"Tusk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so named I suppose from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... descended, and ordered a boat to be lowered, inviting William and myself to join him in trying to make the monster our prey. When we drew near to its station, it raised its head and displayed one formidable tusk, projecting downwards from its upper jaw towards its breast, whilst part of another, broken by some accident or encounter, offered a less menacing weapon to our view. The beast itself was about the size of a large bullock, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... horse, the salmon, but also the rhinoceros, the cave-bear, the mammoth, the elk, the bison, the reindeer, which are all extinct or have long disappeared from France. Some designs have been discovered engraved on the bone of a reindeer or on the tusk of a mammoth. One of these represents a combat of reindeer; another a mammoth with woolly hide and curved tusks. Doubtless these men were the contemporaries of the mammoth and the reindeer. They were, like the Esquimaux of our day, a race of hunters and fishermen, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... devoted fellow, Parr did not feel so revolted as at their first glimpse of each other. Ling had seemed so hairy, so misshapen, like a troll out of Gothic legends. But now ... he was only big and burly, and not so hairy as Parr had once supposed. As for his face, all tusk and jaw and no brow, where had Parr gotten such an idea of it? Homely it ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... eyetooth, or between it and the front false molar, in the lower jaw. Into this break in the series, in each jaw, fits the canine of the opposite jaw; the size of the eye-tooth in the Gorilla being so great that it projects, like a tusk, far beyond the general level of the other teeth. The roots of the false molar teeth of the Gorilla, again, are more complex than in Man, and the proportional size of the molars is different. The Gorilla ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... packed it over the trail, now a perfect Avernus of horror. He reached the river, and in a third poor little boat, again he sailed down the passage. There was the swift-leaping current, the ugly tusk of rock staked with wreckage. A moment, a few feet, a turn of the oar-blade, and he would have been past. But, no! The rock seemed to fascinate him as the eyes of a snake fascinate a bird. He stared at it fearfully, a look ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... perfumes prescribed, which the patients do not have to swallow; they have only to sniff them, or inhale their vapour. Dried and powdered bones of many animals are taken as physic; thus, the bones of a tiger are believed to give strength and courage. An elephant's tusk will furnish medicine for several complaints. Of the vegetables used, none is more highly esteemed ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... "Tusk, my daughter! Perhaps if your father be true to King Edward, and aid my skill instead of obstructing it, he may be none the worse for the journey he must take; and if thou likest to go with him, there's room in the vehicle, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... any rate the most primitive men we know personally, the carvers of the figures from the French bone-caves, drew men and beasts, on bone or mammoth-tusk, turned either way indiscriminately. The inference is obvious. They must have been ambidextrous. Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; and indeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a piece of bone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... a fox. Its antlers are only two or three inches in length and rise from an elongated skin-covered pedicel instead of from the base of the skull as in all other members of the deer family. On each side of the upper jaw is a slender tusk, about two inches long, which projects well beyond the lips and makes ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... elephant's ivory tusk," said the doctor. "You are good for many years, if you will ...
— White Queen of the Cannibals: The Story of Mary Slessor • A. J. Bueltmann
... own in his life, were all sitting back of a big desk on a dais in front. After as many of the crowd who could had found seats and the rest, including the Press, were standing in the rear, Ravick pounded with the chunk of monster tusk he used for a gavel and called the meeting ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... delights thee, nice Betic, nor thrush; The hare with the scut, nor the boar with the tusk; No sweet cakes or tablets, thy taste so absurd, Nor Libya need send thee, nor Phasis, a bird. But capers and onions, besoaking in brine, And brawn of a gammon scarce doubtful are thine. Of garbage, or flitch of hoar tunny, thou'rt vain; The rosin's thy joy, the Falernian ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... taken an unexpected turn. Set on by the savage elephant, Krishna and Balarama have killed it and taken out the tusks. They have then engaged two giant wrestlers, Krishna killing his opponent outright. In the picture Balarama is about to kill the other wrestler and Krishna, holding an elephant tusk under his arm, looks at the king with calm defiance. The king's end is now in sight for a little later Krishna will spring on the platform and hurl him to his death. Gathered in the wide arena, townspeople from Mathura await the outcome, while cowherd boys delightedly ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... horizontal bands of red (top) and green with a black isosceles triangle (based on the hoist side) all separated by a black-edged yellow stripe in the shape of a horizontal Y (the two points of the Y face the hoist side and enclose the triangle); centered in the triangle is a boar's tusk encircling two crossed namele ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... little mound of water-washed rock that had endured when the rest of the stony plain was denuded in past epochs. Suddenly upon that rock appeared the shape of the most gigantic elephant that ever I beheld in all my long experience. It had one enormous tusk, but the other was deformed and broken off short. Its sides were scarred as though with fighting and its eyes shone red and wickedly. Held in its trunk was the body of a woman whose hair hung down upon one side and whose feet hung down upon the other. Clasped in her arms was a child that ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... lazy master idly Took his rest on winter evenings, And, with eager zest, the women Set their tongues in busy motion, And of this and that they gossiped— How the jug of milk had curdled, How the hut was struck by lightning, How a youth was badly injured By a boar's sharp tusk when hunting— Then in warning spoke the crafty Aged Allemanic grandam: "No one else have we to blame but Him who dwells on yonder island— That old pallid, praying stranger. Trust ye not, I pray, the new God Of the Franks, nor false King Clovis!" And they feared the pious stranger. Once, upon ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... encouragement to Kala Nag, above the trumpeting and crashing, and snapping of ropes, and groans of the tethered elephants. "Mael, mael, Kala Nag! (Go on, go on, Black Snake!) Dant do! (Give him the tusk!) Somalo! Somalo! (Careful, careful!) Maro! Mar! (Hit him, hit him!) Mind the post! Arre! Arre! Hai! Yai! Kya-a-ah!" he would shout, and the big fight between Kala Nag and the wild elephant would sway to and fro across the Keddah, and the old elephant catchers ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... of the retainers to save and succour their masters was almost heroic. The mailed knights thought no more of their men, unless it was some particular favourite, than of a hound slashed by a boar's tusk in the chase. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... in from nearly every country in the world, from dozens of presidents and premiers, and the handful of remaining kings. Along with them came hundreds of gifts. They included a carved elephant tusk from Nepal, a Royal Copenhagen dinner service for twenty-four from the Kingdom of Denmark, a one-rupee note from a ten-year-old girl in Bombay and—a gesture that excited much speculation—a case of caviar ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... slab of ebony glued on to the under surface of the head, which helps to strengthen the head and forms a solid bed for the ivory or metal plate which forms the outer facing of the head. The ivory faces are cut out of the solid tusk to the shape shown in Fig. 36. They are glued on with the very best glue procurable and tied down with strong twine. This is another matter of extreme difficulty and delicacy, as ivory is a very stubborn material to work in and it is easy ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... woman died, without uttering a prayer. The knight did all that the witch instructed him to do, and effectually resuscitated her, but uglier than ever, for her nose remained deadly white, and looked like an elephant's tusk. Then she was forced to tell the knight where his brother was; and down in the abyss he not only found him, but many other victims of the wicked Berberisca. He sprinkled them all with the decoction in the caldron, and they were all brought to life again, ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... way of what and what not to do,—how to treat bone with boiling vinegar, and secret processes of rolling out ivory and joining it invisibly, for the making of larger pieces than could possibly be cut from any one tusk. Lost secrets, these, to us; and being lost, by many doubted as having ever been. These things Master Tobias had learned, many years before, from a workman of Byzantium, where the work was already famous, and far and away ahead of all. This man, dying, had left Master Tobias ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... approached his own door his wife came forth to meet him. "Much gladness!" she cried aloud before she saw his burden; "tempered only by a regret that you did not abandon your chase at an earlier hour. Fear not for the present that the wolf-tusk of famine shall gnaw our repose or that the dreaded wings of the white and scaly one shall hover about our house-top. Your wealthy cousin, journeying back to the Capital from the land of the spice forests, has been here in your absence, leaving you gifts of fur, silk, carved ivory, oil, wine, ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... a plunging charge upon rhino and met that formidable tusk. But the hide of a hippo is something akin to armor-plate, and there was no damage, though the big brute was lifted and turned over. He came back, and in some manner got a grip on that big horn with his teeth; and from that on, their fight was simply a wrestling-match, neither ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... of that mighty estate coming in through the doorway cooked. Boars' heads, woodcock, herons, plates full of fishes, all manner of small eggs, a roe-deer and some rabbits, were carried in by procession. And the men set to with their ivory-handled knives, each handle being the whole tusk of a boar. And with their eating came merriment and tales of past huntings and talk of the forest and stories of ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... old woman, laughing and showing the only tooth she had left, which projected from her mouth like a bear's tusk, "so you want a corner of the stable, do you! Well, you shall have it if you will fill my milk-pail ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... tell, this fire-born creature became the father of all the animals that have tusks and that roam in the woods. A tusk is a big tooth, of which the hardest and sharpest part grows, long and sharp, outside of the mouth and it stays there, even when the mouth ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... "so you see, Mak, when you agree with a trader to get him an elephant-tusk, that's ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... eat my supper in your presence. And gnaw the beef bone with a greedy tusk? Did you not shudder at the marrow's essence, Not quite so beautiful or sweet as musk? Did I not ope my lion fauces wider Than is the difference 'twixt ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian poets in a bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red plush, full of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles of their mother's father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow elephant's tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who had been in jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery writing on it, recording God knew what! And the pictures crowding on the walls—all water-colours save those four Barbizons looking ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... worthy of the magnificence of the donor. Sancho, showing the wounds of the torn garments to the Duchess, said: "Had hares or birds been our game, I should not have had this misfortune. For my part I cannot think what pleasure there can be in beating about for a monster that, if it reaches you with a tusk, may be the death of you. There is ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... him. On another occasion, when I was hippopotamus-hunting in one of the boats of the Artemise, in an inlet of the sea close to Kaole, I chased a herd of hippopotami in deep water, till one of the lot, coming as usual from below, drove a tusk clean through the boat with such force that he partially hoisted her out of the water; but the brute did no further damage, for I kept him off by making the men splash their oars rapidly whilst making for the shore, where we just arrived in time to ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Its reach was great, and Satan skipped along the trunk as spryly as a cat on a fence, his arms and tail held out for balance and twitching nervously. Half-way over he spied the three spectators and stopped. Their circulation stopped also. He grinned from ear to ear, showing two rows of tusk-like teeth, shook his fist playfully, and shouted a laugh so loud, so awful, that they believed their last moment had come. But it had not. Their hair turned white, to be sure, and they took on fifty years' growth ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... and of his substance. Then I was domestic with the good King Thibault; here I set myself to doing barratry, of which I render reckoning in this heat.' And Ciriatto, from whose mouth on either side came forth a tusk as from a hog, made him feel how one of them did rip. Amongst evil cats the mouse had come; but Barbariccia locked him in his arms, and said: 'Stand off whilst I enforke him!' And turning his face to my Master: 'Ask on,' he said, ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... tracks had told of the round wound in the front foot and the wound in the hind foot. But there was another: the hunter had picked up the splinters of bone at the camp where he had fired at the Bear, and, after long doubt, he guessed that he had broken a tusk. He hesitated to tell the story of hitting a tooth and hind toe at the same shot till, later, he had ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton
... "Tusk, I'm sorry I stood you up before the class," she tried, in speaking kindly, to hide her loathing. "But now you must go home at once, or I shall never be able to let ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... with horn of hart, it brings thee to they bier; But tusk of boar shall leeches heal, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... I may tell you at once, the most hideous creature in the world. His cruel grin was too evil a thing to be described. He carried a great bludgeon. From his lower jaw a yellow tusk arose at either corner of his mouth and projected beyond his upper lip. His ears covered the whole sides of his head. His jaws were as large around as ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... fossil of much significance in this connection is Moeritherium, whose remains have been found in the rocks exposed in the Libyan desert, for this creature was practically a tapir, while at the same time its characters of muzzle and tusk mark it as very close to the ancestors of the larger woolly elephants of later geological times, when the trunk had grown considerably and the tusks had become greatly prolonged. Again the fossil sequence confirms the conclusions of comparative anatomy, regarding the mode by which certain modern ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... enumerate singly, would more than fill a long letter. We next saw the Museum of Zoology: this contains reptiles and fish, innumerable, and of which I can only say, how wonderful are their varieties! I must not, however, forget to tell you that we saw a part of an elephant's tusk, which when complete is believed to have been at least eight feet in length. Only imagine what must have been the height of the possessor of such a pair of tusks! Here too we saw the skeleton of an enormous whale that was captured ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various |
