"Airless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to last for several hours was provided for each suit, so that in case of necessity the wearer could throw off the tubes connecting him with the air tanks in the car. Another object which had been kept in view in the preparation of these suits was the possible exploration of an airless planet, such ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... silence, a photocell acted with a double click, opening one segment of the sun shielding and closing another at the opposite side of the dome. Space Commodore Alex Napier glanced up from his desk and out at the harshly angular landscape of Xerxes and the blackness of airless space beyond the disquietingly close horizon. Then he picked up his pipe and knocked the heel out into the ashtray. Nobody said anything. He began packing tobacco ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... not a nice district to go through, for there was a sense of heat and dirt, and smell, and crowd, and toil and sorrow throughout. It was probably no nicer to live in, and nothing proved it better than the overflow of the children therefrom into the little, hot, paved, airless angle. Here they could be found from five in the morning till twelve at night. Here, with guards set, to give notice of the approach of the children's joy-destroying Siva—otherwise the policeman—they ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... as he entered the room. There was a close, faint, airless smell in it. Cobwebs, pendulous and brown with dirt, hung from the ceiling. The grimy window-panes saddened all the light that poured through them faintly. He looked round him, and saw no furniture ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... early summer wore away. The dreaded month of July came, with its airless nights, its cloudless ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... he felt guilty, guilty before Hermione. He saw her as a spirit confined for years in a prison to which his action had condemned her. Yes, she was in the dark. She was in an airless place. She was deprived of the true liberty, that great freedom which is the accurate knowledge of the essential truths of our own individual lives. From his mind in that moment the cause of Hermione's outburst, Vere and her childish secrets, ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... discovered what I had suspected before; that on so small a schooner the mate took rank with the men rather than the afterguard. Cabin accommodations were of course very limited. My own lurked in the waist of the ship—a tiny little airless hole. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the decaying wood; others were of gigantic proportions, equal in circumference to the trunks of the enormous trees amid which they grew. No vegetables except moss and toadstool-like productions could exist in that airless and pestiferous region. In every direction lay the trunks of enormous trees blown down by some hurricane, so completely rotted by damp that a stick run into them went right through. They lay like vast skeletons, serving to nourish the mushrooms ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... themselves at well-provided tea-tables and entertained a regularly flowing throng of tea-drinking, scandal-mongering women, accompanied by a circle of men of some interest and distinction. In the evening, Florence did still more. By this time, the salons were suffocating and airless. Yet there were few nights in the week when, somewhere, the sober reception was not heightened to a ball, sometimes impromptu, more often formally prearranged. Morning found the indefatigable leisure world scattered through one or another of the great galleries, where, before the masterpieces ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... amid blinding lightning and deafening thunder, in enormous stones, cutting, bruising, breaking everything, mowing down the grain as if with a scythe. Then black, opaque, horrifying darkness, in which lights were extinguished as in the depths of the airless passages, spread its heavy clouds over the land of Egypt, so fair, so luminous, so golden under its azure sky, where the night is clearer than the daytime in other climes. The terrified people, believing themselves ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... in streets with peril rife; Of workman, sickened in his airless den; Of Indian parching for the streams of life; Of negro slave in bond of ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... things is not their sensuous qualities; the latter belong rather to the mere phenomenon. No one of them indicates what the object is by itself, when left alone. They depend on contingent circumstances, and apart from these they would not exist—what is color in the dark? what sound in airless space? what weight in empty space? what fusibility without fire?—they are each and all relative. Since being excludes negation of every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely simple and unchangeable; it brooks no manifoldness, no quantity, no distinctions in degree, no becoming; ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... and they made good time, reaching by dusk, as they had hoped to do, a farmer's house on the downward dip of the mountain to the east. Here, their story being told, they were hospitably received, and Ann Mary was clapped into the airless inner room and fed with gruel and dipped toast. But she had had fresh air and exercise all day, and a hearty meal of cold venison and corn bread at their noonday rest, so ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... in particular, on a hot, airless day in June, when Joan reached the last point of her endurance. Everything had combined to make the office unendurable. One of Mr. Strangman's most agitated moods held him. Early in the morning he had ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... Chartres; and if at Le Mans we study the front, of which the scheme is the same as at Chartres, with Christ enthroned and benedictory between the winged beasts of the Tetramorph, what a descent we note in the divine ideal! Everything is pinched and airless. The Christ, too roughly wrought, looks savage. The pupils only of the supreme masters of ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... where I will wear this dagger then; Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius: Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong; Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat: Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself. If I know this, know all the world besides, ...
— Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... inside the airless booth—he trickled all over. This was worse than being court-martialled. And still ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... are found in more than one or two papyri of the Book of the Dead. A few contain hymns that are not older than the XVIIIth dynasty, and one is an extract from the text on the Pyramid of Unas (lines 379-399). The most interesting is, perhaps, Chapter CLXXV, which describes the Tuat as airless, waterless, and lightless. In this chapter the deceased is assured of immortality in the words, "Thou shalt live for millions of millions of years, a life ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... airless satellites as the Moon will make the most desperate efforts to steal your atmosphere, ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... One particularly glaring, airless afternoon, the three sisters were toiling back to Dora's lodging, with the London pavement like heated iron under the feet of the crowds that trod it, and the cloudless sky, in which the sun blazed a ball of fire, like glowing brass over their heads. Then as the Millars turned a corner and ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... lingering with wistful tenderness on the words. She pressed her face closer into the cushions, clasping her hands over her head, and for a long time lay very still. The heat was intense and every moment the tent seemed to grow more airless. The room was stifling, and, with a little groan, Diana sat up, pushing the heavy hair oft her damp forehead, and covered her flushed face with her hands. A cicada began its shrill note close by, chirping with maddening ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... the co-pilot; I didn't quite catch his first name) is scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and gives the general appearance of belonging under the spreading chestnut tree, not in a metal bullet flinging itself out into airless space. Come to think of it, who does ...
— The Dope on Mars • John Michael Sharkey
... Walled cities with crowded houses looking into one another across narrow winding alleys, were an inevitable condition of life in sixteenth-century Europe before strong central government had made it safe to live outside the gates. Even the houses of the great were dark, airless, cramped, with tiny windows and dim, opaque glass; such as one may still see at Compton Castle in Devonshire or the Chateau des Comtes at Ghent. Communications moved slowly along unmetalled roads or up and down rivers. Carriages with two ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Grosvenor Square I told my parents that I must go home to Glen, as I felt suffocated by the pettiness and conventionality of my late experience. The moderate teaching and general atmosphere of Gloucester Crescent had depressed me, and London feels airless when one is out of spirits: in any case it can never be quite a home to any one ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... and spoken less; the airless night forbade it; for the last half hour no words had passed between us but a faint, "Ah, go now, go now, Checho," from her, and from me my prayer of "Not yet, not yet—let me stay with you." Aurelia was tired, and now and again ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... to a long, tedious hour. The room was hot and airless, the lawyer very prosy and unnecessarily fluent; but he seemed a straightforward, honest man, and gave them good counsel. Malcolm was soon put into possession of all the Strickland bequest, and after this ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... had been lying chained in one spot for months, and whose feet had lost their powers from inaction. Yes, and for a year Joan had known only the cool damps of a dungeon, and now she was dragging herself through this sultry summer heat, this airless and suffocating void. As she entered the gate, drooping with exhaustion, there was that creature Loyseleur at her side with his head bent to her ear. We knew afterward that he had been with her ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... and there ran strange rivers of deep blue which poured into great lakes and seas of blue liquid. There were mighty mountains of deep blue crystal looming high, and in the hollows and cracks of these crystal mountains lay silent, motionless seas of deep blue, unruffled by any breeze in this airless world. It was a world that lay frozen under a dim, ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... oppressively hot, brooding, airless; or rather, not so much without air, as that the air was thick and viscous like honey, without the thin, fine quality. One drank rather than breathed it. Yet nature revelled and rejoiced in it with an almost shameless intoxication; the trees unfolded their leaves and shook themselves out, crumpled ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... caught irretrievably, like a rat in a trap. He did not wish to be caught like a rat in a trap. This was a free world. Air, light, colour were about him on every side. To die, fighting, on a hill-top, in a battle-field, that was one thing. To see them crowding into his room, to be dragged into a dark airless place, to be caught by the neck and throttled. ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... the majority are satisfied so to live, because no other manner of life is known to them, there is nothing beautiful about it. Even from a purely physical point of view, it is an unwholesome state of things. The airless, lightless houses are most unsavoury, and in times of sickness and childbirth this is intensified. It cannot be wondered at that plague, or cholera, or malignant fevers, often make frightful ravages in families. Nor does it tend to elevate the character to sit on a mud floor dozing in ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... burst in twain.— GNOMES! how you gazed! when from her wounded side Where now the South-Sea heaves its waste of tide, Rose on swift wheels the MOON'S refulgent car, 80 Circling the solar orb; a sister-star, Dimpled with vales, with shining hills emboss'd, And roll'd round Earth her airless realms of frost. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... Victoria Station, and I recall long excursions by bus to the hospitable houses of the literary. In my timidity I wandered up and down the street while I screwed up my courage to ring the bell; and then, sick with apprehension, was ushered into an airless room full of people. I was introduced to this celebrated person after that one, and the kind words they said about my book made me excessively uncomfortable. I felt they expected me to say clever things, and I never ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... interested in how his men would tackle the problem. He didn't know the answer himself, because he had never driven a spike on an airless, almost gravityless world and no one had ever ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... afraid. With every step he took he seemed to climb farther and farther into the midst of fear. It was all around him—in the close, airless dark and in the deathly quiet light that came from the open doorway overhead. What was waiting for him there? His father, risen unimaginably loathsome from the grave? For he could never be in the dark without thinking of his father. Or something else? At least he knew that the never-really-believed-in ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... this gas is produced in small quantities by volcanoes and by decomposing vegetation, yet no trace of it is found in our atmosphere. The moon however, having only one-eightieth the mass of the earth, cannot retain any gas, hence its airless and ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... strange comfort. Now being mighty athirst I reached the demijohn from the corner and drank deep, but the good water tasted ill on my parched tongue; moreover the place seemed strangely close and airless and I in great heat, wherefore I tore off my sleeved doublet and, kicking off my shoes, cast myself upon my miserable bed. But now as I lay blinking at the lanthorn I was seized of sudden, great dread, though of what I knew not; and ever as my drowsiness increased so grew my fear until ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... for the worship of the Lord according to our pure faith?' 'Ah! Pastor, but the notes cannot contaminate,' Monsieur Gabriel would answer; 'Luther himself made use of the monk's melodies in his canticles.' And Pastor Mueller retired to his dirty, airless house, feeling rebuked himself where he had wished ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... for millions of human beings. It removed them from those healthy rural surroundings which preserve the half-primitive, half-poetic insight into the nature of things which comes from relative isolation and close contact with the soil, to the nervous tension, the amoral conditions, the airless, lightless ugliness of the early factory settlements. Here living conditions were not merely beastly; they were often bestial. The economic helplessness of the factory hands reduced them to essential slavery. They must live where the factory was, and could work ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... straight nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been painted. She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... stolen to his ear and faded away. Then he had said to himself that it was the night wind caught in some cranny of the house, and striving to get free. He had thrown open his window and leaned out, and trembled, when he found that the hot night was breathless, airless, that no leaf danced in the elm that shaded his study, that the ivy climbing beneath the sill did not stir as he gazed down at it with ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... said Morgan, wiping his face, for the heat in that airless chasm was terrific. "I don't think ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... happened to be very hot and airless, and the prince, after vainly trying to rest, at length got up and went to the window. Suddenly he beheld in the moonlight a form with a wreath of roses on her head rise out of the sea below him and step ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... The airless pension sitting-room, where she waited while a reluctant maid-servant screamed about the house for Mrs. Fulmer, did not have the hoped-for effect. It was one thing for Grace to put up with such quarters when she shared them with Fulmer; ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... of sand that sheltered them vanished to sweep in a sheet above their heads. And the air struck down with terrific weight, then left them in an airless void that seemed to make their bodies swell and explode. It rushed back in a whirling gale to sweep showers of sand and pebbles over the helpless forms of the three who ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... close-lying faces By the lamp's airless fierce ecstatic fire; And we've found love in little hidden places, Under great shades, between the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... to another "annihilating distance"; upon being able to get from suburbia to the huge shops that created artificial wants, then filled them; from the pokey villas with their wee sham gardens to the dingy offices; from dark airless East End rooms to countless factories that pour out semifraudulent, unnecessary wares upon the world, explosives and weapons to destroy another nation, or cheapjack goods to poison their own—all in a few minutes less than they could ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... fell to vigorously. After a while, they started to get somewhere. Alan grappled with a huge leg of meat while two fellow starmen helped him ease it into a crate. Their hammers pounded down as they nailed the crate together, but not a sound could be heard in the airless vault. ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... institution of nature when pain acts as an alarm-bell to direct intelligent attention to the cause of the pain. If pain does not force the elimination of its own cause, it is an added evil. The death of the innocent, through oppression, child labor, dirt diseases, or airless tenements, ought to arrest the attention of the community and put the social cause of their death in the limelight. In that case they have died a vicarious death which helps to redeem the rest from ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... Driven probably by their desire to see what lay beyond their atmosphere of eternal cloud, to the penetration of which their eyesight was attuned, they developed the space-ship; and effected a safe landing, first upon the barren, airless moonlet nearest them, and then upon fruitful Io. There they made common cause with the hexans against the humans, and in space of time Ionian humanity ceased to exist. Much traffic and interbreeding followed between the hexans of Jupiter and those ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... brothers led us down a wide staircase to the vaulted space beneath the basement, we came upon some hundreds of small bird-cages, containing each a miserable linnet, titmouse, or finch, condemned to chirp out its wretched existence in this airless underground region. In reply to our pitying exclamation, we were told that the bachelors' friend who occupied the corner apartment on the ground-floor was a great sportsman, and devotedly fond of la caccia; that these unhappy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... theatre crowded and airless, and the performance, it seemed to him, intolerably bad. He stole a glance at his companion, wondering if she shared his feelings. Her rapt profile betrayed no unrest, but politeness might have caused her to feign an interest that she did not feel. He leaned ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... grudging, smarting, peevish, tormenting Lady Scadgers, still laid up in bed with her mysterious leg, and gobbling her insufficient income down by about the middle of every quarter, in a mean little airless lodging, a mere closet for one, a mere crib for two; but did he see more? Did he catch any glimpse of himself making a show of Bitzer to strangers, as the rising young man, so devoted to his master's great merits, who had won young Tom's place, and had ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... crude refining process had yielded it as waste. The ore-slag lay like gray powder-flakes strewn down the cliff. Tracks and ore-carts along the ledge stood discarded, mute evidence of the weeks and months of work these helmeted miners had undergone, struggling upon this airless, frowning world. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... when a cruising space vehicle communicates with another space vehicle or its orbiting station, it may use a beam of light instead of conventional radio. Not that radio will be inoperative under the airless conditions of space—rather the reverse—but there is reason to believe that communication by sunlight not only will be cheaper but will entail carrying much simpler and lighter equipment for certain specialized space applications. (The Air Force) is developing ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... he could not account for the way in which the lights swam before his eyes and his steps reeled, as he was taken down a dark ladder-like staircase and into a low long room with a swinging lamp suspended from the ceiling. It felt close and airless after the coldness of the night, and everything swam in a mist before his eyes; but he heard a voice not altogether unfamiliar say in authoritative accents: "Let him sit down, and give him a stoup of wine;" and presently his vision cleared, and he found himself sitting at one side of a rude table ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... some of the concussion of the exploding rocket. When his eyes snapped open he was floating like a feather in open, airless space. His rubberoid space suit, living up to its rigid tests, had inflated to its elastic limit. But it held and within its automatic units began feeding him oxygen, heat and radio-power. He had a chance, now, because he had been ejected cleanly ...
— Shipwreck in the Sky • Eando Binder
... wait," he said. They followed the girl into a narrow passage, close and airless, and smelling of Irish stew. Sounds of warfare came from behind a closed door: a child began to cry loudly, and a boy's voice ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... rain fell too softly to be heard in the garden; not a leaf stirred in the airless calm; the watch-dog was asleep, the cats were indoors; far or near, under the murky heaven, not ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... been to his studio before without an appointment, and her heart beat a little harder as, Sheila's hand in hers, they tiptoed up the worn and creaking stairs, through the ill-kept, airless corridors of the dingy structure, till they reached the top, and stood breathless from their impetuous ascent, within a few feet of Collier Pratt's ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... on a clear, warm day of mid-July when they moved from the airless street of the town to their new, wind-swept dwelling ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... through all the months he had captained Earth's outpost on Mercury had come at last. The Dome's shell was pierced! A half-mile high, a mile across its circling base, the great inverted bowl was all that made it possible for man to defy the white hell of Mercury's surface. Outside was an airless vacuum, a waste quivering under the heat of a sun thrice the size it appears from Earth. The silvered exterior of the hemisphere shot back the terrific blaze; its quartz-covered network of latticed steel inclosed the air that all beings ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... eleven o'clock; the July night was airless, and the last of that season's great balls was ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... his Inferno!" All blessed the fresher atmosphere and brisker breezes of the Indian Ocean, which, if warm, are bearable, and awoke from the lethargy of a sultriness which was like that of an overheated, airless room, to life and ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... gondolier was half asleep. Eustace called him as we jumped into his boat, and rang our soldi on the gunwale. Then he arose and turned the ferro round, and stood across towards the Salute. Silently, insensibly, from the oppression of confinement in the airless streets to the liberty and immensity of the water and the night we passed. It was but two minutes ere we touched the shore and said good-night, and went our way and left the ferryman. But in that brief passage he had opened our souls to everlasting ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Garth and a hot and swollen cloud was hanging over Morfe High Moor. Above the gray ramparts the very east was sultry. In the orchard under the low plum-trees it was as airless as ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... America: because he loved England he disliked the same trends even more in England. Certain things in modern civilisation which he hated he did regard as primarily American. American comfort to him seemed acute discomfort. He thought every American lives in an "airless furnace in the middle of which he sits and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... century. And as Reynolds and Gainsborough, with their elegant ladies in powdered hair and high-waisted gowns, standing in leafy, woodland scenes, had given a picture of England in the age of Reason, well-bred and beautiful, artificial and a little airless, so had Furse in this represented the England of to-day. It was an England that valued cleanliness above all things, of the body and of the spirit, an England that loved the open air and feared not the wildness of nature nor the violence ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... petrified for hours, suppressing every thought, all loud breathing, all motion,—for every thought seemed to him but madness, every motion—madness. Time was no more; it appeared transformed into space, airless and transparent, into an enormous square upon which all were there—the earth and life and people. He saw all that at one glance, all to the very end, to the mysterious abyss—Death. And he was tortured not by the fact that Death ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... grew accustomed to the dimness, he saw that he was right. It was a small planetoid, perhaps a mile or so in diameter. Almost zero gravity. Airless. ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... last arrived on board the yacht again, at three o'clock, we found that the miseries of coaling were not yet over, and that there had been numerous visitors from the shore. Everything on deck looked black, while below all was pitch dark and airless, every opening and crevice having been closed and covered with tarpaulin, to keep out the coal dust. It took seven hours to complete the work, instead of two, as was hoped and promised, so our chance ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... of the picture that astronomers conjure to themselves when the moon is nearly full, and they look down into the great plain which is called the Ocean of Storms, and watch the shadows of sterile and airless peaks follow a slow procession across its silver surface."—Illustrated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... lay upon him through the night at mess, where the grey-clad German and Austrian officers ate and drank below the mild faces of Pordenone's frescoed saints, and afterwards in his room, where he dozed and woke and dozed again through the hot, airless hours. The memory of the girl, the impression of her attitude, of her pale, unsmiling face, of her low, strong voice, tormented him; he felt himself alone with her in a hag-ridden land where all men were murderers or ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... Pete fancied he saw a face at the window, and he caught up a stick, unchained the door, and rushed into the garden. It was no one; the town lay asleep; the night was all but airless; only the faintest breeze moved the leaves of the trees; there was no noise anywhere, except the measured beat of the sea in its everlasting coming ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... the rear of a batch of a dozen, and had never been properly named. The wind was blowing from the stockyards on the dark hour when she arrived. It penetrated even to the small airless chamber where she struggled for her first breath—one of a "flat" in the poorest tenement in the worst slum in Chicago. Huddled in smelly rags by a hastily summoned neighbour from the floor above, the newcomer raised her untried voice in a frail, reedy cry. Perhaps she did not like the smell ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... "The moon is airless, waterless and lifeless, days and nights are two weeks long, temperatures range from that of boiling water at noon down perhaps to that of liquid air at midnight. The men of the ship would walk on the moon clad in diving suits. Gravity being only one-sixth ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... about the planet tends to show that the time when it attained that stage of planetary existence through which our earth is now passing must be set millions of years, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, ago. He has not yet, indeed, reached that airless and waterless condition, that extremity of internal cold, or in fact that utter unfitness to support any kind of life, which would seem to prevail in the moon. The planet of war in some respects resembles a desolate ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... to see that "the powny" was safe, for they were very importunate on the subject of the "swop." I had before been offered 150 dollars for her. I was obliged to sleep with the mother and children, and the pedlars occupied a room within ours. It was hot and airless. The cabin was papered with the Phrenological Journal, and in the morning I opened my eyes on the very best portrait of Dr. Candlish I ever saw, and grieved truly that I should never see that massive brow ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... of the men had a bundle of snipe and we had to return; but we had not many cartridges left, which consoled us. We went back pretty wet all over, for it was piping hot and airless under the palms, but on the fields outside the air was delicious and dry. We crossed the line to a beautiful lake with level grassy banks and found it alive with thousands of duck. They were very wary though, and kept far out ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... burning silence of midday, when the man who toils loses the skin of his face, and the man who rests tastes the joys of deep leisure. The blue, airless sky, the level hilltops, the straight lines of glen, the treeless horizon of the moors—no sharp ridge or cliff caught the tired eye, only an even, sleep-lulled harmony. Five very hungry, thirsty, and wearied men lay in the shadow above the Pool of Ness, and ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... real confinement, nor much internal order. In the scorching summer nights of that African climate, peculiarly oppressive and wearying in the airless passes of Ollioules, nuns and novices went to and fro with the greatest freedom. The very same things were going on at Ollioules in 1730 which we saw in 1630 at Loudun. The bulk of nuns, well-nigh a dozen out of the fifteen who made up the house, being rather forsaken ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... Niflheim, and worked the mines and uranium refineries and chemical plants, but they did so inside power-driven and contragravity-lifted armor, and they lived on artificial satellites two thousand miles off-planet. Niflheim was worse than airless; ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... had threatened to break last night still held off, but the spirit of the weather had changed. It was no longer bright and clear, but sunless, airless, heated, silent—the stillness which seems to presage as much sorrow to man as it heralds tumult to Nature. Leam, however—interpenetrated by her love, which gave what it felt and saw what it brought—always remembered this early day as the ideal of peace and softness, where was no ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... existence, with its hesitating essays in other directions, its half-hearted withdrawals, its pigeon-holed emotions. He had not been half-hearted about Michael. It is perhaps natural that we should love very deeply those who have had the power to release us momentarily from the airless prison of our own egotism. How often it is a child's hand which first opens that iron door, and draws us forth into the sunshine! With Wentworth it had been so. The pure air of the moorland, the scent of the heather and the sea seem indissolubly mingled with the remembrance of those whom ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... time that night, thinking, not of the bridge nor of the "crow's nest," not of the Captain nor of the supposed Hugh Dalton, but of the child in the steerage. How stifling it must be down there to-night! It was hot and airless enough here, where Blythe had a stateroom to herself,—separated from her mother's by a narrow passageway, and where the port-holes had been open all day. Now, to be sure, they were closed; for the sea was rising, and already the spray dashed against ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... she heard a rapid-fire thunk-thunk-thunk as the automatic guard system slid inter-compartment doors shut against sections of the ship suddenly airless. The doors were still thudding shut when another explosion came, from toward the bow. Then there was silence; a feeling of utter quiet ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... with a shiver at the hour before dawn, that strange hour when the bird turns on the bough to change his dream, when the wild-cat puts out his tongue to taste the air and curls more warmly into his own fur, when the leaf of the willows gives a tremor in the most airless morning. M'Iver breathed heavily beside me, rolled in his plaid to the very nose, but the dumb cry of the day in travail called him, too, out of the chamber of sleep, and he turned on his back with a snatch of a soldier's drill on his lips, but ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... could not understand a word of his jargon: but at the first glance he marked and judged the awkward childish German, who refused to let his bag out of his hands, and struggled hard to make himself understood in an incredible language. He took him up an evil-smelling staircase to an airless room which opened on to a closed court. He vaunted the quietness of the room, to which no noise from outside could penetrate: and he asked a good price for it. Christophe only half understood him; knowing nothing ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... through space. It was no globe—it was a world of many facets, of smooth and polished planes; a huge blue jewel world, dimly luminous; a crystal world cut out from Aether. A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God, if you will, made material. It was airless, waterless, sunless. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... paused. Lo, then the serpent hissed In impotent rage, "Depart! and how depart! Can flesh be carried down where spirits wonn? Or I, most miserable, hold my life Over the airless, bottomless gulf, and bide The buffetings of yonder shoreless sea? O death, thou terrible doom: O death, thou dread Of all that breathe." A spirit rose and spake; "Whereas in Heaven is power, is much to fear; For this admired country we have marred. Whereas in Heaven is love (and ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... resident missionary. In Yen-ping the mission buildings are imposing structures, and are placed upon a hill above and away from the rest of the city. Any white person who has traveled in the interior of China will remember the airless, lightless, native houses, opening, as they all do, on filthy streets and reeking sewers and he will understand that in order to exist at all a foreigner must be somewhat isolated and live in a clean, ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... he found himself back again before the house, and an ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless evening a wind had sprang up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac-stems as he came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In his right hand he had a bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise. Where he had come by the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Ella, it's not a whit better with you. It's different, but no better—no better for me. It smells of rose-leaves and lavender there too; it is as airless ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... and was flying continuously, while men of the air service were trained in its manipulation and gunners received practice in three-dimensioned range finding and cruiser practice in the air. Above, in the airless space, they learned to operate the guns that were controlled from within the air-tight rooms. They were learning, and the ship performed the miracles that were now taken as ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... the reputation of being honest and not illiberal. But as soon as the French entered, he, with true priestly baseness, sent away the women nurses, saying he had no longer money to pay them, transported the wounded into a miserable, airless basement, that had before been used as a granary, and appropriated the good apartments to the use ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art. It seemed the cause might lie partly in the abrupt attack; and that if the tale were gradually approached, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thunder about, though not visibly; a day both airless and pitiless; one of those days when you feel that the unseen powers are conspiring against your peace. A naked sun from a naked sky stared down upon a naked earth. It seemed to me that the hawk had been a figure of more than ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... stairway, and introduced me to Death. They showed me Amelia's sister, Jinny, who died (of consumption, I believe) on the day before our visit. I still can see the alabaster white face, with its pronounced vein-markings; the straight, thin form, outlined beneath a sheet, in that tiny, low-ceiled, airless garret. What a picture to place before an infant on a sunny Sunday afternoon! It might be supposed that I had asked to see it, for I remember Amelia saying, as one about to ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... fair. Nor tree nor herbage grew, nor sang Water among the rocks: hard rang The heel on metal, or on crust Grew tender, or went soft in dust; Neither for beast nor bird nor snake Was harbourage; nor could such slake Their thirst, nor from the bitter heat Hide, since the sun not furnished it; But airless, shadowless and dense The land lay swooning, dead to sense Beneath that vault of stuprous black, Motionless hanging, without wrack Of cloud to break and pass, nor rent To hint the blue. Like the foul ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... noise of an engine exhaust. The town is of white mud and stone, with wooden balconies painted a vivid blue, and flat roofs. A minaret rises behind it with a blue-tiled extremity supporting the upraised hand and crescent. The streets are narrow and airless. In the shops are a mass of articles of all descriptions: tinned stuff, tobacco, clocks, hair-oil, cheap jewellery, odd bottles of doubtful wine, scent, rugs, copper vessels, sweets, sauces, pickles. Innumerable ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... like a white ghost into the gathering darkness, Gabriel remained at the door and looked up to the fast clouding sky. It was now about nine o'clock, and the night was hot and thundery, and so airless that it was difficult to breathe. Overhead, masses of black cloud, heavy with storm, hung low down over the town, and the earth, panting and worn out with the heat, waited thirstily for the cool drench of the rain. Evidently a witch-tempest was brewing in the halls of heaven on no small ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... into trenches in the firing-line are, if anything, less heroic than the army of cooks and Janies who descend to spend their lives in the basement "domestic offices" of Bloomsbury. Dark and ill-ventilated in summer, gas-lit and airless throughout the foggy winter. Flight upon flight of stairs up which Janie daily toiled a hundred times before she was suffered to seek the attic she shared with cook under the slates. Overwork, lack of fresh air and recreation—all ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... go to the country," she would say to her husband or the doctor, who often recommended sea-air, "and to think of them running about on the grass when it is dry and sunny; for it is very close and airless sometimes here in Diamond Terrace in the long summer days. But do let me keep to dry land. It makes me quite nervous to think of Harry falling over the rocks or getting into boats, and Bobby and Frank getting their feet wet constantly on the shore when ...
— The Good Ship Rover • Robina F. Hardy
... an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball slept insulated ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... of her, thus finding the way in instantly, the church clock sounded midnight. She entered a room that was black as coal and unsweetened as an airless cellar. The fair rays that had been pouring out of her returned with a little shock upon themselves— repulsed. She felt herself reduced, and the sensation was so unpleasant at first that she almost gasped. It was like suffocation. She felt enclosed with Death. That her own radiance dimmed ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... protein is still subject to an undesirable form of consumption in the gut. Various bacteria make their home in our airless, warm intestines. Some of these live on protein. In the process of consuming undigested proteins, they release highly ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... tenant, still trying, by various arithmetical expedients, to obtain a more favourable quotation for the dollar. With the approach of dusk, however, his impatience drove him once more to the front balcony. The night fell, mild and airless; the lamps shone around the central darkness of the garden; and through the tall grove of trees that intervened, many warmly illuminated windows on the farther side of the square, told their tale of white napery, choice wine, and genial hospitality. The stars were already thickening ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... too truly, and the misery of the next twenty days are impossible to picture. The moment the bombardment began, father and daughter were forced to seek the protection of one of the caves that had been dug in the side of the bluff; and here, in damp, airless, almost dark, and fearfully overcrowded quarters, they were compelled to remain day and night during the siege. Almost from the first, scarcity of wood produced an entire abandonment of cooked food, every one subsisting on raw pork or raw salt beef, or, as Janice chose, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... in the second week of June—a torrid, airless day—he came home reeling. For the moment a black fear fell on her that she would be too weak to wrestle with this attack; but she braced ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... become the hot airless day: in the garden the leaves on trees and shrubs drooped as under an invisible weight. All the stale smells of the day before persisted—that of the medicaments on the shelves, of the unwetted dust on the roads, the sickly odour of malt from a neighbouring brewery. The ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... And if, during the colloquies, any malignant prisoner had happened, in a burst of reckless despair, to venture on an indiscreet disclosure, the visitors were allowed to get well out of earshot before the thud of clubs on heads was heard, and the groans of victims chained to bars in dark cells of airless stench, underneath the self same polished floors which had but an hour before resounded to paeans of eulogy ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... cloudy finger breaks The frost and the heart's airless black soil shakes; Love grown a man uprises, serious, bright With mind remembering now things dark ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... He was surveying the airless parlor rather heavily, and his curt manner was not pleasing to the head of the house of ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... every now and then, listlessly flapping the carved wooden lattice-work shutters of an overhanging balcony built out on timber props over the river Maritza, whose turbid waters surged beneath with steady plash. Inside, the striped silken curtains were closely drawn. The atmosphere was stuffy and airless, ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... disposal, you are, have been, or may be, equally ill served. Take the old-established Bull's Head with its old-established knife-boxes on its old-established sideboards, its old-established flue under its old-established four-post bedsteads in its old-established airless rooms, its old-established frouziness up-stairs and down-stairs, its old-established cookery, and its old-established principles of plunder. Count up your injuries, in its side-dishes of ailing sweetbreads in white poultices, of ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... the restaurant to Leicester Square, arm in arm, proud and joyous, enjoying the lamplight and noise, not minding the airless heat; but when they reached the entrance of the music hall—where he had stood gaping, solitary and sad, a few nights ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... was drawn by an old trotter who whirled them along so briskly that the pace created a little breeze; but when they reached Hepburn the full heat of the airless morning descended on them. At the railway station the platform was packed with a sweltering throng, and they took refuge in the waiting-room, where there was another throng, already dejected by the heat and the long waiting for retarded trains. Pale mothers were struggling with fretful babies, ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... appears to have lost, we "rather slumber than sleep," waking often, and full of the foolishest of dreams. This condition of things probably affects politics and society more than the thoughtless suppose. If literature produced in the warm, airless fog of July be dull, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... you can get some bulky supplies cheaper on the Moon, because everything from Earth has to be boosted into space against a gravity six times as great as the lunar, which raises the price like hell. Water and oxygen, for instance. Peculiar, on the dry, almost airless Moon. But roasting water out of lunar gypsum rock is an easy trick. And oxygen can be derived from water by ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Alans were found in their beloved temperance hotel near Bloomsbury—a clean, airless establishment much patronized by provincial England. They always perched there before crossing the great seas, and for a week or two would fidget gently over clothes, guide-books, mackintosh squares, digestive bread, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... presently to see, but that airless, star-dusted sky! Of all things, I think that will be one of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells |
