calms. There is a sense of suffocating heat in the atmosphere; a thin haze creeps over the sky, but it scarcely affects the broad glare of ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... excitement. The doctor drew into him the murmur of Julian's mind until it seemed to become, for the time, the murmur of his own mind. He was conscious of a dreadful turmoil of doubt, and dread and perplexity, so strong, so painful, that it lay upon him like a dense and a suffocating burden. In that moment he knew utterly that the greatest load in the world laid on any man is the load of his own, perhaps beloved, sin. He was staggering wearily with Julian away from the light. His ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... short career, glorifying himself as the prize scholar and the erstwhile Grand Llama of Budge Street, and drawing a dismal picture of the factory. Barney Bill listened comprehendingly. Then, smoking a well-blackened clay, he began to utter maledictions on the suffocating life in towns and to extol his own manner of living. Having an appreciative audience, he grew eloquent over his lonely wanderings the length and breadth of the land; over the joy of country things, the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... comrades, reporting that all the rest of the inhabitants had fled. Determined to do all the mischief in their power, they set fire to the house and barns, and then pushed off into the woods, to seek new victims in the unoffending Moravian settlement of Guadenhutten. Little Emily was first awakened by a suffocating heat and smoke, and by the crackling of the flames: she screamed aloud to her father for help, and tried to approach the stairs, but the blinding smoke and the quickly spreading fire drove her back. Just then, a tall and noble form, ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... it, that this was the very place that had now grown so vivid to us. "Ah, this is how it looks in sunlight!" I would think to myself, having seen it always in the early morning and cold. Behind me the long white house, the hunters, the dogs.... No, they were not here in the burning suffocating sunlight, but they would come—they ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... all the banks. The streets are crowded with hurrying people whose faces wear expressions of nervous fright. The railroad stations are packed with tightly jammed mobs in which people and luggage form one inextricable, suffocating, hopeless jumble. ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... of the harpsichord, and, bringing them rapidly together, exclaimed, as he rose from the instrument, "The devil take the tempest." "That's it! That's it!" cried the harlequin, springing upon his neck and almost suffocating him. Haydn used to say that when he crossed the Straits of Dover in bad weather, many years afterwards, he often smiled to himself as he thought of the juvenile trick which ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... in and disposed his length as best he might in the cramped interior, redolent now of varied scents, all delicate but mingled to a suffocating potency. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... sufferings of mortality Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... was parched under an August sun; tansy was dust-covered, and ferns had grown ragged and gray. The jogging horses left behind their lazy feet a suffocating cloud. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... the hot and suffocating staircase to the first floor, where the fire raged with the utmost fury. Here the flames were bursting from the burning wing through every crevice into the passage. Ishmael, in his wet woollen clothes, and the boys in their blankets, dashed for the last flight of stairs—keeping their ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... unable to get it off again; which accident presenting to his terrified imagination a dismal picture of his passing the rest of his days in darkness, and in hopeless seclusion from his friends and family, caused him to struggle with great violence, and to utter suffocating cries. Being released, his face was discovered to be very hot, and red, and damp; and Miss Tox took him on her lap, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... he could not even now admit that such monstrous things could be. With a necromantic operation taking place before his eyes; with the unholy perfume of the secret incense all but suffocating him; with the dreadful Oracle dully gleaming in the shadows of that temple of evil—his reason would not accept the evidences. Any man of the ancient world—of the middle ages—would have known that he looked upon a professed wizard, upon a magician, who, according ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... about her, and made her gasp for breath. Up through the belt holes in the floor, toward the farther end of the long room, sprang little tongues of flame that leaped higher and higher, even while she strove for sight, that single, horrified, suffocating instant, and gleamed, mockingly, upon the burnished shafts of ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... extricate it from the bed into which it had sunk, and the labour was considerably increased from the nature of the weather. The wind was blowing as if through a furnace, from the N.N.E., and the dust was flying in clouds, so as to render it almost suffocating to remain exposed to it. This was the only occasion upon which we felt the hot winds in the interior. We were, about noon, endeavouring to gain a point of a wood at which I expected to come upon the river again, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... trees. For on board the heat was terrible, the pitch was oozing out of the seams, and blistering the paint; every piece of tarry cordage was soft and pliant, and very beads stood out upon the strands; while beneath the awnings there was a stuffy suffocating heat that ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... indictment of the cook. What would he reply under such circumstances, if some one were to accuse him, saying, 'O my boys, many evil things has this man done to you: he is the death of you, especially of the younger ones among you, cutting and burning and starving and suffocating you, until you know not what to do; he gives you the bitterest potions, and compels you to hunger and thirst. How unlike the variety of meats and sweets on which I feasted you!' What do you suppose that ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... efforts to make our whole northern community used to them, for the glory of the Union. So the trader only regarded the mortal anguish which he saw working in those dark features, those clenched hands, and suffocating breathings, as necessary incidents of the trade, and merely calculated whether she was going to scream, and get up a commotion on the boat; for, like other supporters of our peculiar institution, he decidedly ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... genius found it by instinct. From the first he strove to free French music from the oppression of the foreign tradition that was suffocating it.[79] ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... once more on his feet, when another creeper caught his foot. Again he fell, and this time our enemies were too quick for him. Rushing on him by hundreds, they threw themselves on his body, almost suffocating him as they held him down by main force. I was treated much in the same way, when a huge negro caught me up by the back of the neck, and made as if he was about to cut off my head. He did not do so, but held me tightly by the collar while the rest ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... father's hand, drowning and suffocating in the waves of despairing agony; I shook my tight fist at ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... his three hundred eunuchs had by chance been witness of the tyrant's drunkenness, Ibrahim slaughtered the whole band. Again, he is said to have put an end to sixty youths, originally selected for his pleasures, burning them by gangs of five or six in the furnace, or suffocating them in the hot chambers of his baths. Eight of his brothers were murdered in his presence; and when one, who was so diseased that he could scarcely stir, implored to be allowed to end his days in peace, Ibrahim ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... time spent at Beynac left some pleasant memories. The days were fiery, and, when the south wind blew, almost suffocating; but when the sun went down into the west there usually came a beneficent change. During the few minutes that the golden circle lay seemingly upon the edge of the world, a boat crossing the river appeared to glide ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... no use. There are multitudes, myriads, of men and women, who are floundering in the horrible quagmire beneath the burden of a load too heavy for them to bear; every plunge they take forward lands them deeper; some have ceased even to struggle, and lie prone in the filthy bog, slowly suffocating, with their manhood and womanhood all but perished. It is no use standing on the firm bank of the quaking morass and anathematising these poor wretches; if you are to do them any good, you must give them another chance to get on their feet, you must give them firm foothold upon which they can ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... with the brooding metropolitan gasoline fog, produced a sirocco of which no Libyan desert needed to be ashamed; and it alternately blotted out and revealed the interesting Marathonian procession, until one capricious and suffocating flurry, full of whirling newspapers and derbies, completely blotted out the Governor and the young ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... too great an importance in the public eye? Here, once again, then, proof met him of the conspiracy of modern government constantly going on to bring about disconnection between the Crown and the real life-needs and aspirations of the people. Suffocating traditions closed him round making a cypher of him—to himself a scorn and a derision, and a monster unto many—just as much, by this denial of petition, a breaker of his Crown oath as those who in the past had paid penalty for ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... the dank, penetrating odour of steaming, dirty clothes. The room, though vast, was close and suffocating, the tallow candles flickering in the humid, hot air threw the faces of the President and clerks into bold relief, with curious caricature effects of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... home and lay down to sleep before dawn, but his rest was disturbed by wonderfully varied dreams, some beautiful, some hideous. He sprang up with a shriek, for a dream showed him the white snake coiling round his breast and suffocating him. But he thought no more of this horrible picture, and firmly resolved to release the princess from the bonds of enchantment, even if he himself should perish. Nevertheless his heart failed him more and more as the sun sank nearer the horizon. At the appointed time he stood by the stone ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... the sweet but painful sounds rushed to the senses of the youth he darted through the crowd, closely followed by his friend. The music seemed to pursue him with mockery. He rushed headlong from the temple, as if seeking escape from some suffocating atmosphere in the pure breezes of heaven, and hurried forward with confused and purposeless footsteps. The moment of his disappearance was marked by the partial recovery of Francesca. She unclosed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... that he, the croupier, another accomplice, and the woman who had made my cup of coffee were all in the secret of the bedstead. There appeared some reason to doubt whether the inferior persons attached to the house knew anything of the suffocating machinery; and they received the benefit of that doubt, by being treated simply as thieves and vagabonds. As for the old soldier and his two head myrmidons, they went to the galleys; the woman ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... Jerry sleep, that when the rain, having robbed the atmosphere of its last breath of wind, ceased and left the stateroom a steaming, suffocating furnace, he did not know when Skipper, panting for air, his loin cloth and undershirt soaked with sweat, arose, tucked blanket and pillow under his arm, and went ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... building, suddenly expanded, and the cold and more dense air rushing in, it seemed as if a sudden wind was blowing violently. The current drove the thick smoke, and showered the burning cinders, directly on the chesnut-tree. She felt the scorching heat, while the suffocating vapour almost deprived her of the power of respiration. She grew dizzy; yet still the only movement she made was, to turn her child a little in her arms, that he might be more effectually shielded from the smoke. At that moment, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... myself made an attempt to examine their wounds; but before we could strip off one of their shirts, we heard a crashing and roaring beneath our feet, and up through the floor streamed clouds of smoke, black and suffocating, as though produced ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... disappointment. After all this toil, after passing some splendid chances of good breakfasts on the way up, and spending all his strength on this one exploit, he finds the fresh air suffocating him, and a most strange and terrible feeling coming over him, as his coat-of-mail, which until now was always kept wet, shrinks, and seems even cracking off while the warm air ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... and had prepared for their coming. Trees had been felled across the roads and efforts made to obstruct all the foot-paths. Provisions had been carried away, and the dry herbage of the fields was set on fire as they advanced, almost suffocating them with the heat and smoke. This was done to hinder their march until the Spaniards had completed a strong intrenchment which was being built at a suitable ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... was that I saw a very strange thing, a hare in a rage. It seemed to go mad, of course I mean spiritually mad. Its eyes flashed fire; it opened its mouth and shut it after the fashion of a suffocating fish. At last it spoke in its own way—I cannot stop to explain in further detail the exact manner of speech or rather of ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... come out of it again, and the yeas and nays were called until the clerk grew hoarse. Thus rolled the hours away. Candles burned down to their sockets, forming picturesque grottoes of spermaceti as they declined; lamps went out in suffocating fumes. Some insisted on having a window up, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... watched the death-throes of the suffocating sands under the relentless onset of the sea. The last strongholds were battered, stormed, and overwhelmed; the tumult of sounds sank and steadied, and the sea swept victoriously over the whole expanse. The ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... was low, so that your neck rose out from it like white ivory. The conservatory, where trained clematis vines met over your heads, was like a bower of stars; music; his hand, the white glove off, over yours; the suffocating sweetness of clematis blossoms; a fountain throwing fine spray; your neck white as ivory, and—what of the Van Ness ball ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... seeing this, watched his opportunity, till he at length succeeded in throwing a slipping noose, made by twisting his proboscis over the head of the prince. This he gradually tightened with all his force, until the prince perceived himself rapidly suffocating. His eyes failed him, and seemed bursting from their orbits; his vision presented nothing but gleams of many colored lights dancing before him; his heart heaved and panted with throes of desperate agony; his arm became almost nerveless, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... column rises amid the branches, the fragment of an arch hangs over and is supported by a dismantled tree trunk. And through the torrid twilight of the approaching storm the cry of the hyena is heard. The claws of the hyena are heard upon the crumbling tombs and the suffocating girl strives with her last strength to free herself from the thrall of the great lianas. But there comes a hirsute smell; she turns with terrified eyes to plead, but meets only dull, liquorish eyes, and the breath of the obscene animal ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... my cousin, I saw him fall, wounded, but could not go to his help. Peleton's nerves had broken down, and without me to lean on he must have stumbled. The flames took a firmer hold, the heat became intense, the smoke was suffocating. I called Raoul by name; he answered cheerily, bidding me not ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... as one slipping down a steep incline, faster and faster every second. The beating of her heart rose up and deafened her. It was like someone beating a tattoo in the church. She could not hear another word of the service. And she was suffocating with the nauseous sweetness of the bridal flowers. Wildly she looked around her. Where was Trevor? He would help her. He would understand—he always understood. But she sought him in vain. There was only the long line of bridesmaids ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... interrupting herself, "thou shalt know, even now, the doom, which all thy power, strength, and courage, is unable to avoid, though it is prepared for thee by this feeble band. Markest thou the smouldering and suffocating vapour which already eddies in sable folds through the chamber?—Didst thou think it was but the darkening of thy bursting eyes—the difficulty of thy cumbered breathing?—No! Front-de-Boeuf, there is ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... thickened, and lungs seemed to be eaten by the chlorine poison. Yet the men fought on until exhausted, and then fell to suffer through a death struggle which continued from twenty-four hours to three days of suffocating agony. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... strange repulsion. She felt as a timid animal must feel when some lord of the jungle pulls it down and drags it to his lair. Bower was kissing her cheeks, her forehead, her hair, finding a mad rapture in the fragrance of her skin. He crushed her in a close embrace that was almost suffocating. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... rugged peak and ribs of the mountain very much as the "tablecloth" does to the summit of Table Mountain. There was no fog down where we were, but, what was even worse, we were smothered with blinding and suffocating clouds of dust, for it was a dry gale, and all hands were devoutly praying that the louring sky would dissolve into rain, if only for half an hour, just to lay the dust and so save us from the unpleasantness of being blinded and suffocated. ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... future unknown destination, of which they can augur nothing but misery from all that they have yet seen? How shall I make known their situation, while labouring, under painful disease, or while struggling in the suffocating holds of their prisons, like animals enclosed in an exhausted receiver? How shall I describe their feelings as exposed to all the personal indignities, which lawless appetite or brutal passion may suggest? How shall I ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... from the shore line. A blanket of yellow and black fur ... covering the earth, covering mangrove roots, fitted neatly around the bent palm tree trunks, lying over the rocks that had cut his feet last night ... smothering, suffocating ...
— The Day of the Dog • Anderson Horne
... played very well on the fiddle, especially Russian songs, Shahkes sometimes invited him to join the orchestra at a fee of half a rouble a day, in addition to tips from the visitors. When Bronze sat in the orchestra first of all his face became crimson and perspiring; it was hot, there was a suffocating smell of garlic, the fiddle squeaked, the double bass wheezed close to his right ear, while the flute wailed at his left, played by a gaunt, red-haired Jew who had a perfect network of red and blue veins all over his face, and who bore the name of the famous millionaire Rothschild. And this accursed ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... even spoke to his leader, contrary to his custom unless addressed:—"Methinks the air of yonder halls, valorous Captain, carries with it a perfume, which, though it may be well termed sweet, is so suffocating, as to be more suitable to sepulchrous chambers, than to the dwellings of men. Happy I am that I am free, as ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... acetylene, the figure is not trustworthy, because toxicological experiments upon animals seldom agree with similar tests upon man. If crude acetylene were diluted with a sufficient proportion of air to remove its suffocating qualities, the percentage of specifically toxic ingredients would be reduced to a point where their action might be neglected; and short of such dilution the acetylene itself would in all probability determine pathological effects long before its impurities could set up ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... rough road, jostling against each other frequently, both enduring stoically and silently. The rain was still falling, but the thunder storm had lost its fury. The crashing in the sky had abated, the winds were not so fierce, the night was being shorn of its terrors. Still the intense, almost suffocating darkness prevailed. But for the occasional touch neither could have told that there was another person on the seat. Suddenly Lorry remembered the lantern. It was still lit with the slide closed when he threw it on the seat. Perhaps it still burned ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... against her side; she experienced again the curious sensation as if her heart were about to burst, and it choked her—a feeling so oppressive and painful it almost made her feel sick. Her hands began to tremble, and her breathing grew rapid, as though she were suffocating. Almost fainting, she swayed over towards the man, and a cold shiver ran through her from top to toe. Jim bent over her, and, taking her in both arms, he pressed his lips to hers in a long, passionate kiss. At last, panting for breath, she turned ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... difference between tying a man hand and foot and putting him out in the Atlantic, and suffocating him in a cave? It was only by an accident that the wind ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... dive the Ithaca righted herself laboriously, wallowing drunkenly, but apparently upon an even keel in less turbulent waters. One long minute dragged after another, yet no suffocating deluge poured in upon the girl, and presently she realized that the ship had, at least temporarily, weathered the awful buffeting of the savage elements. Now she felt but a gentle roll, though the wild turmoil of the storm still came to her ears through the heavy planking ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... world, which it is so wicked to disturb! How miraculously beautiful must be that system which makes wine out of the scorching tears of guilt; and from the suffocating suspense, the agonized fear, the compelled and self-mocking bravery, the awful sentence, the despairing death-pang of one man, furnishes the smirking expectation of fees, the jovial meeting, and the mercenary holiday to another! "Of Law, nothing less can be said ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his family a man was always safe. She remembered something that Gora had once said to the same effect....Yes, she could have forgiven the theft of an outsider, for at least she would be spared this sickening suffocating sensation of contempt. It was demoralizing. She hated herself as much as she hated him. Moreover there would have been some compensation in sending an outsider ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... shells from the Confederate batteries passed through her cotton armor, one of them setting it on fire near the starboard wheel, while the discharge of her own bow guns produced the same effect forward. The flames spread rapidly, and the dense smoke was suffocating the men in the engine-room. Seeing that, if he delayed longer in order to ram again, he would probably lose his vessel, Ellet turned her head down stream and arrived safely abreast the army below. The fire was subdued by cutting her burning bales ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... be collected and saddled we started for the base of the mountain range. Hardly had we ascended two hundred feet out of the shelter of the valley before we were met by a hurricane of wind from the northeast, which swept blinding, suffocating clouds of snow down the slope into our faces until earth and sky seemed mingled and lost in a great white whirling mist. The ascent soon became so steep and rocky that we could no longer ride our horses up it. We therefore dismounted, and wading ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... woman was hurrying back, her hand still grasping the wrist of the girl, when she was suddenly seized so violently by the throat as to cause her to release her captive, and to prevent her making any other sound than a sort of gurgling, suffocating noise. The Serpent passed his arm round the waist of his mistress and dashed through the bushes with her, on the north side of the point. Here he immediately turned along the beach and ran towards the canoe. A more direct ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... eighty degrees between day and night) was most trying to the troops, who had to carry the same clothes whether the thermometer was at freezing-point at dawn or at 110 deg. Fahr. at mid-day. Scarcity of water, too, was a great trouble to them, while constant sand-storms, and the suffocating dust raised by the column in its progress, ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... to have struck his spine, his legs, burned his throat, his chest, his stomach, made the tears come into his eyes. A shudder of disgust passed all over him. He began shouting at the top of his voice to drown the throbbing in his head. The dark tavern room suddenly became hot and thick and suffocating—and people, people everywhere! Nejdanov began talking, talking incessantly, shouting furiously, in exasperation, shaking broad rough hands, kissing prickly beards. ... The enormous fellow in the greasy coat kissed him too, nearly breaking his ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... of breaking day struggled in, just clearly enough to enable her to distinguish things. The room looked dreary, clothing was strewn about, the chairs were out of their places, and the remains of the evening meal were still on the table. A moist heat pervaded this scene of disorder. The suffocating air seemed laden with a sense of the horrible, ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... one by one, first her cloak, then her girdle, then her outer tunic, then her inner one, then the wrappings round her neck; and the vapour of cinnamon envelops her naked limbs. At last she sinks to sleep on the tepid floor. Her hair, falling around her hips, looks like a black fleece—and, almost suffocating in the overheated atmosphere, she draws breath, with her body bent forward and her breasts projecting. Hold! here is my flesh breaking into revolt. In the midst of anguish, I am tortured by voluptuousness. Two punishments at the same time—it is too much! ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... came near it in a way he wasn't looking for later in the week. It was Friday and half a dozen of us had been sent down to work on the second level. It was damp and suffocating down there, fifty feet below the street. I felt as though I had gone into the mines. I didn't like it but I knew that there was just as much to learn here as above and that it must all be learned eventually. ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... me was burdened with the letters of applicants who were suffocating in the "man-stifled towns," and it soon dawned upon me that a twentieth century Ulysses required a corps of stenographers to clear his correspondence before setting sail. No, adventure is certainly not dead—not while one ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... some 12,000 inhabitants, was the place most seriously injured by this wholly unexpected rain of destruction, for a tempestuous fall of red-hot stones, some of immense size, and a shower of ashes killed hundreds of the terrified and suffocating citizens, and blocked up the streets with smoking debris to a depth of ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... the weight upon his chest increased, and the pressure grew more suffocating, while the serpent's head played about his lips, touching them from time to time with its ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... Thick, seemingly suffocating masses of wood smoke flowed over the city. They were not actually strangling, but they created panic. There was fighting in Government Center, but it stopped when the mysterious stuff—not one man in a hundred had ever seen burning wood or smelled its smoke—the ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... these tombs many persons could not withstand the suffocating air, which often causes fainting. A vast quantity of dust rises, so fine that it enters the throat and nostrils, and chokes the nose and mouth to such a degree, that it requires great power of lungs to resist it and the strong effluvia of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Slowly, gradually, inch by inch, the great suffocating cloud which had been crushing her had lifted. She felt alive again. Her black hour had gone, and she was back in the world of living things once more. She was afire with a fierce, tearing pain that tormented her almost beyond endurance, but ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... tired from the journey," he thought. "Or—I wonder what the weather is this evening. The heat seems to have become suffocating since ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... new thrill of hope, she was hardly conscious of the suffocating smoke which now filled the cabin, stinging her eyes so that she could hardly see, or of the heat which with her exertions had sent the perspiration streaming down her face. For now, balancing herself with great care, she moved her tortured arms, half numb with pain, up and ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... (mod. Sorgente Mefita), a small lake in the territory of the Hirpini, IO m. S.E. of Aeclanum, close to the Via Appia. There are now two small pools which exhale carbonic acid gas and sulphuretted hydrogen. Close by was a temple of the goddess Mephitis, with a cave from which suffocating vapours rose, and for this reason the place was brought into connexion with the legends of the infernal regions. Virgil's description (Aeneid, vii. 563) is not, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... civilization. And here I am... right in the midst of it... I'm letting it get its claws into me! I'm wearing its clothes... [She tears at them.] I'm breathing its air! I don't believe I can stand it! [She paces the room restlessly.] My soul is suffocating, as well as my body. I must have something to remind me of the sky, and the open sea, and the great spaces. I must go back again to my home, to my island! [Stretches out her arms to them appealingly.] Ah, can't some ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... saw her rush forward quickly and nimbly straight toward the crater. She seemed to go down into it. And then the wind changed or died away, or both, for there came a vast cloud of rolling smoke, black, cruel, suffocating; and the mountain crest and the child-angel were snatched from ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... kitchen he perceived the cause of the uproar, although he could see nothing else, for the dense suffocating vapour with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the discomforts of these marches, the chief of which was the dust more than the heat and the fatigue. No rain had fallen for some time, and the roads and the fields through which we passed were powdered into fine dust, which arose in almost suffocating clouds, so that mouth, lungs, eyes, and ears were filled with it. Sometimes it became so dense that men could not be seen a dozen yards away. The different regiments took turns in heading the columns. There was comparative comfort at the head, but there were so many regiments that during ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... unexpectedly helped itself, and in twelve hours time by stool, and vomit, she voided about five gallons of dirty looking water, which greatly relieved her for some days, but gathered again as the swelling returned, and always abounded with a hectic, or suffocating asthma in her stomach, and either a canine appetite or loathing. She has lately voided several extraneous membranes different from the former, and so frequent, that it keeps her very low, some of which she has preserved in spirits, and humbly ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... full power of her lungs. And then Slade savagely brought a big hand over her mouth and held it there. She fought to escape the clutch, kicking, squirming—trying to bite the hand. But to no avail. The terrible pressure on her mouth was suffocating her, and the room went dark as she continued to fight. She thought Slade had extinguished the light, and she was conscious of a dull curiosity over how he had done it. And then sound seem to cease. She felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. She was conscious only ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... left the station with his detachment early on the previous day; had relieved four outposts between dawn and dusk, covering eighty miles of desert road, with four brief halts for rest; and had spent a night of suffocating wakefulness in a sun-baked windowless room, built out from the base of the last post relieved. It was all in the day's work—as Frontier men understand work. The exposure and long hours in the saddle had little effect upon his whipcord and iron frame: but a sharp attack of fever—unrecorded ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver |
