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More "Cataclysm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now perceived to be a natural melancholy. The young man had not been long at Donnaz without discovering that in that little world of crystallised traditions the chaplain was the only person conscious of the new forces abroad. It had never occurred to the Marquess that anything short of a cataclysm such as it would be blasphemy to predict could change the divinely established order whereby the territorial lord took tithes from his peasantry and pastured his game on their crops. The hierarchy which rested on the bowed back ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... century. For had it been predicted beforehand that innumerable millions of human beings would be transported with security at a headlong speed for hundreds of miles along a ferruginous track, the most temporary deviation from which would produce the inevitable cataclysm and no end of a smash, the working majority would have expressed their candid opinion of such rhodomontade by cocking the contemptuous snook ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... not indulge in such emotional demonstrations, and she could not imagine any possible cause. She moved the pink satin slippers out of reach of Harriet's thrashing feet, gathered up the fallen elephant and scattered chocolates, and sat down to wait until the cataclysm should pass. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... that love is a possibility always just out of sight, where it will always remain. She is economically independent because men cannot do without her. She has more rights than the Imogenes will gain in a thousand years; and she is, moreover, something that men would strive to preserve in a world-cataclysm, whereas no one would give Imogene a ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... hers," he repeated. "She was a wife, and the adultery is hers. More, she was the seducer. It was she who debauched your mind with lascivious readings, and tore away the foundations of virtue from your soul. If in the cataclysm that followed she was crushed and smothered, it is no more than ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... and, muttering and grumbling, rolled across the narrow strait slowly and sullenly. Australia scowled at our penitent Island, threatening direful inflictions—lightning, thunder, and an overwhelming cataclysm. Behind that frowning Providence there was a smiling face. The good storm, albeit black and angry, behaved benignly. Gentle rain came, and a picturesque little electrical display to a humming accompaniment of far distant ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... women's highly practical sanity and also of their irrelevancy in the conduct of Miss de Barral's amazing governess. It appeared from Fyne's narrative that the day before the first rumble of the cataclysm the questionable young man arrived unexpectedly in Brighton to stay with his "Aunt." To all outward appearance everything was going on normally; the fellow went out riding with the girl in the afternoon as he often used to do—a sight which never failed to ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... by some supernal fiat banished, The land sank down in one great cataclysm; The vales, the plains, the mountains slowly vanished, Buried and quenched in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... had applied them to the especial case of these little planets. Here, then, was an opportunity of tracing back the changes in these orbits through thousands of centuries in order to find whether, at a certain epoch in the past, so great a cataclysm had occurred as the explosion of a world. Were such the case, it would be possible almost to set the day of the occurrence. How great a feat would it be to bring such an event at such a ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... talked of schism As boon of God in place of war, And bared their foreheads for its chrism! While direr than the mace of Thor, In mid-air hung the cataclysm ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... rain fall, and she found a savage comfort in the formidable character of the storm, which seemed like a cataclysm of nature, to such degree did the flash of the lightning and the roar of the thunder mingle with the echoes of the vast palace beneath the lash of the wind. Forms began to take shape in her mind, after the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... have thought that Breede himself played the waiting game. Or perhaps Breede only toyed with him. He fastened his gaze on the criminal cuffs. They were his rock of refuge in any cataclysm that might impend. If only he could keep those cuffs within his range of vision he would fear nothing. Patent laundry tubs; five dollars saved; why your husband failed in business; bright ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... of the primal gods was now substituted the hideous strophes and antistrophes of the grimy spirits of darkest New York. As one performer after another took up the strain, to and fro and from upper to lower tiers of cells, one awaited some seismic cataclysm to put an end to it and them; and the pauses of it were punctuated by bursts of dreary laughter, applausive of the incredible gushings of blighting depravity. They were the heralds of the prison day—the tune to which its steps were set. After it was over—when the yawning keeper had ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the animals in good condition and spirited, withal unused to being ridden. I remembered the San Francisco of the great earthquake as we rode through the streets, but this San Francisco was vastly more pitiable. No cataclysm of nature had caused this, but, rather, the tyranny of the labour unions. We rode down past Union Square and through the theatre, hotel, and shopping districts. The streets were deserted. Here and there ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... "mythological" systems begin with a story of a flood—some cataclysmic upheaval that destroyed the world. Egypt itself was colonised by a group of Atlantean priests who brought their curious, deep knowledge with them. They had foreseen the cataclysm. ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... night when trees, fields, dwellings, all vanished into the Gulf, leaving no vestige of former human habitation except a few of those strong brick props and foundations upon which the frame houses and cisterns had been raised. One living creature was found there after the cataclysm—a cow! But how that solitary cow survived the fury of a storm-flood that actually rent the island in twain has ever ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... billiards, tenpins, chess, eating, mosquitoless sleeping, mountain scenery, and a month of idleness." This experience, somewhat idealized, is the basis of the first part of "Tiger Lilies". Here Lanier had the opportunity of seeing at its best the life of the old South just before it vanished in the cataclysm of the Civil War. Of that life he afterwards wrote: "Nothing can be more pitiable than that at the time when this amiable outcome of the old Southern civilization became known to the world at large, it became so through being laid bare by the sharp spasm of civil war. There was ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... airships of the Martians appeared. Evidently the people in them were dazed by the disaster and uncertain what to do. It is doubtful whether at first they comprehended the fact that we were the agents who had produced the cataclysm. ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... to one another the fact of membership by pointing first up to the sky, then down to the ground, and last to their own hearts. The Society was called the Hung League, because all the members adopted Hung as a surname, a word which suggests the idea of a cataclysm. By a series of lucky chances the inner working of this Society became known about fifty years ago, when a mass of manuscripts containing the history of the Society, its ritual, oaths, and secret signs, together with an elaborate set of ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... less of the lust of conquest, of centralization, and of religious conformity. Though each monarch identified the State with himself, yet it may be doubted if either, on his deathbed, knew that his monarchy was dying also. But so it was that to each succeeded that gradual but complete cataclysm which seems the inevitable consequence of the system ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... sung by those to whom San Francisco held more than pleasure—more than sentimentality. It held for them close-knit ties that nothing less than a worldshaking cataclysm could sever—and ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... themselves the question—in what will result these armaments and this exhaustion? What will be the nature of a future war? Can recourse be had to war even now for the decision of questions in dispute, and is it possible to conceive the settlement of such questions by means of the cataclysm which, with modern means of destruction, a war between five great powers with ten ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... the strangely weathered mesas were ruined castles, stupendous in bulk; the mighty buttes and crumbled peaks were colossal cities overthrown by the cataclysm of time. It seemed to Enoch, that nowhere else in the world could one behold such epic loneliness. The excitement that had buoyed him up since Diana's arrival suddenly departed, and his life with all its ugly facts was vividly in ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... applied to the matters of every day. It hung together with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed it to you, all those years ago, that life must be begun many times anew. And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... there were great globules of water on the bulk-heading, and everything, including the men's clothes and blankets, was wet. The men lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a laborious matter to sit. They said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amid the cataclysm of elemental sound. It became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight, dimmed by flying spray, to take a turn at ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... that the Grand Cycle of Man's Life on the Earth is composed of Seven Cycles, of which we are now living in the third-seventh part of the Fifth Cycle. These Cycles may be spoken of as the Great Earth Periods, separated from each other by some great natural cataclysm which destroyed the works of the previous races of men, and which started afresh the progress called "civilization," which, as all students know, manifests a rise and fall like unto that of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the gang received terms of imprisonment (largely a prophylactic measure), save the extraordinary English-speaking Baluchi, who had long imposed, it was said, upon Gungapur Society in the days before that Society had disappeared in the cataclysm. ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... start building anew. The most sensitive recluse cannot help being a member of society. As such, he unavoidably gathers about him a host of mere acquaintances, good folks who waste his time dulling the edge of his wit and infecting him with their orthodoxy. Then comes the cataclysm. He loses, let us say, all his money, or makes a third appearance in the divorce courts. He can then at last (so one of them expressed it to me) "revise his visiting-list," an operation which more than counterbalances ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... flattered Ronald, and now in the witty, now in the sentimental manner, declared my love and received the assurance of its return. By means of this exercise my resolution daily grew stronger, until at last I had piled together such a mass of obstinacy as it would have taken a cataclysm of nature ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Each yuga, maha-yuga, and karpa is followed by a period of more or less complete destruction. The achievements of each period are forgotten, because its results are obliterated or consumed by a mighty cataclysm. And thus no gain acquired in any past age is available for the coming epoch. In this way, the whole idea of the puranic chronology is the most effective ever devised by man in any land to bring discouragement and despair into the heart of the people ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... the Balkan allies and the Turks, in 1912 and 1913, there had been mutterings, and now the situation had come to be admittedly precarious. Mr. Blithers was in a position to know that the little principality over which the young man reigned was bound to be drawn into the cataclysm, not as a belligerent or an ally, but in the matter of a loan that inconveniently expired within the year and which would hardly be renewed by Russia with the prospect of vast expenditures of war threatening ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... after all, what's the good? Leave him alone and he'll come home, if he has any stuff in him, dragging or wagging his tail behind him. There's more in a week of life than in a lively weekly. None the less I'll slate him. I'll slate him ponderously in the Cataclysm.' ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... to the right, to the left, with an air of surprise, as if they were crossing an interminable cemetery, the tombs of which had been overthrown by a cataclysm; ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... cataclysm, Bolivar distinguished himself in Caracas, going hither and thither among the ruins, counteracting with his words the effect of the speeches of the royalists and assisting to dig out of the debris corpses and the wounded, ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... for the Allies, in their joint Note, have declared that the remedy of these two monstrous abuses forms an essential part of their aim in the war, which in costliness of life and of treasure has already far exceeded any cataclysm that could have come to Europe through its doing its clear and Christian duty with regard to Turkey during the preceding hundred years. And among the benefits which eventually mankind will reap in the fields that ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... of these causes, however, will reveal the presence of moral influences. Professor Dill says: "The general tendency of modern inquiry has to discover in the fall of that august and magnificent organization, not a cataclysm, precipitated by the impact of barbarous forces, but a process slowly prepared and evolved by internal and economic causes." Two of these causes were the dying out of municipal liberty and self-government, and the separation of the upper class ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... 1720, which we shall sketch fully in another chapter, did not injure the Bank. The directors generously tried to save the fallen company, but (as might have been expected) utterly failed. With prudence, perhaps, gained from this national cataclysm, the Bank, in 1722, commenced keeping a reserve—the "rest"—that rock on which unshakable credit has ever since been proudly built. In 1728 no notes were issued by the Bank for less than L20, and as part of the note only was printed the clerk's ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... rose; and the Grand Canon illustrates, on a stupendous scale, the system of erosion which, in a lesser degree, has deeply furrowed the entire region. At first one likes to think of the excavation of this awful chasm as the result of some tremendous cataclysm of Nature; but, in reality, it has all been done by water, assisted, no doubt, by the subtler action of the winds and storms in the disintegration of the monster cliffs, which, as they slowly crumbled into ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... me. As I stood before him, he studied me through his spectacles with his cold eyes, as he had studied me in those days when I was trying to persuade him to give me work, and I began counting my sins, wondering if in the cataclysm of ill luck which had overtaken me, I was to lose ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... clambering yesterday, when he followed the channel of Garden Creek through its tortuous course among the ravines of the Blue Ridge, through the narrow defile of the Devil's Garden, sunless, strewn with rubble of boulders, with a chaos of shattered rock masses—debris, superstition said, of cataclysm—of the Crucifixion, when the mountain crests tore themselves asunder, and cast their pinnacles into the abyss for rage and grief. The searcher had climbed on and on, until he reached the nook sacred to the crystals. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... raced against death in a forest fire. But never had he seen a fire like this must have been. All at once he seemed to hear the roar of it in his ears, the rolling thunder of the earth as it twisted in the cataclysm of flame, the hissing shriek of the flaming pitch-tops as they leapt in lightning fires against the smoke-smothered sky. A few hours ago he had stood where Father John's Cabin had been and the place was a ruin of char and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... government crisis of the autumn of 1899, we, in company with all other foreigners in China, realized that conditions were becoming serious, yet never did we expect or prepare for such a cataclysm as took place when the storm clouds suddenly burst in the early summer ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... of the ages. If only a mummy now turn over in his porphyry sarcophagus, a papyrus is generally found under him; and the finder, with the papyrus in his hand, may go forth fully warranted to revise every event from the first cataclysm of the Devonian age to the last earthquake in Java, and every man from Moses ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... wood, in form exactly like a Roman amphitheatre if the seats of it be circular; on this the lower or inverted brick dome was laid. The whole fabric was on one of the terraces which were heaved up in some old geological cataclysm, when some lake gave way, and the Carrotook River was born. The level was higher than that of the top of the fly-wheels, which, with an awful velocity now, were circling in their wild career in the ravine below. Three of the lowest moonlets, as I ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... the most searching destructiveness, and when all was over they had to be wept over in ruined homes and in the midst of a society which was wrecked from top to bottom, and in which all relatives and friends had sunk together to common perdition. There has been no other such cataclysm in history. Great states have been conquered before now, but conquest did not mean a sudden and desolating social revolution; so that to a Southerner the loss of relatives on the battle-field or in the hospital is associated with the loss of everything else. A gentleman told me of his going, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... now recollect textually. I saw the signature of Gaspar Ruiz. He was an audacious fellow. He had snatched a soul for himself out of a cataclysm, remember. And now it was that soul which had dictated the terms of his letter. Its tone was very independent. I remember it struck me at the time as noble—dignified. It was, no doubt, her letter. Now I shudder at ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... was a moral cataclysm. Andover girls were country girls, but not of rustic (any more than of metropolitan) social training. Which of them would have suffered an Academy boy, walking home with her from a lecture or a prayer-meeting, any little privilege which he might not have taken in her father's house, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... President, in 1912, when another, viewing himself and his party less objectively, through vanity perhaps, might have believed that his own nomination was the one thing needed to prevent that year's Republican cataclysm. Four years later he accepts the Republican nomination for President, when as the result showed, there is at least a reasonable chance to win. He takes the post of Secretary of State when neglected opportunities lie ready to his hand and when the force of world events requires ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... cataclysmic origin of the Valley; and I now jokingly remarked that his wild tumble-down-and-engulfment hypothesis might soon be proved, since these underground rumblings and shakings might be the forerunners of another Yosemite-making cataclysm, which would perhaps double the depth of the Valley by swallowing the floor, leaving the ends of the roads and trails dangling three or four thousand feet in the air. Just then came the third series of shocks, and it was fine to see how awfully silent and solemn he became. His ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... not the sacrifice worth while because of the things involved? Only last night I was thinking about this war and its far-reaching effects. No man can foresee its extent or its evil effects upon the world itself. It is a world cataclysm, and before it ends it may unsettle everything fine and wholesome in America. We of America, although we are cut off from its terrible sweep, cannot be unmindful of these consequences, for we stand in the midst of it all. We must keep our own house in order so that we shall be prepared to ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... to time there are vast breakings up which scientific men can scarcely explain; thus, up to 1817 this sea was constantly obstructed, when suddenly an immense cataclysm took place which drove back these icebergs into the ocean, the great part of which were stranded on Newfoundland Bank. From that time Baffin's Bay has been almost free, and has become ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... reaction, when, in the intervals of jazzing, we have nothing to satisfy the spiritual void left by the War except the possibility of an industrial cataclysm at home and the triumph of Bolshevism abroad, we owe a large debt of gratitude to Sir THOMAS BEECHAM for his efforts to revive the Town. And the Town is at last appreciating at their full worth his services both to the cause ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... other way round, as a sensible person might have been expected to do. He was knocking out the walls in the cellars and digging up the stone floors with splendid disregard for that ominous thing known as a cataclysm. The grave question in the minds of the servants was whether the usual and somewhat mandatory two weeks' notice wouldn't prove a trifle too long after all. In fact, Hawkes, with an inspiration worthy of an office boy, managed to produce a sick grand-mother ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... philosophic mind the tremendous cataclysm that is convulsing the world must reach this conclusion: that its results will be more profound, more far-reaching, more epoch-making than were the results ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... hob-nobbed with him; his charm brushed off on to the dryest and dullest so that, temporarily, they too bloomed with personality. As for women—His appearance among them was the signal for a noiseless social cataclysm. They slipped and slid in his direction as helplessly as if an inclined plane had opened under their feet. They fluttered in circles about him like birds around a light. If he had been allowed to follow the pull of his inclination, they would have ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... remote period of time the entire southwest was rent and torn by an awful cataclysm which caused numerous fissures and seams to appear all over the country. The force that did the work had its origin in the earth and acted by producing lateral displacement rather than direct upheaval. Whenever ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... the truth of the cataclysm by Giddings' revolt than by the newspaper head-lines or by Giddings' words. And from somewhere in the depths of his reserve-self he summoned the last of his coolness and self-control. "Beg pardon, Giddings," said he. "You see ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... across the Channel was drifting slowly and unconsciously towards the cataclysm of the Revolution; yet the old monarchy, full of the germs of decay, was still imposing and formidable. The House of Bourbon held the three thrones of France, Spain, and Naples; and their threatened union in a family compact was the terror of European diplomacy. At home France was the foremost ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... realised. Does anybody suppose that humanity has had the profit of all the inventive and improving capacity born into the world? That Turgot, for example, was the only man that ever lived who might have done more for society than he was allowed to do, and spared society a cataclysm? No,—history is a pis-aller. It has assuredly not moved without the relation of cause and effect; it is a record of social growth and its conditions; but it is also a record of interruption and misadventure and perturbation. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... on," said I; "and after me, there will be Woodruff—unless, of course, there's some sort of cataclysm." ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... through misconception of one all-important point. Lord Macaulay takes for granted that conflict in Europe, since the publication of Luther's manifesto against Rome, has been between Catholicism and Protestantism. Even after describing the cataclysm of the French Revolution, he winds up his argument with these words: 'We think it a most remarkable fact that no Christian nation, which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century, should ever have ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... had admired and pursued him, trusting sweetly to his masterly wisdom to guide them through the seven circles of the science of the tango. They were now scrutinizing him as if between their last encounter and the present moment had occurred a great cataclysm, transforming all the laws of existence—as if he were the sole survivor ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Pobloff had tumbled into the aisle, miraculously escaping a dislocated neck, the music and the rack had kept him company. Curiously he fingered the manuscript. Yes, there was the fatal spot! He gazed at the strange combination of instruments on the page in his own nervous handwriting. How came the cataclysm? Vainly the composer scanned the various clefs, vainly he strove to endow with significance the sparse bunches of notes scattered over the white ruled paper. He saw the violins in the highest, most screeching position; saw them disappear ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... is true. In the cataclysm that she did not wish for, that she did not start, that she did not prepare, she has lost more than a million men. And what men they were! The Ecole Normale, which is the preparatory school for the French university, lost seventy ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... at Brod did not know that he held the destiny of Europe in his hand. And yet, this is the truth. Had he permitted us to pass unquestioned we should have reached Sarajevo in time to prevent the greatest cataclysm of all ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... trusted mainly to individual initiative and civic freedom; the Land Powers founded their empires on organisation and order. The dominion of the former was sporadic and easily dissolvable; that of the latter was solid, and liable to be destroyed only by some mighty cataclysm. The contrast between them is as old and ineffaceable as that which subsists between the restless sea and the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... branches was seen above two hundred feet high in the air. Not a bird built its nest in these aerial skeletons; not a leaf trembled on the dry branches, which rattled together like bones. To what cataclysm is this phenomenon to be attributed, so frequent in Australia, entire forests struck dead by some epidemic; no one knows; neither the oldest natives, nor their ancestors who have lain long buried in the groves of the dead, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Bargeton as a third. But in spite of this precaution, the whole town knew the state of affairs; and so extraordinary did it appear, that no one would believe the truth. The outcry was terrific. Some were of the opinion that society was on the eve of cataclysm. "See what comes ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... reviving with every step that I took. I don't know what I had expected the outside world to be. This was April 14. It was nearly a month since the outburst of the Revolution, and surely there should be signs in the streets of the results of such a cataclysm. There were, on the surface, no signs. There was the same little cinema on the canal with its gaudy coloured posters, there was the old woman sitting at the foot of the little bridge with her basket of apples and bootlaces, there was the ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... time when the framers of the Federal Constitution were stopping congressional action for twenty years, the trade was legitimate only in a few of the Northern states, all of which soon enacted prohibitions, and in Georgia alone at the South. The San Domingan cataclysm prompted the Georgia legislature in an act of December 19, 1793, to forbid the importation of slaves from the West Indies, the Bahamas and Florida, as well as to require free negroes to procure magisterial certificates of industriousness ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... color. The lakes seemed to take on the very deepest sapphire blue. No hush lay over the land as it did in the east, but there were wild sudden storm flurries, and as Kit expressed it, a feeling in the air as if there might be a regular circus of a cataclysm any minute. ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... the magnificent address, the broad, vehement, grandiloquent pronouncements, the sumptuous texture of his music seems forever proclaiming the victory of man over the energies of fire and sea and earth, the lordship of creation, the suddenly begotten railways and shipping and mines, the cataclysm of wealth and comfort. His work seems forever seeking to form images of grandeur and empire, flashing with Siegfried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's spear, upbuilding above the heads of men the castle of the gods. It ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... to a man rose in angry protest, sworn enemies joining hands to resist such an outrageous aggression; and Charles, in a frenzy of fear for his crown, dismissed his hireling army paid with Louis's gold. The proud edifice which the Duchess of Portsmouth had so carefully reared was threatened with a cataclysm of popular rage against the "painted French spy" who was regarded, and perhaps rightly, as a prime instigator of the mischief, and the worst enemy of the country that had given ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... to blame somebody or something for whatever happened. Yet others, he admitted, as well as his mother, held the war responsible for Gideon Vetch—as if the great struggle had cast him out in some gigantic cataclysm, as if it had broken through the once solid ground of established order, and had released into the world all the explosive ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... Beauchamp have recently been speculating on our becoming a nation of artists, and authorities in science and philosophy, by the time our coalfields and material wealth are exhausted. That, and the cataclysm, are their themes. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and sudden physical revolutions, wholesale creations and extinctions of living beings, were the ordinary machinery of the geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of Cuvier. It was gravely maintained and taught that the end of every geological epoch was signalised by a cataclysm, by which every living being on the globe was swept away, to be replaced by a brand-new creation when the world returned to quiescence. A scheme of nature which appeared to be modelled on the likeness of a succession of rubbers of whist, at the end of each of which the players ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... successes. He made himself master of almost half the globe. The reign of Napoleon was an earthquake which, for fifteen years, shook the sea and the land, carrying down innumerable human lives in the general cataclysm. But he sunk at last! He aspired to the very heaven of heavens in his ambitions; and his conquests were the wonder and terror of mankind. But he left France smaller, weaker, poorer, and more debased and depraved than ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a much more complete concentration of capital and industry than has yet taken place; doubtless, too, he underrated the powers of endurance of some petty industries, and saw the breakdown of capitalism in a cataclysm, whereas modern Socialists see its merging into a form of socialization. But, when all this is admitted, it cannot be fairly said that the sum of criticism has seriously affected the general Marxian theory, as apart from ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... to fully understand the world cataclysm any more than some of the rest of us. If we all had to understand, we might find ourselves ineligible for the Kingdom, but the Book says everywhere, "He that believeth on me shall have everlasting life." And we can believe whether we understand or ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... Will the coming man drink wine? These tremendous and imperative problems only recently agitated some of the "thoughtful minds" in our midst. By degrees they lost their preeminence, they were seen to be in process of solution without social cataclysm, they have, in a manner been referred for disposal to the coming man himself, that is to say, they have been dropped, and are to-day as dead as Julius Caesar. The present hour has, in its turn, produced its own awful problem: Will the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... over the tree-tops of the valley, and it filled the valley with rock and towered above it. This was the asteroid, exploded into a separate entity by the cataclysm that gave birth to the planets, which Dr. Ku Sui had wrenched from the asteroidal belt between Mars and Jupiter and built into a world of his own, swinging it through space as he willed, and cloaking it with invisibility to baffle those who marveled at how he came and went, unseen, on his ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... a whirlwind might have carried it, but that, in that case it would be no supposititious, or doubtfully identified whirlwind, but the greatest atmospheric cataclysm in the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... before the Great Pyramid was fashioned, whose fleets had ruled the vanished seas known to us as the Sahara and North Africa, whose golden capital had looked proudly out upon an empire mightier than Rome—an empire which the Atlantic Ocean had swallowed up. The story of this cataclysm which had engulfed Atlantis, brought to new lands by a few survivors, had bequeathed to men the legend of the Deluge. The riddle of The Sphinx, most ancient religious symbol in the known world, was resolved; for Paul saw it ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... apprehensively at Madigan. But her father had retired within his shell, and nothing but a cataclysm ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the glass, that houses, partially submerged, actually rose from the water, and that houses of which only the roofs were visible were farther on. That this whole valley was the crater of an extinct volcano was sufficiently evident; and we could only surmise that in later times some fresh cataclysm of nature had poured suddenly into it a vast body of water, and so had submerged the city that had been builded here. Whatever had brought about the catastrophe, it evidently had come with a most appalling suddenness. Everywhere the condition of the houses showed ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... Stillwater in the house, especially as he had already invited her and sent her the money to come—unless she should tell him of that secret interview she had witnessed between Mr. Fabian and Mrs. Stillwater. That, indeed, might banish Rose from Rockhold, but it would also bring down a domestic cataclysm that must break up the household and ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... animals is no less fertile in results. I should digress from my subject if I were to examine here how the organization of animals is developed upon the earth; what modifications, or more strictly speaking, what complications it has undergone after each cataclysm, or if I even stopped to describe one of those ancient epochs during which the earth, the sea, and the atmosphere had for inhabitants cold-blooded reptiles of enormous dimensions; tortoises with shells three feet in diameter; lizards seventeen metres ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... and delicacy and complexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learning only by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; whole races of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as at the end of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times; prodigal, inhuman, riotous, arming some vegetable growths with spurs and thorns that tear and stab, some insects with stings, some serpents with deadly fangs, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... them very justifiable. Seeing that this chain of the Carpathians was here and there circular in form and with high peaks, they concluded that it anciently formed important amphitheatres. These mountainous circles must have been broken up by the vast cataclysm to which the Sea of Rains was due. These Carpathians looked then what the amphitheatres of Purbach, Arzachel, and Ptolemy would if some cataclysm were to throw down their left ramparts and transform them into continuous ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... heard it, and it was only divulged thirty years after his death. Thus every diplomatic means failed the patriot, who was no match for the machinations of the European statecraft which has borne its lamentable fruits in the recent cataclysm we have all witnessed. He was thrown on the resources with which he was more familiar: those of an ennobling idea and of the exactions of self-devotion in its cause. Immediately after his eyes had been opened at Szczekociny to the new peril that had burst upon his country he sent out another ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... Titan shook Orsino's hand in his mighty grip and went away. As a matter of fact he was going down to look over one of Montevarchi's biggest estates with a view to buying it in the coming cataclysm, but it would not have been like him to communicate the smallest of his intentions to Orsino, or to any one, not excepting his wife ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... destroyed in a landslide, or some cataclysm of nature," suggested Mr. Parker. "That is ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... nothing to say, for he seemed involved in a cataclysm that had crushed him, and so moved toward the door. She walked by his side and stepped back when he opened it. He held out his hand as if to bid her good-by, for the last time, but she appeared to disregard it and stood quietly by ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... with the exuberant polytheism of the Chaldean one, in which Heaven, Sun, Storm, Sea, even Rain are personified, deified, and consistently act their several appropriate and most dramatic parts in the great cataclysm, while Nature herself, as the Great Mother of beings and fosterer of life, is represented, in the person of Ishtar, lamenting the slaughter of men (see p. 327). Apart from this fundamental difference in spirit, the identity in all the essential points of fact is amazing, and ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... morning of January 30 we had the unique experience of witnessing this crumbling action at work—a cataclysm of snow, ice and water! The ship was steaming along within three hundred yards of a cliff, when some loose drifts slid off from its edge, followed by a slice of the face extending for many hundreds of feet ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... in a deliberate and perfectly calm way. It was for all the world like a scene in a play. The shaded room, the two nervous diplomats registering anxiety and strain, the old functionary who was to stay behind to guard the archives and refused to be moved from his calm by the approaching cataclysm. It seemed altogether unreal, and I had to keep bringing myself back to a realisation of the fact that it was only too true and ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... guiding the {164} Pitt Ministry, no better steps could have been devised to accomplish the end. As a matter of fact, the Pitt Ministry thought very little about it in the press of the tremendous European cataclysm. ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... Finally the last shattered fragment was hurried out of sight, the flood poured past unhampered, and overhead the glacier towered silent, unchanged, staring at them balefully like a blind man with filmed eyes. There remained nothing but a gleaming scar to show where the cataclysm had originated. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... but not utterly so. You must remember that after the cataclysm of 1917, Russia has been born again in travail and agony. No hand was outstretched to help her, save that of Germany alone, for her own sake ultimately, perhaps, but nevertheless with invaluable results to Russia. We had vast resources which Germany exploited, ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... last important service as editor of The Journal was a direct outcome of our participation in the Great War. The problems raised by that world cataclysm called for a restatement of American ideals and aspirations. He therefore arranged for a number of articles adapted to the needs of every community, whether large or small, and these were soon acclaimed as the ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... Sally knew absolutely nothing of the cataclysm of revived memory in Jeremiah. Remember that the incident of the galvanic battery at the pier-end is only four days old. Do not be misled by the close details we have given ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... aerolites that wander from their own spheres to ours; and when we speak of celestial sweetness or beauty, we may be nearer the literal truth than we dream. If mankind generally are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more trial to reach the shore,—as some grave theologians have maintained,—if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead devils who have "died into life," (to borrow an expression from Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the best critics as the foremost living Spanish novelist, is without doubt the chief exponent of that ferment of political and social thought in Spain which had its inception in the cataclysm of 1898, and which gave rise to the new movement in ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... of fire. The fatal touch is given. The detonation of the blast goes shrieking up to heaven. The mansions of bonanza kings are tottering to their doom; That swirling tide of fiery fate halts at the gaping tomb. Beyond the cataclysm's brink, the multitude, too dazed to think, Behold the red waves rise ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... Naubandhana (the harbour). Then the fish addressing the associated Rishis told them these words, "I am Brahma, the Lord of all creatures; there is none greater than myself. Assuming the shape of a fish, I have saved you from this cataclysm. Manu will create (again) all beings—gods, Asuras and men, all those divisions of creation which have the power of locomotion and which have it not. By practicing severe austerities he will acquire this power, and with my blessing, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 1862, a full decade after the cataclysm, his largest and probably his most popular work of fiction made its appearance in the return to romance-writing, entitled Les Miserables. I daresay biographies say when it was begun; it is at any rate clear that even Victor ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... fifteenth centuries presaged the Reformation of the sixteenth, and if the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth was the forerunner of political revolutions throughout the Western World, we may well, after the mechanical and economic cataclysm of the nineteenth, cease wondering that twentieth-century ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... ages. The territory of the Netherlands is narrow and meagre. It is but a slender kingdom now among the powers of the earth. The political grandeur of nations is determined by physical causes almost as much as by moral ones. Had the cataclysm which separated the fortunate British islands from the mainland happened to occur, instead, at a neighbouring point of the earth's crust; had the Belgian, Dutch, German and Danish Netherland floated off as one island into the sea, while that famous channel between two great rival nations ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... other parting, that had perforce been during the past year. The presence of Chauvelin in her house, the obvious planning of this departure for France, had filled her with a foreboding, nay, almost a certitude of a gigantic and deadly cataclysm. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... aseptic, anarchy *Amphi about, around, ambidextrous, amphitheater (Latin ambi) both *Ana up, again anatomy, Anabaptist *Anti against, opposite antidote, antiphonal, antagonist *Cata down catalepsy, cataclysm *Dia through, across diameter, dialogue *Epi upon epidemic, epithet, epode, ephemeral *Hyper over, extremely hypercritical, hyperbola *Hypo under, in smaller hypodermic, hypophosphate measure *Meta after, over metaphysics, metaphor *Para beside paraphrase, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... of this vast country are practically in the hands of half a dozen men. Merely by holding up a finger, these men could, to suit their own selfish ends, start a universal panic which might bring about a financial cataclysm, involving the whole world in disaster. I do not say they would use this power for evil, but they are in position to do so if it served their purpose. I want to have such power, only if I had it I would not use it for evil. I would use it for good. Conditions in the industrial world are very ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... the event was a moral cataclysm. Andover girls were country girls, but not of rustic (any more than of metropolitan) social training. Which of them would have suffered an Academy boy, walking home with her from a lecture or a prayer-meeting, ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... of reaction, when, in the intervals of jazzing, we have nothing to satisfy the spiritual void left by the War except the possibility of an industrial cataclysm at home and the triumph of Bolshevism abroad, we owe a large debt of gratitude to Sir THOMAS BEECHAM for his efforts to revive the Town. And the Town is at last appreciating at their full worth his services both to the cause of popular education ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... laborers who read the Valencian newspapers and talk about equality all the time. And they would divide up the orchards, and demand that the product of the harvests—thousands and thousands of duros paid for oranges by the Englishmen and the French—should belong to all." But to stave off such a cataclysm, there stood don Ramon, the scourge of the wicked, the champion of "the cause" which he led to triumph, gun in hand, at election time; and just as he was able to send any rebellious trouble-maker off to the penal settlement, so he found it easy to keep ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... sport till late at night amid a good deal of ill-tempered fighting and pulling about. Their mothers' milk is still inside them; they have not yet succumbed to the ridiculous diet, clothing, and life-habits of their elders. But soon manhood descends upon them like a cataclysm; it tears them with a frenzy which is anything but divine and thereafter absorbs them, to the exclusion of every other ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... form shook all over with silent laughter. It was fascinating to watch laughter that produced such a cataclysm but made no sound. Elliott forgot to drink ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... the first act—that passion which is but one remove from deadly hate. Almost at the beginning of the first act Isolda, devoured by a longing for revenge, schemed to murder Tristan, and she does not falter in her purpose until he has taken the drink; the reaction has all the violence of a cataclysm; all is delirium; there is not a moment of happy lingering over the joy of a possible; new life; there is no time for that, no thought of it. All is burning wrath and hate and equally burning lust and greed for the possession of the beloved one's body. In the second act the anger has died out, and ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Miss Isobel's life by Quin's advent into the family was mild, however, compared to the cataclysm effected in the life of her sister. Miss Enid, having had her own affections wrecked in early youth, spent her time acting as a sort of salvage corps following the devastation caused by her cyclonic mother. When Madam shattered things to bits, ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... women who are the most expert in the wriggle of the tango are mostly over forty years old! Do you see that one in the skin-tight pink robe? She is a grandmother! All are painted—all are feverish—all would be young! It is ever thus when a country is on the eve of a cataclysm—it is ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... the botany of to-day. The foregoing facts seem to be at variance with the doctrine of Uniformity, or with anything like a slow process. The entombment of these animals must have been very sudden, and due, one would naturally think, to a tremendous cataclysm followed by immediate freezing, else their flesh would have become tainted. A recent English writer predicts another deluge owing to the constant accumulation of ice at the Antarctic Pole, which for untold ages has been attracting and freezing the waters of the Northern Hemisphere. ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... the silence came a cry, beginning as a low, sorrowful moan, rising to a tremulous shriek, culminating in a yell that seemed to tear the night in sunder and rend the world as by a cataclysm. So fearful was it that I could not believe it had actual existence: it passed previous experience, the powers of belief, and for a moment I thought it the result of my own animal terror, an hallucination born ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hung together with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed it to you, all those years ago, that life must be begun many times anew. And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... upon the most staggering and tragic cataclysm of Nature that has been visited upon our country since first our forefathers won it from the Indian—the unprecedented succession of tornadoes, floods, storms and blizzards, which in March, 1913, devastated vast areas of territory in Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... nomination for President, in 1912, when another, viewing himself and his party less objectively, through vanity perhaps, might have believed that his own nomination was the one thing needed to prevent that year's Republican cataclysm. Four years later he accepts the Republican nomination for President, when as the result showed, there is at least a reasonable chance to win. He takes the post of Secretary of State when neglected opportunities ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... been torn and broken in a cataclysm more fearful than that which levels cities and disrupts the earth. Slowly it began its readjustment. There was no other life to give aid or sympathy; and just as they had suffered alone, so now the forest people struggled back into life alone, building up from the wreck of what had been, ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... Bulwer's "Pompeii" as the wing of the condor shades the crow. Byron's "sound of revelry by night" is the throbbing of a snare drum drowned in Hugo's thunders of Mont St. Jean. Danton's rage sinks to an inaudible whisper, and even Aeschylus shrivels before that cataclysm of Promethean fire; that celestial monsoon. It stirs the heart like the rustle of a silken gonfalon dipped in gore, like the whistle of rifle-balls, like the rhythmic dissonance of a battery slinging shrapnel from the heights of Gettysburg into ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... members of the fraternity communicate to one another the fact of membership by pointing first up to the sky, then down to the ground, and last to their own hearts. The Society was called the Hung League, because all the members adopted Hung as a surname, a word which suggests the idea of a cataclysm. By a series of lucky chances the inner working of this Society became known about fifty years ago, when a mass of manuscripts containing the history of the Society, its ritual, oaths, and secret signs, together with an elaborate set of drawings of flags and other regalia, fell into the ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... mountain-guarded corner of Western Europe. I shall have but a word to say of these three vast rooms, for Rubens and Van Dyck and Teniers are known to every one. The first has here a representation so complete that if Europe were sunk by a cataclysm from the Baltic to the Pyrenees every essential characteristic of the great Fleming could still be studied in this gallery. With the exception of his Descent from the Cross in the Cathedral at Antwerp, painted ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... anarchy *Amphi about, around, ambidextrous, amphitheater (Latin ambi) both *Ana up, again anatomy, Anabaptist *Anti against, opposite antidote, antiphonal, antagonist *Cata down catalepsy, cataclysm *Dia through, across diameter, dialogue *Epi upon epidemic, epithet, epode, ephemeral *Hyper over, extremely hypercritical, hyperbola *Hypo under, in smaller hypodermic, hypophosphate measure *Meta after, over metaphysics, metaphor *Para beside ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... man with an open free mind can ponder these facts and not answer forthwith and without faltering—to a democratised edition of a Greater Britain Overseas. Only a world cataclysm or national upheaval displacing every nation from its foundations can ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... on clear to the mill without another word; without even a grin from the broad-faced Ole, who sat in ponderous thought in the wagon ahead. To a nature such as his the infrequency of a new idea gives it the force of a cataclysm; during its ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... eating, mosquitoless sleeping, mountain scenery, and a month of idleness." This experience, somewhat idealized, is the basis of the first part of "Tiger Lilies". Here Lanier had the opportunity of seeing at its best the life of the old South just before it vanished in the cataclysm of the Civil War. Of that life he afterwards wrote: "Nothing can be more pitiable than that at the time when this amiable outcome of the old Southern civilization became known to the world at large, it became so through ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... every great quarter of London, there will be an electric guillotine that will decapitate the rich like hogs in Chicago. Christ, who with his white feet trod out the blood of the ancient world, and promised Universal Peace, shall go out in a cataclysm of blood. The neck of mankind shall be opened, and blood shall cover the face of ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... our bird and animal families. "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet"—literally, and he must go softly now lest the very fowl of the air and fish of the sea be destroyed forever. Within my memory the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm perhaps, has apparently become extinct; and the ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latter by the hand of man, for I knew the man who believed that he had killed the last pair of these noble birds reported from the Florida ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... suffering ... that is true. In the cataclysm that she did not wish for, that she did not start, that she did not prepare, she has lost more than a million men. And what men they were! The Ecole Normale, which is the preparatory school for the French university, lost seventy per ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... the right to speak out just what he felt that in one stupendous passage (measures 246-277) it seems as if the very Heavens were falling about our heads. At measure 282 a theme of ideal repose is interpolated—just the contrast needed after the preceding cataclysm. The Development proper is renewed in measure 298 and after a repetition of the interpolated theme in measures 320-335 the rhythm of the first theme asserts itself in all its majesty, carrying us upward to a veritable table-land of sublimity. From this we are brought down through a series ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... much more complete concentration of capital and industry than has yet taken place; doubtless, too, he underrated the powers of endurance of some petty industries, and saw the breakdown of capitalism in a cataclysm, whereas modern Socialists see its merging into a form of socialization. But, when all this is admitted, it cannot be fairly said that the sum of criticism has seriously affected the general Marxian theory, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... vaguely conscious of a strengthening of soul. In the vast cataclysm of things her own hopes and fears and destiny mattered very little. If she never saw Doggie again, if Doggie recovered and returned to the war and was killed, her own grief mattered very little. She was but a stray straw, and mattered very little. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... "Haitiens," he says, "have reached a point in their efforts to conform to an alien culture where they are in danger of losing their personality as a people as well as their native culture." But now if ever is the moment, after the great cataclysm in Europe, to lift the ancestral cult from the dust and make it worthy of Haiti, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... cannot now recollect textually. I saw the signature of Gaspar Ruiz. He was an audacious fellow. He had snatched a soul for himself out of a cataclysm, remember. And now it was that soul which had dictated the terms of his letter. Its tone was very independent. I remember it struck me at the time as noble—dignified. It was, no doubt, her letter. Now I shudder at the depth of its duplicity. Gaspar Ruiz was made to complain of the injustice ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... had accepted the new condition of things and whose whole nature had bloomed again under the sunshine of hope, it was the less intolerable. She had set herself to wait, as had countless thousands of women before her; and as due proportion will, till the final cataclysm abolishes earthly unions. But Harold felt the growth, both positive and negative, as a new torture; and he began to feel that he would be unable to go through with it. In his heart was the constant struggle of hope; and in opposition to it the seeming realisation of every ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... again seemed to me quite beyond measure or description, though it may be in a degree suggested by the absence throughout the many-paged American newspaper of the least mention of a European circumstance unless some not-to-be-blinked war or revolution, or earthquake or other cataclysm has happened to apply the lash to curiosity. The most comprehensive journalistic formula that I have found myself, under that observation, reading into the general case is the principle that the first duty of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... portent of the iron wrath of the Almighty. In a twinkling it had passed him, high in the dome of heaven, only to erase in a fabulous blast the moaning multitude. And prone upon the strand between the stormy waters and the field of muddy dead, Gerald Shannon prayed for a second cataclysm which might bring ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... repeated trips over the trail, Drew had a pretty good idea of the locality, and had it not been for the fallen trees that had been torn up by the cataclysm of the morning, he would have had little difficulty in gaining the beach. But again and again he had to make long detours, and as the darkness was intense he had to rely entirely on his sense of touch; so his progress ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... standard of rebellion had been raised; here and there might be found a Dutchman as stiff-necked as the fate that he defied. His father and his father's father had lived here upon the Lesser river, and nothing short of a cataclysm of nature should avail to budge him. The commissioners might cut up his cabbage-patch into building sites and reduce his garden to the limits of a city block, but they could not touch his beloved Arcadia House, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... pumice-stone. The three islets mentioned above would be the remains of the old central cone, and a bed of pumice-stone from 98 to 131 feet thick is spread over the whole of their surface, telling of a violent cataclysm of which neither history nor tradition has preserved ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... theorizings. The mind reels and loses itself in trying to conceive of the everlasting continuance of the present order, or of any one fixed course of things, but finds relief in the notion of a revolution, an end, and a fresh start. The Mexican Cataclysm or universal crash, the close of the Hindu Calpa, the Persian Resurrection, the Stoic Conflagration, the Scandinavian Ragnarokur, the Christian Day of Judgment, all embody this one thought. The Drama of Humanity is played out, the curtain falls, and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... lines and sudden transitions; all her forces combine against them. Everywhere she keeps her borders melting, wavering, advancing, retreating. If by some cataclysm sharp lines of demarcation are drawn, she straightway begins to blur them by creating intermediate forms, and thus establishes the boundary zone which characterizes the inanimate and animate world. A stratum of limestone or sandstone, when brought into contact ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... fell, and the sound re-echoed through Europe. It was the signal of a new era and a new hope. The Revolution had begun—that mighty movement which, in its meaning and consequences, dwarfs every other cataclysm in history. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... agency Leaves many an enduring monument Of metamorphic and eruptive power; Of molten deluge, and volcanic flood; Fracture and break, the silent stories tell Of dire convulsion in the ages past; Of subterranean catastrophe, And cataclysm of internal force. ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... hunger. She often returned home pale and silent, having reached the uttermost depths of human abomination, and never daring to say all. At times she trembled and raised her eyes to Heaven, wondering what vengeful cataclysm would swallow up that accursed city ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... conscious, seemed ignoble to him. Everything was upset for him—his admiration for his own people, the religious respect with which they inspired him, his confidence in life, the simple need that he had of loving others and of being loved, his moral faith, blind but absolute. It was a complete cataclysm. He was crushed by brute force, without any means of defending himself or of ever again escaping. He choked. He thought himself on the point of death. All his body stiffened in desperate revolt. He beat with fists, feet, head, against the wall, howled, was seized ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... gray light the strangely weathered mesas were ruined castles, stupendous in bulk; the mighty buttes and crumbled peaks were colossal cities overthrown by the cataclysm of time. It seemed to Enoch, that nowhere else in the world could one behold such epic loneliness. The excitement that had buoyed him up since Diana's arrival suddenly departed, and his life with all its ugly facts was vividly in ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... bulk-heading, and everything, including the men's clothes and blankets, was wet. They lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a somewhat laborious matter to sit, and said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amidst the cataclysm of elemental sound. Indeed, it became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight dimmed by flying spray to take a ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... to think of my own safety and passed a turn of the mizzen gaff-topsail downhaul about me, belaying to a pin as the cataclysm hit us. For the next two minutes—although it seemed an hour, I did not speak, nor breathe, nor think, unless my instinctive grip on the turns of the downhaul on the pin may have been an index of thought. I was under water; there was roaring in my ears, pain in my lungs, ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... pagan sun-worshiper, his expression rapt, intent. Strains from the world's best music rose and fell in throbbing sweetness on the desert stillness, music which told beyond peradventure that some cataclysm in the player's life had shaken him from his rightful niche. It proclaimed this travel-stained sheepherder in his faded overalls and peak-crowned limp-brimmed hat another of the incongruities of the far west. The sagebrush plains and mountains have ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... flashes from his writings that have moved me, and move me indescribably still. "Le Style," as Rolland remarks, "c'est l'ame." It was so in Mr. Davis's case. He had the rare faculty of stirring by a phrase the imaginations of men, of including in a phrase a picture, an event—a cataclysm. Such a phrase was that in which he described the entry of German hosts into Brussels. He was not a man, when enlisted in a cause, to count the cost to himself. Many causes will miss him, and many ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... he rode abroad the next day no man suspected the cataclysm which had shattered Hump Doane's world into a chaos of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... becomes insecure, assailable by flying machines and subject to unprecedented and unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these new conditions may not release in the soul of man. A conspiracy of adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no effectual guarantee that it could ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... years 1808 to 1820 meant far more than at almost any other period; for these years were, all over the European world, a time of stirring economic change, and the set which forces might then take would in a later period be unchangeable without a cataclysm. Perhaps from 1808 to 1814, in the midst of agitation and war, there was some excuse for carelessness. From 1814 on, however, no such palliation existed, and the law was probably enforced as the people who made it ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... proper application of it has disencumbered history of much rubbish. At the same time, like all rules, it should be used with judicious caution and not allowed to run away with us. As applied by Lewis to Roman history it would have swept away in one great cataclysm not only kings and decemvirs, but Brennus and his Gauls to boot, and left us with nothing to swear by until the invasion of Pyrrhus.[242] Subsequent research has shown that this was going altogether too far. The mere fact of distance in time between a document ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Most true; but what if they were from the beginning—over a volcano's mouth? What if the method whereon things have proceeded since the creation were, as geology as well as history proclaims, a cataclysmic method? What then? Why should not this age, as all others like it have done, end in a cataclysm, and a prodigy, and a mystery? And why should not ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... only divulged thirty years after his death. Thus every diplomatic means failed the patriot, who was no match for the machinations of the European statecraft which has borne its lamentable fruits in the recent cataclysm we have all witnessed. He was thrown on the resources with which he was more familiar: those of an ennobling idea and of the exactions of self-devotion in its cause. Immediately after his eyes had been ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... surging, black storm-clouds, while all the sharp and snow-clad peaks around it glittered in the sun. Even in those rare moments when it was freed from clouds and mists it stood alone in its peculiar grandeur. Unlike all the others it wore no diadem of snow. Some terrible convulsion of nature, some cataclysm at its birth or in the fiery days of its youth, had left it bald-headed, ugly, and deformed. But for that catastrophe it would have been far loftier than any of its fellows; and even now the hunchback towered among them, its flat head level with their pointed peaks, the ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... What is my relation to them, and theirs to me? Why should that beetle in the grass, upon whose back all the colours of the prism change and glow like supernatural fire, trouble me with the cause and motive of its beauty? Why should yonder rock, standing like a spar of some ship wrecked in a cataclysm of the awful past, draw me to it as though it were the image of a grand, yet unattainable and blighted, longing ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... our pretty Delilah, for one girl crying will sometimes set off a whole row of others,—it is as hazardous as lighting one cracker in a bunch. The two Annexes hurried out their pocket-handkerchiefs, and I almost expected a semi-hysteric cataclysm. At this critical moment Number Five called Delilah to her, looked into her face with those calm eyes of hers, and spoke a few soft words. Was Number Five forgetful, too? Did she not remember the difference of their position? I suppose so. But she quieted the poor handmaiden as simply and easily ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in this man's story. That mattered to her. For the first time the shadow of danger and death crossed her mind. Was that the significance? Suddenly, in a flash of acute discernment, she saw herself involved helplessly in that story, as one is involved in a natural cataclysm. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... proprieties and amenities of life, seemed to stamp him as a man worthy of confidence, even had not his sentiments been of the most high-minded character. He described the great flood of 1882, which wrought such havoc in Missouri, in which cataclysm his Uncle Henry Perkins had suffered great loss. He extolled the commendable conduct of his uncle in sacrificing valuable property that he might save a woman; letting a flatboat loaded with twenty-five hogs ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... ... Mary's words came back to me—'the most dangerous man in the world' ... I was not afraid, or broken-hearted at failure, or angry—not yet, for I was too dazed and awestruck. I looked at him as one might look at some cataclysm of nature ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... one kind of work to another, he desired for his daughter a genuine farmer, one accustomed all his life to scrabbling the earth. His resolution was unbreakable. In his empty and inflexible brain, when an idea sprouted it became so firmly imbedded that no hurricane nor cataclysm could uproot it. Pepet should be a priest, and should travel over the world. Margalida he was keeping for some farmer who should add to the lands of Can Mallorqui ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... made up her mind to do a thing, she usually did it. A cataclysm of nature was about all that would ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... which mankind is faced? Overloaded with the past, he had space for nothing else. Modern developments of every sort cast no first herald rays upon his mind. He journeyed in France a few years before the greatest cataclysm that the world has ever known, and his mind, arrested by much that was trivial, never once responded to the storm-signals which must surely have been visible around him. We read that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him over his brewery and ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... republican papers in New York, as the Times, the Tribune, and the Evening Post, only not by the Sumners, Doolittles, and many of the like leaders, all of whom, when, about a year ago, warned against such a cataclysm, self-confidently smiled; but who soon will cry more bitter tears than did the daughters of Judah ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... bulk-heading, and everything, including the men's clothes and blankets, was wet. The men lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a laborious matter to sit. They said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amid the cataclysm of elemental sound. It became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight, dimmed by flying spray, to take a ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... population, the tradition of its military greatness, and its influential political position, was able to exert an immense influence; French was the language of intellect and society in Germany, in England, in Russia, everywhere in fact. During the eighteenth century internal maladministration, the cataclysm of the Revolution, and finally the fatal influence of Napoleon alienated foreign sympathy, and France lost her commanding position. Yet it was reasonably felt that, if a natural language is to be used for international purposes, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... vehement, grandiloquent pronouncements, the sumptuous texture of his music seems forever proclaiming the victory of man over the energies of fire and sea and earth, the lordship of creation, the suddenly begotten railways and shipping and mines, the cataclysm of wealth and comfort. His work seems forever seeking to form images of grandeur and empire, flashing with Siegfried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's spear, upbuilding above the heads of men the castle of the gods. It dares measure itself with the terrestrial forces, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... other half steep as a wall on one side and sloping gently on the other to the level of the surrounding plains. The Carpathians were therefore pretty nearly in the same condition as the crater mountains Ptolemy, Alpetragius and Arzachel would find themselves in, if some terrible cataclysm, by tearing away their eastern ramparts, had turned them into a chain of mountains whose towering cliffs would nod threateningly over the western shores of Mare Nubium. The mean height of the Carpathians is about 6,000 feet, the altitude of certain points in the Pyrenees ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... lick the ice-cream freezer and to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces smeared with chicken croquettes and ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... for the fomenter of this frightful international conflict and was disposed to place the blame on the basis of rumor and personal feeling. On the other hand each nation concerned has vigorously disclaimed responsibility for the cataclysm. Austria - very meekly - claimed that Servia precipitated the conflict. Germany blamed it upon Russia and France, the former from Slavic race sentiment, the latter from enmity that had existed since the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870. They, on the contrary, ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... of Atlantis put the date of the cataclysm which destroyed all or part of that famous country at nine thousand years before Christ. If Denis de Milet, who wrote scarcely three thousand years ago, believed that in his time, the dynastic issue of Neptune was still ruling its ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... at the time that the bursting of a star may merely have lit up a previously dark nebula, but the spectroscope does not support this. A dim star had dissolved, wholly or partially, into a nebula, as a result of some mighty cataclysm. What the nature of the catastrophe was ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... something after all! What had been should be again. Old times had stories to tell of sublime catastrophes, the crash of systems, and the swallowing up of chains of cloud-capped mountains in the yawning abysses of a world that might at any moment turn itself inside out. Alas! the cataclysm theories had to die the death, and we had to comfort ourselves with a dull prosaic dream of forces acting with infinite slowness, grinding, and evolving through unnumbered ages, the great laws working themselves out ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... agreed or disagreed. Yet the true Church of Christ reserves the world-dominion only for Christianity in its most spiritual and perfect form and excludes every other dominion of man over men. The present cataclysm of Europe may show the world that no earthly king is destined for dominion over our planet, but Christ, ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... snapped by the earthquake of November 18th, 1929, report that for distances of a hundred miles on the Grand Banks the cables have disappeared into unfathomable depths. And before the subterranean cataclysm, they were within six hundred feet of the surface. And all the bottom of that section of the North Atlantic seems to have caved in. Ten thousand square miles dropped out of the bottom of the ocean! Fact, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... Netherlands is narrow and meagre. It is but a slender kingdom now among the powers of the earth. The political grandeur of nations is determined by physical causes almost as much as by moral ones. Had the cataclysm which separated the fortunate British islands from the mainland happened to occur, instead, at a neighbouring point of the earth's crust; had the Belgian, Dutch, German and Danish Netherland floated off as one island into the sea, while that famous channel between two great rival ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have been giddy after that cataclysm, but he stood upright and steady. He should have been tired and shaken, but he was fresh and calm. He should have been heavy and stiff and held to the earth by the ball and chain of a hundred years; yet he seemed scarcely more solid, scarcely less light, than an embodied ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it found, and sharply marking off the future from the past. The same bias of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies of the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... to regard the events of the past few minutes as nothing short of a cataclysm, flutteringly leafed over her book, and just as Amidon began wondering what he could think of to put into a letter, she burst into tears. Amidon closed his desk with a bang, and giving Alderson orders covering his absence, walked out into the streets, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... Markley in the office we have generally ended by wondering whether God—or whatever one cares to call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world—whether God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing or chastisement, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any more than they have in the great schools, and ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis. Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with one ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... appearances are apt to be deceptive and, alluding to certain experiences of his own at the tender age of six years, affirmed that the smoking of a first cigarette, for all its seeming harmlessness, is liable to be followed by something in the nature of a cataclysm. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... indeed as if heaven and earth were confounded in that hideous din. Great rocks were cleft asunder, the sun was hid from sight at times in clouds of sulphurous vapor. When the cataclysm was at its height the horses stood with drooping heads, trembling, dazed with terror. The captain's tall form was everywhere upon the eminence; suddenly he was seen no more; a shell had cut him clean in two, and he sank, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of vast wealth confers. The resources of this vast country are practically in the hands of half a dozen men. Merely by holding up a finger, these men could, to suit their own selfish ends, start a universal panic which might bring about a financial cataclysm, involving the whole world in disaster. I do not say they would use this power for evil, but they are in position to do so if it served their purpose. I want to have such power, only if I had it I would not use it for evil. I would use it for good. Conditions in the ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... To the political cataclysm which ended his public activity and doubtless hastened his death, I refer elsewhere. As long as he lived our friendly relations continued, and this has been to me ever since ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... if those five years were just one long dream—the soldiering, the voyage across the sea, the two years in a strange, strange land, all culminating in that awful cataclysm which had for ever robbed him ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... composed of Seven Cycles, of which we are now living in the third-seventh part of the Fifth Cycle. These Cycles may be spoken of as the Great Earth Periods, separated from each other by some great natural cataclysm which destroyed the works of the previous races of men, and which started afresh the progress called "civilization," which, as all students know, manifests a rise and fall like unto that of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... thinker with whom I had often conversed, was a firm believer in the cataclysmic origin of the Valley; and I now jokingly remarked that his wild tumble-down-and-engulfment hypothesis might soon be proved, since these underground rumblings and shakings might be the forerunners of another Yosemite-making cataclysm, which would perhaps double the depth of the Valley by swallowing the floor, leaving the ends of the roads and trails dangling three or four thousand feet in the air. Just then came the third series of shocks, ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... spite of the calm and peace prevailing on the great passenger ship, the shadow of war impended over all. The bloody struggles of the great European cataclysm were proceeding at the other end of the English Channel and dire hints of dangers on the sea in the "war zone" had accompanied the sailing of the ship. But on this bright May day, as the liner approached its destination, danger seemed far distant and few indeed among passengers ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... force could reach us. The race is an undeveloped thing. A few centuries later it will have evolved another sense. This century may see the first huge step—because the power of a cataclysm sweeps it forward." ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that," said Colline. "'Dear bachelor, says Lisette'—I have forgotten the tune. Well then, you know that there are four cardinal points. Now suppose there were to turn up a fifth cardinal point, all the harmony of nature would be upset. What they call a cataclysm—you understand?" ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... tragic!" she mocked. "One would think we were facing a cataclysm, whereas business men are merely just beginning to take advantage of some of the opportunities that are everywhere around them. It is all perfectly legal, isn't it? I have heard my father say that ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... prevent its greatest disasters. The man with the lantern at the bridgehead at Brod did not know that he held the destiny of Europe in his hand. And yet, this is the truth. Had he permitted us to pass unquestioned we should have reached Sarajevo in time to prevent the greatest cataclysm of all ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... is better than war; it were madness to compare the two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of unutterable folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless have reached ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose manifestations it is impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a third ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Negro and his worth to the nation. It is to be hoped that every Negro who, during his service at the front, received such impressions and had such experiences as to throw light upon the many phases of that world cataclysm will in the near future follow the example of these worthy women. The public will welcome history of divisions and regiments and will certainly be interested in the mere personal narrative presenting the experiences peculiar ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... and "the-remnant-that-shall-be-saved" idea give place to a faith that claims for God the entire world with its present life as well as individual immortality in future felicity. Miracle and cataclysm and postmortem glory—the ever-ready recourse of baffled hope and persecuted Christianity—are giving place more and more to a Christian conquest that is orderly and inclusive of the whole sweep of human life. The church is but dimly conscious, as yet, that through the aid ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... face, she thought; and she knew that everything she felt was being immediately registered in Mr. Harding's mind. They were two affinitized beings, suspended in the centre of a cosmos; "their soul intelligences were all that had been left of the sentient world after some cataclysm. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... really the case of Italy itself—conversion? The deepest passion in the poet's life came to him when, a voluntary exile in France, he witnessed the splendid reawakening of French spirit in face of awful danger. Living in Paris during the early months of the cataclysm, witness of the mobilization, the rape of Belgium, and the turn at the Marne, the heroic struggle for national existence in the winter trenches, he saw with a poet's vision what France was at death-grips with, what the Allies were fighting for, was ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... bringing up the lower half-dome of the shell. This lower centring was of wood, in form exactly like a Roman amphitheatre if the seats of it be circular; on this the lower or inverted brick dome was laid. The whole fabric was on one of the terraces which were heaved up in some old geological cataclysm, when some lake gave way, and the Carrotook River was born. The level was higher than that of the top of the fly-wheels, which, with an awful velocity now, were circling in their wild career in the ravine below. Three of ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... Obregon? Carranza? What's the difference? I love the revolution like a volcano in eruption; I love the volcano because it's a volcano, the revolution because it's the revolution! What do I care about the stones left above or below after the cataclysm? ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... terrestrial revolutions. According to this theory, there have been a series of mighty cataclysms on the earth, and these have suddenly destroyed the whole animal and plant population then living on it; after each cataclysm there was a fresh creation of living things throughout the earth. As this creation could not be explained by natural laws, it was necessary to appeal to an intervention on the part of the Creator. This catastrophic theory, which Cuvier described in a special work, was soon ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... 30 we had the unique experience of witnessing this crumbling action at work—a cataclysm of snow, ice and water! The ship was steaming along within three hundred yards of a cliff, when some loose drifts slid off from its edge, followed by a slice of the face extending for many hundreds of feet and weighing perhaps one million tons. It plunged into the sea with a deep booming ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... out except when we can't get on without you." And Hawkins, whom a cataclysm would not have ruffled after forty-five years in ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... blaze of his radiant youth. Men hob-nobbed with him; his charm brushed off on to the dryest and dullest so that, temporarily, they too bloomed with personality. As for women—His appearance among them was the signal for a noiseless social cataclysm. They slipped and slid in his direction as helplessly as if an inclined plane had opened under their feet. They fluttered in circles about him like birds around a light. If he had been allowed to ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... thickest, and listened meanwhile to the fourth day's swelling roar of the battle. Its long continuance had made it even more depressing and terrifying than in its earlier stages. To John's mind, at least, it took on the form of a cataclysm, of some huge paroxysm of the earth. He ate to it, he slept to it, he woke to it, and now he was walking to it. The illusion was deepened by the fact that no human being save Weber was visible to him. The country between the two monstrous battle ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with a frightening thud. Red pieces of glass and streaming water poured in a cataract down across the broncho's eyes as if very doom itself had suddenly cracked. A cataclysm could not have been more horrible. An indescribable fright and awe overwhelmed the brutish mind as with a cloud ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... appearing interested. Only Miss Craven and Peters, more intimate, saw the effort that he made. To Miss Craven it seemed sometimes as if he were deliberately living through a self-appointed period—she had found herself wondering what cataclysm would end it. She was conscious of the impression, which she tried vainly to dismiss as absurd, of living over an active volcano. What would be the result of the upheaval when it came? She had prayed earnestly ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... nothing else than an ancient crater, thrust upward from the sea-bottom by some primordial cataclysm. The western portion, broken and crumbled to sea level, was the entrance to the crater itself, which constituted the harbour. Thus, Fuatino was like a rugged horseshoe, the heel pointing to the west. And into the opening ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... country. A choice between responsible Ministries is a great strength to the Crown. The advantage of such a system cannot be denied. Would not the ending of such a system involve a much greater disturbance than to amend the functions of the House of Lords? Is there not a much greater cataclysm involved in the breakdown of the constitutional organisation of democracy—for that is the issue which is placed before us—than would be involved in the mere curtailment of the legislative veto which has been given ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... time of the government crisis of the autumn of 1899, we, in company with all other foreigners in China, realized that conditions were becoming serious, yet never did we expect or prepare for such a cataclysm as took place when the storm clouds suddenly burst in ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... some supernal fiat banished, The land sank down in one great cataclysm; The vales, the plains, the mountains slowly vanished, Buried and quenched in the wide ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... knock the four corners of the universe, one after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that disproportion ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ordinarily artificial and ill-balanced, was correspondingly weak—Fate had interpolated a blood-stained page of red and white terror in the years 1906-08. Although fitful, unorganized, and abortive, that wild splutter was one of the foretokens of the impending cataclysm, and was recognized as such by the writer of these pages. During the foregoing quarter of a century he had watched with interest the sowing of the dragon's teeth from which was one day to spring up a race of armed and frenzied men. Few ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... unexplored interior. Where they have come from is a mystery. It might have been that, in the ages past, the chain of islands from Luzon to Borneo was a part of Asia, an extensive mountain system populated by the tiny men found there to-day. If so, then they were driven to the highlands by the cataclysm that in prehistoric ages might have broken up the mainland into islands, leaving only the summits ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... Swan Song, sung by those to whom San Francisco held more than pleasure—more than sentimentality. It held for them close-knit ties that nothing less than a worldshaking cataclysm could sever—and the ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... be shaken by every passing wind. I can assure you that I am very fixed in my resolves. I was content to be lazy before simply because there was no particular reason for my being otherwise, and I admit that constitutionally I may incline that way; but when a cataclysm occurred, and, as I may say, the foundations were shaken, it became necessary for me to work, and I took a resolution to do so, and have stuck to it. Possibly I should have done so in any case. You see when a man is told by a young lady he is a useless idler, who does but cumber the ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... Mr. Carville, by the way he was continually having stimulating adventures of the soul. And what stirred me now was a vision of that sober, drab-grey little man, going about his business on the great waters, with this portentous cataclysm hanging over his destiny. And yet, according to my friend, these perilous things were constantly on the brink in most men's lives. The smug, complacent commuting folk we knew all had these moments of almost unendurable stress, yet they gave no sign. I ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... wall, with immense dark and gloomy caverns. Strangely, it had no intersecting canyon. It jealously guarded its secret. Its unusual formations of cavern and pillar and half-arch led the mind to expect any monstrous stone-shape left by an avalanche or cataclysm. ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... purposes are writ too large in the past to mistake them. And it is the ardent hope of America that Russia—that Empire which has so generously accorded us her friendship in our times of peril—may not by cataclysm from within, but of her own volition, place herself fully in line with the ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... absorb profits. I do not believe Society could afford this. I am profoundly convinced that under the Socialist program the inevitable waste would be so enormously increased as to result in disaster approaching a Social cataclysm. This is an old argument whose validity Socialists scout. Nevertheless I believe it sound. The number of these whose intellectual and physical strength is sufficient for the wisest direction of great enterprises is very small. Some ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. We may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Creek through its tortuous course among the ravines of the Blue Ridge, through the narrow defile of the Devil's Garden, sunless, strewn with rubble of boulders, with a chaos of shattered rock masses—debris, superstition said, of cataclysm—of the Crucifixion, when the mountain crests tore themselves asunder, and cast their pinnacles into the abyss for rage and grief. The searcher had climbed on and on, until he reached the nook ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... resemblances draw him near to us. His time was very like our own time. Upon even a slight familiarity with his books we recognize in him a brother-soul who has suffered, felt, thought, pretty nearly like us. He came into an ending world, on the eve of the great cataclysm which was going to carry away an entire civilization—a tragic turning-point of history, a time troubled and often very grievous, which was hard to live in for all, and to even the most determined minds must have appeared desperate. The peace of the Church was not yet settled; ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... still at this time under the stress of the emotion caused by the terrible earthquake of 1663. Father Lalemant has left us a striking description of this cataclysm, marked by the naive exaggeration of the period: "It was February 5th, 1663, about half-past five in the evening, when a great roar was heard at the same time throughout the extent of Canada. This noise, which gave the impression that fire had broken out in all the houses, ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... a frost—a nipping-frost; and slowly but surely the whole arctic and antarctic worlds were chilled and cramped, degree after degree, by the gradual on-coming of the Great Ice Age. I am not going to deal here with either the causes or the extent of that colossal cataclysm; I shall take all those for granted at present: what we are concerned with now are the results it left behind—the changes which it wrought on fauna and flora and on human society. Especially is it of importance in this connection to point out that the Glacial epoch is ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Vice-president Hendricks, ex-Governor Seymour, General Hancock, and John B. Gough were the victims. It was a cataclysm of fatality that impressed its sadness on the nation. The three mightiest agencies for public benefit are the printing press, the pulpit, and the platform. The decease of John B. Gough left the platforms of America ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... is no less fertile in results. I should digress from my subject if I were to examine here how the organization of animals is developed upon the earth; what modifications, or more strictly speaking, what complications it has undergone after each cataclysm, or if I even stopped to describe one of those ancient epochs during which the earth, the sea, and the atmosphere had for inhabitants cold-blooded reptiles of enormous dimensions; tortoises with shells three ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... felt it swallow men into its vortex—men, customs, institutions, civilizations, indeed the age and epoch wherein we lived, we had felt moving into chaos—into nothing, to be reborn some day into we know not what, in the cataclysm out there on the front. We had seen it. But seeing it had revealed nothing. For many nights we had heard the distant roar of the hungry guns ever clamouring for more food, for the blood of youth, for the ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... primal gods was now substituted the hideous strophes and antistrophes of the grimy spirits of darkest New York. As one performer after another took up the strain, to and fro and from upper to lower tiers of cells, one awaited some seismic cataclysm to put an end to it and them; and the pauses of it were punctuated by bursts of dreary laughter, applausive of the incredible gushings of blighting depravity. They were the heralds of the prison day—the tune to which its steps were set. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... will say, in the presence of all the facts here enumerated, that the submergence of Atlantis, in some great world-shaking cataclysm, is either impossible or improbable? As will be shown hereafter, when we come to discuss the Flood legends, every particular which has come down to us of the destruction of Atlantis has been duplicated in some of the accounts ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Lance guessed, some new type of generator. Out of the top of the device sprouted a funnel-like horn, from which, on the adjustment of the beacon's control studs, shot the nullifying ray. Lance could not suppress a shiver as he thought of the earth-shaking cataclysm that ray would conjure from ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... Hegira, so that in nineteen lunar years the system will begin to come to an end according to its own reckoning, and after 1000 years it will cease to exist. Others have fixed this present year as the year of the great cataclysm, but the interpreters are so secret and reserved in their statements, that it is only by casual remarks that we can arrive at any idea of their real belief. Lying to infidels is such a meritorious act, that you cannot ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... sea of blood, and each moment the forms of the drowned multitude showed more and more distinctly; clasping and clinging to each other in the awful contortions of death, as they had struggled with each other in their frantic fight against that awful cataclysm; heap upon heap, line after line, thousands upon thousands of them a multitude a ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... crossed the thread exactly on time, each night a trifle earlier than the night before by a definite and calculable amount, due to the march of the earth around the sun. So they had crossed the lines in every observatory since clocks and telescopes had been invented. Heretofore, no matter what cataclysm of nature had occurred, the star had always crossed the line not a second too soon or a second too late, but exactly on time. It was the one positively predictable thing, foretellable for ten or for ten thousand years by a simple mathematical calculation. It was surer than death ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... Bubble in 1720, which we shall sketch fully in another chapter, did not injure the Bank. The directors generously tried to save the fallen company, but (as might have been expected) utterly failed. With prudence, perhaps, gained from this national cataclysm, the Bank, in 1722, commenced keeping a reserve—the "rest"—that rock on which unshakable credit has ever since been proudly built. In 1728 no notes were issued by the Bank for less than L20, and as ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... more or less, when the North Pole had fully donned the earth's ice-cap, with all the isothermal and isochimenal changes thereby effected, what must have been the line of march taken by our northern vegetal and animal forms to escape the cataclysm of ice and snow then impending? Manifestly, they would have flocked, first to the Gulf states, then to Mexico, and afterwards to the Central American states; but none of them could ever have been crowded through the Isthmus of Panama, since at ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... be that these events will quickly usher in the return of Christ to gather His saints together from the four quarters of the earth.... Many see in the events preceding and accompanying this terrible cataclysm of war the signs of our Lord's near return. If so, blessed will that servant be whom his Lord when He cometh shall find giving 'their food in due season' to those fellow servants who have been put in his charge."—Church Missionary Review, ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... some one caught Blenheim's arm from behind just as he fired; but I was not certain. For suddenly that same whistling shriek sounded over us, nearer this time, more ominous; the earth seemed to rock and then to end in a mighty shock and cataclysm. Blackness enveloped me, and I dropped into a ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
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