"Waterspout" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Columbiad was accompanied by a veritable earthquake. Florida was shaken to its very depths. The gases of the powder, expanded by heat, forced back the atmospheric strata with tremendous violence, passing like a waterspout through the air. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... direction at a sharp run, carrying no balls, for they intended to make them on the scene of operation. When the other two divisions were off, Speug addressed his faithful band. "MacFarlane, take six birkies, climb up the waterspout, and clean the richt-hand shed, couping the Pennies into the street. Mackenzie, ye're no bad at the fightin'; tak' anither sax and empty the roof o' the left-hand shed, and 'gin ye can clout that Penny that's sittin' on the riggin' it'll teach him to keep ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... limits of the tropics, another class of spinning storms, known as waterspouts, may often be observed. In general appearance these air whirls resemble tornadoes, except that they are in all cases smaller than that group of whirlings. As in the tornadoes, the waterspout begins with a funnel, which descends from the sky to the surface of the sea. Up the tube vapours may be seen ascending at great speed, the whole appearing like a gigantic pillar of swiftly revolving smoke. When the whirl reaches the water, it is said that the fluid leaps up ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... save gray; and Raimbaut and Biatritz were aging people now. It seemed to him that they were the wraiths of those persons who had loved each other at Montferrat; and that the walls about them and the leaden devils who grinned from every waterspout and all those dark and narrow windows were only part of some magic picture, such as a sorceress may momentarily summon out of smoke-wreaths, as he had seen Zoraida do ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... forced themselves on his mind. The "House of Pieterse" appeared to his mind's eye as a menacing waterspout. In the face of this danger difficult questions that had been clamoring for answer had ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... Phyllis was nearing the ascent when a sound startled her. She swung round in her saddle, to see a wall of water roaring down the lane with the leap of some terrible wild beast. Somewhere in the hills there had been a waterspout. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... god were envious, he must have seen with mortification how little he could do to mar the happiness of mortals. I stood in a mere waterspout; she herself was wet, not from my embrace only, but from the splashing of the storm. The candles had guttered out; we were in darkness. I could scarce see anything but the shining of her eyes in the dark room. To her I must have appeared ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... importance ten-fold. As for the notary, he had temporarily lost his head in presence of political events which came upon him like a waterspout out of cloudless skies. Theodose, certain now of his supremacy, holding Thuillier fast by his past services and by the literary work in which they were both engaged, admired by Brigitte for his modesty ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... the truth. A great waterspout lifted me out of the river. Then a fierce wind caught me and blew me about as if I were a feather. Finally, I was dropped here ...
— Children's Classics In Dramatic Form • Augusta Stevenson
... "There is a waterspout after us," exclaimed Captain Turner, as we made our appearance, "and we must give it the slip, or be grabbed by Davy Jones. Be alive for once! If that fellow comes over us, he will capsize, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... reefs with a violence known only to the earthquake and the angry ocean. Vast volumes of water surged high on either side, projecting still higher their sparkling shafts of spray, like the pillars of a waterspout. ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... officer proceeded along a path that sometimes sunk between two broken black banks of moss earth, sometimes crossed narrow but deep ravines filled with a consistence between mud and water, and sometimes along heaps of gravel and stones, which had been swept together when some torrent or waterspout from the neighbouring hills overflowed the marshy ground below. He began to ponder how a horseman could make his way through such broken ground; the traces of hoofs, however, were still visible; he even thought he heard their sound at some ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... without any warning, a most terrific eruption occurred. A loud explosion was heard; the earth shook, and immense columns of hot water, boiling mud mixed with burning brimstone, ashes and stones, were hurled upwards from the mountain top like a waterspout, and with such wonderful force that large quantities fell at a distance of forty miles. Every valley near the mountain became filled with burning torrents; the rivers, swollen with hot water and mud, overflowed their banks, and ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... to get into English imprisonment. As I was thinking about all this, the masts again appear on the horizon, the Emden steaming easterly, but very much slower. All at once the enemy, at high speed, shoots by, apparently, quite close to the Emden. A high, white waterspout showed among the black smoke of the enemy. That was a torpedo. I see how the two opponents withdrew, the distance growing greater between them; how they separate, till they disappear in the darkness. The fight had ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... Anne Lisbeth's son. The wind cut through the rigging, and the boat cut through the sea. The sails, filled by the wind, swelled out and carried them along in wild career. It was wet and rough above and below, and might still be worse. Hold! what is that? What has struck the boat? Was it a waterspout, or a heavy sea ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... "The waterspout will go by to the north," Reade conjectured, studying the oddly-shaped, rapidly moving and twisting blackish cloud, "but we're going to be right in line with the main storm that is ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... hurricane, scattering the flames on all sides into a tempest of burning billows. I buried my head in my apron, for I thought that all was lost, when a most terrific crash of thunder burst over our heads, and, like the breaking of a waterspout, down came the rushing torrent of rain which had been pent up ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... spectacles which we have beheld, may be ranked the Southern Cross, the cloud of Magellan, and the other constellations of the southern hemisphere—the waterspout—the glacier leading its blue stream of ice, overhanging the sea in a bold precipice—a lagoon-island raised by the reef-building corals—an active volcano—and the overwhelming effects of a violent earthquake. These latter phenomena, perhaps, possess for me a peculiar interest, from their ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... seen a waterspout, Miss Trevor? No? Then the chances are that you will see several before you are many hours older. Have you noticed those long, black, quivering tongues that dart out and in from the bodies of the darkest clouds? Well, those ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... effect), when the time comes round:—but we have not yet got to November of this Year 1729; there are still six or eight important months between us and that. Important months; and a Prussian-English "Waterspout," as we have named it, to be seen, with due wonder, in the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... bed of sponge in the deep sea I lie, And watch the huge shark and the grampus glide by; Or amidst groves of coral I play at bo-peep, Or I float where the porpoise and flying-fish leap. I have seen the thin nautilus trimming her sail, And the Geyser-like waterspout made by the whale; To this lord of the ocean there clung a whole bevy Of parasite barnacles waiting his 'levee.' I have seen the small soldier-crab coated in red, With the shell of a whelk for a home overhead; And the ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... 'Father, let me also show you something;' and, as it was beginning to rain, he drew his sword and swung it in cross cuts above his head, so that not a drop fell on him, and the rain fell heavier and heavier, till at last it was coming down like a waterspout, but he swung his sword faster and faster, and kept as dry as if he ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... it was strange that he could keep still and wait until the next morning to see the ships. He certainly had not slept five minutes before he slipped out from under the wing and slid down the lightning-rod and the waterspout all the way down ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... population is 16,000; and that small number—when it is remembered that it is the port of entry for the great state of Virginia—is a strong argument against its asserted prosperity. Not long before my arrival they had been visited with a perfect deluge of rain, accompanied with a waterspout, which evidently had whirled up some of the ponds in the neighbourhood; for quantities of cat-fish fell during the storm, one of which, measuring ten inches, a friend told me he had himself picked up at a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... that," said Tommy, "without the buff'loes have got 'em." So they camped for the day under a huge banyan-fig tree and awaited developments. About evening, away on the horizon, there arose an answering cloud of smoke, connecting earth and sky, like a waterspout. ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... downpour of rain, which fell upon the frigate's deck like a waterspout, cut short all further speech by its deafening tumult, and although it lasted but a few minutes, it killed the fury of the squall to such an extent that the ship, unsteadied by her canvas, rolled so violently that no one could keep his feet. Suddenly the torrent ceased, and ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke |
