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More "Cliff" Quotes from Famous Books



... in the early morning at the little old church that had nestled for centuries among its trees in the village on the cliff. The absolute simplicity of the service deprived it of all terrors for Dinah. Standing with Scott in the glow of sunlight that smote full upon them through the mellow east window, she could not feel afraid. The whole world was so ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... over it, proved to be highly precipitous when you scampered over it; and Turnbull was twice nearly flung on his face. MacIan, though much heavier, avoided such an overthrow only by having the quick and incalculable feet of the mountaineer; but both of them may be said to have leapt off a low cliff when ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... a rumbling sound, and the earth seemed again to tremble. Then there came a great splash in the water at the foot of a tall, rugged cliff about a quarter of a mile away. A great piece of the precipice ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton

... the early cars on stones in which grooves were cut for the guidance of the wheels instead of the steel rail and the flange wheel of the present day. These early cars were drawn by mules, after they had been pulled by a windlass up the cliff from the boat landing at Frankfort. The mules and the rock rails were soon replaced by two locomotives and iron rails. One engine brought the train from Frankfort to a point half way, by noon, and after the passengers had eaten dinner at Midway, ...
— The story of Kentucky • Rice S. Eubank

... days and nights, crouching behind a rock topped with a growth of mesquite, and with the cliff at my back, suffering agonies of thirst and absolutely hopeless of deliverance, I fought the fellows at long range, firing occasionally at the smoke of their rifles, as they did at that of mine. Of course, I did not dare to close my eyes at night, and ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce

... above, and lived in the caves. They walled the fronts of the caves with rock, which they covered with plaster, and divided them into compartments or rooms; and now many hundreds of these dwellings are found. Such is the cliff village of Walnut Canyon. In the ruins of these cliff houses mortars and pestles are found in great profusion, and when first discovered many articles of pottery were found, and still many potsherds are seen. The people were very skillful in the manufacture of stone implements, ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell

... night-mists. Darkness and all night's adherents were annihilated. Pelicans and geese and curlews were in uproar, as at a concerted signal. A buzzard yelped thrice like a dog, and rose in a long spiral from the cliff to Melicent's right hand. He hung motionless, a speck in the clear zenith, uncannily anticipative. ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... that the boy and his old gun had ended that fight on the cliff; and without knowing it, old Gabe kept the lad in constant torture with his talk of the blood-penalty. But Isom got used to it in time, for he had shot to save his brother's life. Steve Marcum treated him thereafter as an equal. Steve's friends, too, changed ...
— The Last Stetson • John Fox Jr.

... rock. A ray of glory flashed across its surface. The pilgrims looked whence it should proceed, but closed their eyes with a thrill of awful admiration, to exclude the fervid splendor that glowed from the brow of a cliff impending over the enchanted lake. For the simple pair had reached that lake of mystery, and found the long-sought ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... closing days at Ocean Cliff, the home of Uncle William and Aunt Emily Minturn at Sunset Beach. School was soon to open, and Mr. and Mrs. Bobbsey were anxious to get back to their town home, for Flossie and Freddie were to start regular lessons now, even though it was ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope

... and not only in the orchard, but of it, for she was comfortably perched on a low bough of an ancient hoary apple tree. She had a volume of Robert Bridges's poems in her hand and a thirst was on her to be at the edge of a cliff and look over into blue space below. The secluded orchard with its early crown of pink blushes, the serene shut-in valley screened from cold winds and cradled between the chalky highlands, weighed on her. She looked upwards through the ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... relish; he was not born in the woods to be scared of an owl, you know; what then? It mast have been the echo, most musical, most resonant, repeated and yet repeated, dying with long sighs of sweet sound, vibrated from rock to river and back again from depth to depth of cave and cliff. Her thought flew after it; she knew, that, even if her husband heard it, he yet could not reach her in time; she saw that while the beast listened he would not gnaw,—and this she felt directly, when the rough, sharp, and multiplied stings of his tongue retouched her arm. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... could see where it poured down a narrow vertical cataract from an opening in the face of the cliff. It was sweet water. The guide drank eagerly and ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman

... was his kind face with its high cheek-bones and short-pointed beard. Had he indeed come down from the skies? There seemed no other way, for Susan did not know till afterwards that there were some steps cut zigzag down the cliff just behind her. But wherever he had come from he was undoubtedly there, real flesh and blood, and she was no longer alone with the dreadful roaring sea. It was such a joyful relief that it gave her new strength; she forgot her bedraggled and woebegone state, and starting up began to try and explain ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton

... hear! how thin and clear, And thinner, clearer, farther going! O sweet and far, from cliff and scar, The horns ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers

... boughs twilight reigned, while beyond, not more than half a mile away, the splendid river-fall thundered down the precipice. For the rest they could find no exit to that garden which on one side was enclosed by a sheer cliff of living rock, and on the others with steep stone walls beyond which ran a torrent, and by the buildings of the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... cliff, at the edge of a steep precipice, lie the remains of a Moorish castle; the clouds hang where hung the balcony; the path along which the ass now goes, leads through the hall. From here you can enjoy the view over the whole valley, which, long and narrow, seems like a river ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen

... beautiful contrast. Instead of the brazen glare of the first, the air was full of glimmering lights and shades, and the sky of a deep transparent blue. Far up a mountain side, on an overhanging cliff, grew the same graceful ash-tree, but its branches were entwined with vines of the passion-flower that hung around in slender streamers. On a jutting rock, with precarious footing, stood a young ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... a time it happened that Merlin showed to her a wonderful cavern in the cliff, closed by an enchanted stone. By her subtle working she soon made Merlin remove the stone and go into the cavern to let her know of the marvels there. Then she so wrought through the magic he had taught her that the stone was placed back again, so that he never ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler

... approach we should discover our error. What we had supposed to be peaks were in reality a thousand glittering spires. Nothing could be more beautiful than the architecture of this ice-palace. The walls are curiously constructed of massive blocks of ice which terminate in cliff-like towers. The entrance to the palace is at the end of an arched recess, and it is guarded night and day by twelve ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... as she had never been on the water before, and could not know whether she were a good or a bad sailor. Aunt Sara and Elinor had told her unpleasant anecdotes of voyages; but when Dover Castle on its gray height, and white Shakespeare Cliff with its memories of "Lear," had faded from her following eyes, still she would hardly have known that the vessel was moving. The purring turbines scarcely thrilled the deck; and presently Mary ate sandwiches ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... God, our lives were saved by Kenneth Moore. Did you not hear that cry of his when we were about to crash into the face of the cliff?" ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... more adrift. O'er dappling sea and broad lagoon, O'er frowning cliff and yellow dune, The long, warm lights of afternoon Like jewel ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson

... the stubborn unreasoning of the time. It was useless to argue with her. Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff. And her training was everybody's. The brightest intellect in the land would not have been able to see that her position ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the tried and true comrades of camp and trail are in the saddle, bent on seeing with their own eyes some of the wonderful sights to be found in that section of the Far Southwest, where the singular cave homes of the ancient Cliff Dwellers dot the walls of the Great Canyon of the Colorado. In the strangest possible way they are drawn into a series of happenings among the Zuni Indians, while trying to assist a newly made friend: all of which makes interesting reading. If there could ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... there are many dikes which are for the most part vertical, and traverse the inclined beds of lava and scoriae which were successively superimposed during those eruptions by which the old cone was formed. They project in relief several inches, or sometimes feet, from the face of the cliff, being extremely compact, and less destructible than the intersected tuffs and porous lavas. In vertical extent they vary from a few yards to 500 feet, and in breadth from one to twelve feet. Many of them cut all the inclined beds in ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... winter-chimney, or well-polished jet, Exhale mundungus, ill-perfuming scent! Not blacker tube, nor of a shorter size, Smokes Cambro-Briton (versed in pedigree, Sprung from Cadwallader and Arthur, kings Full famous in romantic tale) when he O'er many a craggy hill and barren cliff, Upon a cargo of famed Cestrian cheese, High over-shadowing rides, with a design To vend his wares, or at the Arvonian mart, Or Maridunum, or the ancient town Ycleped Brechinia, or where Vaga's stream Encircles ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... day? Ah, rather let us now in lovely June O'erlook these happy children at their play: Lo, where they gambol through the garden gay, Or round the hoary hawthorn dance and sing, Or, 'neath yon moss-grown cliff, grotesque and grey Sit plaiting flowery wreaths in social ring, And telling wondrous tales of the green ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various

... first-rate magnitude make compensation, in some degree, by exhibiting those ever-changing fields of green, blue, and purple shadows or lights, (one scarcely knows which to name them) that call to mind a sea-prospect contemplated from a lofty cliff. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... towering walls had been carved by wind and water into thousands of beautiful, fantastical forms, and a dim religious light fell from above through a long, funnel-shaped hole running from the roof of the cavern to the top of the great cliff. ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... of a cliff about the first of November, I saw a vigorous young apple-tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it, uninjured by the ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau

... the precipice, three hundred feet in depth, forming the wall of the old crater, but now thickly covered with vegetation. It is so steep in many places that flights of zigzag wooden steps have been inserted in the face of the cliff in some places, in order ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... the sail that is always straining against the wind; and the timbers form clearly the lightest possible framework for the canvas,—thus showing the essence of windmill sail. Then the clay wall of Stanfield's mill is as beautiful as a piece of chalk cliff, all worn into furrows by the rain, coated with mosses, and rooted to the ground by a heap of crumbled stone, embroidered with grass and creeping plants. But this is not a serviceable state for a windmill to be in. The essence of a windmill, as distinguished from all other mills, is, that ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... Look at the crumbling cliffs around old England's shores. See the effect upon the beach of one night's fierce storm. Mark the pathway on the cliff, how it seems to have crept so near the edge that here and there it is scarcely safe to tread; and very soon, as we know, it will become impassable. Just from a mere accident, of course,—the breaking away of some of the earth, loosened by rain and frost ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... struggle between two lights, the wonderful clearness of the air would let things be seen and heard at incredible distances. Two leagues away I could make everything out. The smallest detail about the distant mountains, a tree, a cliff, a house, a bend in the ground, was thrown out with the most delicate sharpness. New senses seemed to be given me. I found myself another being, released from bondage, free to soar away on my new wings. It was an hour of utter purity, all hard and clear. I said to myself, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... mountain elder-berries and lots of flowers in the grass. There was the glacier, the roar of the river and a plaintive little chapel on a green knoll under the great cliff of ice which cut the sky. There was a fat, crumby woman ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... like one who shivers on the plank at a bathing-place, nor could the jeering cries of the Cossack induce him to venture on the treacherous surface. Meanwhile, we who had crossed were examining the broken cliff which rose above us. It looked not exactly dangerous, but a little troublesome, as if it might want some care to get over or through. So after a short rest I stood up, touched my Cossack's arm, and pointed upward. He reconnoitred ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... in a voice that rang from cliff to plain; and springing forward, he seized Houseman with a giant's grasp,—"behold ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... standing out from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon it, and the clustering town ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... king, that that dreadful battle took place between Bhurisravas alone on one side and the many united together on the other. And those ten heroes covered that single mighty car-warrior with showers of arrows like the clouds showering rain on a mountain cliff in the season of rains. That mighty car-warrior, however, cut off those clouds of shafts shot by them resembling the fatal darts of Death or the very thunder in effulgence, before they could reach him.[401] They then, surrounding ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... "We may even now be too late!" They were only a hundred yards from the tower, when the sound of rapid pistol shots was heard, wafted down the wind, and a confused sound of cries on the cliff was wafted to them, as a dozen twinkling lantern lights appeared on the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... exercise. Why, if we hold our own in respect to the material growth of our population, it is as much as we do. Where is the joyful buoyancy and expansive power with which the Gospel burst into the world? It looks like some stream that leaps from the hills, and at first hurries from cliff to cliff full of light and music, but flows slower and more sluggish as it advances, and at last almost stagnates in its flat marshes. Here we are with all our machinery, our culture, money, organisations—and the net result of it all at ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... crowned, The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep, The mountain moss by scorching skies imbrowned, The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep, The tender azure of the unruffled deep, The orange tints that gild the greenest bough, The torrents that from cliff to valley leap, The vine on high, the willow branch below, Mixed in one mighty scene, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... shrubs, in ALLMERS'S garden. At the back a sheer cliff, with a railing along its edge, and with steps on the left leading downwards. An extensive view over the fiord, which lies deep below. A flagstaff with lines, but no flag, stands by the railing. In front, on the right, a summer-house, covered with creepers and ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen

... days up a precipitous mountain range, and, turned back in sight of the crest by an impassable cliff, were forced to back track and ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... have been a string stretched from the corner eaves to the snow-white light-house standing on the farthest spit of land; blue sea and yellow sand curving round it, with a white edge of breakers; inshore, the sand rising to a cliff ridged with grassy hummocks; farther inshore, the hummocks united and rolling away up to inland downs, but broken here and there on their way with scars of sand; over all, white gulls wheeling. He could hear the nearest ones mewing as they ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... it. We must lean hard upon God's will. In Switzerland at one of the most dangerous passes, where men used to travel with their faces white with fear, to-day any ordinary traveler can pass in safety because along the edge of the cliff there is an iron rail against which you may lean and have almost no danger beside you. This iron rail corresponds to the will of God for Christians. Paul also asks in this prayer that God's people may be made perfect to do his will. We need not be afraid of this word perfect, nor of ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... fight. His enemy, rejoicing in his victory, seized the King's horse and mounted it. The horse seemed to know what had happened, and who was on his back, for he began to show the greatest fury. After trying for some time to throw his new rider off, he suddenly dashed off up a steep cliff; and when he reached the top, he leapt wildly down the sheer precipice, with the man still on his back. The rider had no time to save himself, and both he and the horse were dashed to pieces. Thus the King was avenged ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... should be precipitated into matrimony with Miss Penge. According to his ideas in such matters a man should be left alone. Therefore, as was customary with him when he opposed his wife, he held his tongue. "You have been called in three or four times when he has been just on the edge of the cliff." ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... boys I guessed we were elected to go on foot to California after all, for I did not propose to follow the river down any sort of a hole into any mountain. We were floating directly toward a perpendicular cliff, and I could not see any hole any where, nor any other place where it could go. Just as we were within a stone's throw of the cliff, the river turned sharply to the right and went behind a high point of the mountain that seemed ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... summer plain, the eastern side of which is bounded by grassy hills of limestone, the other sides by a forest. The hill nearest to the plain terminates in a cliff, in the face of which, nearly at the level of the ground, are four caves, with low, narrow entrances. Before the caves, and distant from them less than one hundred feet, is a broad, flat rock, on which are laid several sharp slivers of flint, which, like the rock, ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... stood on the edge of the castle cliff, looking across the bay of Cruta to the sea. He was tall, loose jointed, and gaunt, and the long grey beard and unkempt locks of flowing hair which streamed behind in the breeze showed that he was an old man; but his eyes, set back in deep hollows, ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... that way. It was horrible. She was flung down by a huge breaker, and before she could pick herself up a second wave broke over her. She had no chance to get her breath. And there wasn't any one near enough to help her. I saw it all happen from the cliff." She shuddered a little at ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... to be no more; another name for death: 'Tis the sun parting from the frozen north; And I, methinks, stand on some icy cliff, To watch the last low circles that he makes, 'Till he sink down from heaven! O only Cressida, If thou depart from me, I cannot live: I have not soul enough to last for grief, But thou shalt hear what grief has ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... since 1681. For a sixth part of its distance it is carried over mountains deeply excavated. It has, I think, ninety-nine locks and viaducts, and as one of its most wonderful features it has an octuple lock, or eight locks in flight, like a ladder from the top of a cliff to the valley below. If in 1681 a French engineer had the ability and the daring to conceive and construct an octuple lock, will any one maintain that more than two hundred years later, with all the enormous advance in engineering, with a better knowledge of hydraulics and ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden

... went twice to Broadstairs, in June and in September. From this he wrote to me (17th June), "It's now four o'clock, and I have been at work since half-past eight. I have really dried myself up into a condition which would almost justify me in pitching off the cliff, head first—but I must get richer before I indulge in a crowning luxury. Number 15, which I began to-day, I anticipate great things from. There is a description of getting gradually out of town, and passing through neighborhoods of distinct and various characters, with ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... poultry, duck and partridge, sand-grouse, and "Bob White" the quail, for half our dinners; and the Arabs call him the "Angel of Death belonging to the Birds." He failed to secure a noble eagle in the Wady 'Afal, whose nest was built upon an inaccessible cliff: he described the bird as standing as high as our table, and with a width of six to seven feet from wing to wing. He also brought tidings of a large (horned?) owl, possibly the same species as the fine bird noted at Sinai. The Arabs call it classically ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... men who showed themselves now and then on inaccessible-looking crags, who eyed us suspiciously and made no answer to the shouted challenge of Anazeh's men. When the track passed over a spur, or swung round the shoulder of a cliff, we could sometimes catch sight of other parties—always, though of three, before and behind us, proceeding in ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... English-speaking people of the Lowlands. The king of England had some claim to be their suzerain, a claim which the Scots were slow to acknowledge. The old line of Scottish princes of the Celtic race died out. Alexander III. fell with his horse over a cliff on the coast of Fife. Two competitors for the throne arose, both of them of Norman descent,—John Baliol and Robert Bruce. The Scots made Edward an umpire, to decide which of them should reign. He decided for Baliol ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... here assume against him, what we shall afterwards prove, that the guilty are not to be directly put to death except by public authority. But what we may not directly bring about, we may not directly risk the occurrence of. As I may not throw myself down a cliff, so neither may I walk along the edge precisely for the chance of a fall. I may often walk there with the chance of falling, but not because of the chance. It will be said that the English love of fox-hunting and Alpine climbing is largely owing to the element of danger present in those ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... pioneers to whom we owe our age of comparative enlightenment were heretics," George persisted. "And if they could have been headed off, or burned, most of us would still be living in mud caves at the foot of the cliff on which stood the nobleman's castle; and kings would still be kings by divine decree, scientists—if there were any —workers in the black art, and every phenomenon we failed to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the shoulder of the hill in the required direction; and by the time they reached a point where actual descent had again become necessary, they had once more come within sight of the ship, and had the satisfaction of seeing that she had drawn sensibly nearer to the cliff. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... going directly towards a gate that opened out on the cliff above the river. In Charley's day this gate had been often used, for it gave upon four steep wooden steps leading to a narrow shelf of rock below. From the edge of this cliff a rope-ladder dropped fifty feet to the river. For ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... weather it makes a collection of honey intended to be absorbed by its own larvae, if it had not the misfortune to be watched by one of these intriguing Coleoptera. Wherever in Provence there is a perpendicular wall, natural or artificial, a little cliff, a sloping ditch, or the wall of one of those caves which the people of the country use for putting their tools in, the Anthophora hollows out galleries, at the bottom of which he builds a certain number of chambers. He fills each of them with ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... other there must have been an enormous population to worship in such a sanctuary; and yet all you see now is a public-house just opposite the church, a few cottages, and a farmhouse. A few steps farther bring you to the low cliff, and there is the sea ever encroaching on the land in that quarter and swallowing up farmhouse and farm. Miss Agnes Strickland, who lived at Reydon Hall—a few miles inland—has thus sung the ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie

... the bush. He turned back and went, as he thought, the way he had come, but soon arrived at a tall, precipitous cliff, which by some infernal magic seemed to have got between him and the river. Then he broke down, and that strange madness came on him, which comes even on strong men, when lost in the forest—a despair, a confusion of intellect, which has cost many a man his life. Think what ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various

... Dud stopped at the ranch some days, too. He had to, for he hurt his foot. That's when Helen saved his life. He was flung from the back of a horse over the edge of a cliff and fortunately landed in the top ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... "we were covering the flank of the main army, marching on Vienna under the Emperor's command. We came to a bridge defended by three batteries of cannon, one above another, on a sort of cliff; three redoubts like three shelves, and commanding the bridge. We were under Marshal Massena. That man whom you see there was Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, and I was one of them. Our columns held one bank of the river, the batteries were on the other. Three times they tried ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... egg hunting on the cliff, and sometimes he set traps there for foxes, and he helped Menie and Koko make a little trap to catch hares. There was plenty to do in every ...
— The Eskimo Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... sounds, and the flock of bells suddenly springs into wakefulness. It is the new dawn! Behind the sheer black cliff rises the golden glory of the invisible sun. Almost falling Christophe at last reaches the bank, and he says to ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... spot Montgomery, with his leading company, reached the first barricade, which was undefended; passing through this, they pressed on toward the next. The road leading to it was only wide enough for five or six persons abreast. On one side was the river, on the other a steep cliff; in front was a log hut with loop-holes for musketry, and a battery of two three-pounders. It was held by a party of 30 Canadians and 8 militiamen under John Coffin, with 9 sailors under Bairnsfeather, the captain of the transport, to work the guns. Montgomery, ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty

... misfortune felt a bitter resentment swelling in her heart, and scorning to remain among her kind in that costume, took her way to the Cliff House, where she arrived, worn and weary, ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... looked over the bluff. Half-way down the cliff on an outcropping shelf of rock the man lay, face downward, motionless. He seemed to have grown smaller and to have shrunk into his clothes. One long, thin leg was bent up under the skirts of the overcoat in a queer, twisted way, and the cloth of the trouser leg looked flattened and empty. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... passed, and in the bed of the river is some limestone which is small and worn smooth, and seems to have been brought down by the current. We went about a mile further and encamped under a high bluff on the right opposite to a cliff of rocks, having ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

... over the heavens, how they clap their hands for joy. Moreover, when they grow larger, they love me still; then I help the charming maids to weave variegated garlands, and the wild boys to become still, while I seat myself near them, on the lofty summit of a cliff, steep lofty cities and brilliant palaces in the mist-world of the blue mountains in the distance, and, on the red-tinged clouds of evening, paint brave troops of horsemen, ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff

... the attitude of this new-found relative. Then one evening—when solution seemed least near—the key, metaphorically speaking, fell at his feet. Returning home from a ramble over the headland, his observant eye was caught by the sight of a narrow foot-track that, crossing the main pathway of the cliff, wound steeply upward and seemingly lost itself in a tangle of gorse and bracken. Stirred by a boyish desire for exploration, he paused, turned into this obscure track, and incontinently ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... squabbling imps; but to the forest sped, Or roam'd at large the lonely mountain's head, Or, where the maze of some bewilder'd stream To deep untrodden groves his footsteps led, There would he wander wild, till Phoebus' beam, Shot from the western cliff, released ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... weird, endless arches of the Claudian aqueduct, throwing long shadows before them in the westering sun. Worthy framework for such a picture, the noble semicircle of the Sabine Hills rises on the horizon to the left, terminating in the grand rugged peak of Monte Gennaro, whose every cliff and scar are distinctly visible, and concealing in its bosom the romantic waterfalls of Tivoli and the lone ancestral farm of Horace. On the right the crested Alban heights form the boundary, crowned ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... was growing eery, now, and precipitous. To their right rose a sheer cliff. To their left, the path fell off abruptly to a gigantic caldron where ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... those plicated, overthrown, or curved exposures where parallel rocks, as talcose schist, usually vertical, are bent and fractured, as if by a maul like force, battering them from above. The strata are oftentimes tumbled over upon a cliff-side like a row of books, and rest upon heaps of fragments broken away by the strain upon the bottom layers, or crushed off from their ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... not say that I was on the point of throwing myself from yonder cliff to escape the misery ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... the spit of coast-land toward which they had struggled. The point lifted itself abruptly into a rocky bank which curved in and out, yielding to the besieging waves. Just here had been formed a little sandy cove partly protected by the beetling cliff. At the top was verdure in abundance. Vines hung down over the face of the wall, coarse grasses and underbrush grew to its very edge, and sharp-pointed fir trees etched themselves against the clear blue of the sky. Below, the white sand formed a sickle-shaped beach, bordered by the rocky wall, ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... waterside to listen; and at once ordered the whole party to get under arms. He requested Mr. Barlow, the young lieutenant in charge of the troops, to place half his men across each end of the plateau. The back was defended by a cliff, which rose almost perpendicularly from it to a height of some hundred feet; the plateau being some thirty yards, in depth, from the sea face to its foot. The male passengers were requested to divide themselves ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty

... thirty in number, excavated in the south side of the precipitous bank of the ravine, and vary from 35 to 110 ft. in elevation above the bed of the torrent. The caves are of two kinds—-dwelling-halls and meeting-halls. The former, as one enters from the pathway along the sides of the cliff, have a broad verandah, its roof supported by pillars, and giving towards the interior on to a hall averaging in size about 35 ft. by 20 ft. To left and right, and at the back, dormitories are excavated opening on to this hall, and in the centre of the back, facing the entrance, an image of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... 'leben," said Joan, looking at the clock. "I don't see how 'tis possible for 'em to venture in 'fore wan, 'less 'tis to Yallow Rock, and they'd hardly try that. What do 'ee say, Eve? Shall we run up out to cliff, top o' Talland lane, and see if us can see any signs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... reported that somebody was shouting. A long time afterward, as it seemed to her then, a strong arm went round her. Inch by inch she was dragged from the water that fought and wrestled for her. Phyllis knew that her rescuer was working up the cliff wall with ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... the Battry of St. Dominica of 7 Guns. A little without this Battry, on the East side of the Bay, is a small but high Island, close to the Shore, on the Top of which is the Church of Bonn Voyage, about half-way down the Cliff. Below the Church is a Battry of 3 Guns. Neither the one nor the other of these battry's are of much Consequence. They serve, indeed, to force Shipping coming into the Bay between 2 Fires, and hinder them from ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook

... mishap, they rumbled into the hamlet of Poldau. For the last hour they had seen signs of the coming fete. All the natives, arrayed in their best clothes, were drifting westward to the rocky cape, where, perched on a lonely cliff, was the tiny chapel, "Our Lady of the Guard," which was the scene of the Pardon on the morrow. Before they entered Poldau night had fallen, and the long yellow beams from the powerful Phare glanced out across the sullen waters and the level land. It was beneath ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... on the highroad which skirts the cliff-bound coast of Normandy you may come to a board bearing the legend "Hottetot-sur-Mer" and a hand pointing down a narrow gorge. If you follow the direction and descend for half a mile you come to a couple of villas, a humble cafe, some fishermen's cottages, one of which is also ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... the schooner vanished, and its place was supplied by a remarkable white cliff, which from the extraordinary optical delusion it occasions gives its name to the noble port which is now called Ship Harbour. I have since mentioned this subject to a number of mariners, and have ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare, black cliff clang'd round him as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels. And on a sudden, lo! the level lake And the long glories ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... pure enjoyment of the family circle I will pass my days, cheering my idle hours with lute and book. My husbandmen will tell me when spring-time is nigh, and when there will be work in the furrowed fields. Thither I shall repair by cart or by boat, through the deep gorge, over the dizzy cliff, trees bursting merrily into leaf, the streamlet swelling from its tiny source. Glad is this renewal of life in due season: but for me, I rejoice that my journey is over. Ah, how short a time it is that we are here! Why, then, ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... ran parallel to the desert. The palm trees rustled on their right, the green corn waved, the narrow cuttings in the earth gleamed with shallow water. But on their other side was limitless sterility; the wide, stony expanse of the great river bed, the Oued-Beni-Mora, then a low earth cliff, and then the immense airy flats stretching away into the shining regions of the sun. At some distance, raised on a dazzling white wall above the desert in an unshaded place, Domini saw a narrow, two-sided white ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... slowly, slowly down from him, into the pool, to be carried away out to sea; and her face looking up, her lost face with beseeching eyes, and dark, wet hair-possessed, haunted, tortured him! He got up at last, scaled the low rock-cliff, and made his way down into a sheltered cove. Perhaps in the sea he could get back his control—lose this fever! And stripping off his clothes, he swam out. He wanted to tire himself so that nothing mattered and swam recklessly, fast and far; then suddenly, for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... had a fancy that when she spoke again it would be without that deliberation—almost restraint—which seemed to accord a little strangely with the girlishness of her appearance and actual years. She stood on the extreme edge of the cliff, her slim straight figure outlined to angularity against the sky. She remained so long without speech that I had time to note all these things. The sunshine, breaking through the thin-topped pine trees, lay everywhere about us; a little brown feathered bird, scarcely a dozen yards away, sang ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... it was true. Poor Lydia had had a taste of the joy of life, and a full measure of the sorrow, seven years ago, when Clifford Frost, twelve years her senior, at thirty-one the perfect match, had singled her out for his favour. Martie and Sally could remember how pleasantly exciting it was to have Cliff Frost so much at the house, how Lydia laughed and bloomed! Lydia had been just Sally then: her age, and ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin, the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary, between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart sprang up a perpendicular cliff of two hundred and fifty cubits, forming part of the precipitous Mount Moriah. So that when Simeon and his associates arrived on the summit of the tower called Adoni-Bezek-the loftiest of all the turrets around about Jerusalem, and the usual place of conference ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... rooms here, and established ourselves for the night. From this point we have a view of the beautiful lake, and of Skiddaw at the head of it. The cascade is within three or four minutes' walk, through the garden gate, towards the cliff, at the base of which the inn stands. The visitor would need no other guide than its own voice, which is said to be audible sometimes at the distance of four miles. As we were coming from Keswick, we caught glimpses of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... a tree that harmonizes with all situations, rude and cultivated, level and abrupt. On the side of the mountain it adds grandeur to the declivity, and gives a look of sweeter tranquillity to the green pastoral meadow. It yields a darker frown to the projecting cliff, and a more awful uncertainty to the mountain-pass or the hollow ravine. Amid desolate scenery it spreads a cheerfulness that detracts nothing from its power over the imagination, while it relieves it of its terrors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... her his watch. Then she perceived that the sun had not yet risen high enough to illumine the wooded crest of the opposite cliff. The snow-clad hills, the blue glaciers, the wonderful clearness of atmosphere, led her to believe that the day was much more advanced. Land and sea shone in a strange crystal light. None could tell whence it came. It seemed to her, in that solemn ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... the car splashed through the ford at the foot of the wood, and carried them along the Warwick Road, past Blacklow Hill, where Piers Gaveston was executed, and where, it is said, his restless spirit still rides at drear midnight, to Guy's Cliff, with its old Saxon mill and romantic view of the Avon. Then on to Warwick, to look at the treasures of a castle fortunately untouched by the ravages of war, and the beautiful Beauchamp Chapel, with its tomb of the "King Maker". They could have stayed a long time in ancient, picturesque ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... I sent in the direction of Roodekraal had a fight with the enemy at Tijgerfontein. A heavy bombardment took place; and my men told me afterwards that the baboons, of which there were a large number in these mountains, sprang from cliff to cliff screaming with fright—poor creatures—as the rocks were split on every side by the ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet

... been seen, we observed traces of blood, satisfying us he had been wounded; but the course taken in his flight was one that seemed to defy every human effort to follow in. It was a narrow pointed ledge, ascending boldly towards a huge cliff that projected frowningly from the extreme summit, and on either side lay a dark, deep, and apparently fathomless ravine; to look even on which was sufficient to appal the stoutest heart, and unnerve the steadiest brain. For me, however, long accustomed to dangers of the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... tall cliff, that lifts its awful form, Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm; Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson

... were lost on the valet; he stood yawning with his hands in his pockets, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but staring straight before him at a little hollow, beyond which the ground sloped away smoothly to the brink of the cliff. A bench was placed here, and three persons—an old lady, a gentleman, and a young girl—were seated on it, watching the sunset, and by consequence turning their backs on Monsieur Justin. Near them stood two gentlemen, also looking ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... do, but I know pretty well whereabout it is. We always set sail at night and came in at night, and none was allowed on deck except the helmsman and two or three old hands till morning; but when I was ashore and on duty at the lookout I noticed three trees growing together just at the edge of the cliff at the point where it was highest, two miles away from the entrance to the cove. They were a big un and two little uns, and I feel sure if I were to see them again I should ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty

... a similar one on the north side) being previously confined to a bed of scarcely one hundred feet in breadth, descends at once in a magnificent cascade of full four hundred feet in height. I stood upon a cliff nearly level with the top of the fall, and directly in front of it. The beams of the evening sun fell upon the cascade, and occasioned a most splendid rainbow; while the vapoury mists arising from the broken waters, the bright green woods that hung from the surrounding ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various

... one very striking difference from seaside cliffs. The seaside cliffs may be nearly vertical, but the inland cliffs are not, excepting for a little way at the top; lower down a heap of stones and soil lies piled against the face of the cliff and makes a slope up which you can climb. If you look at the cliff you can find loose fragments of it split off either by the action of freezing water (p. 83) or by other causes ready to roll down if sufficiently disturbed. ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell

... gone to live awhile among his people—the two of us were sitting upon the rugged rock, facing to the cliff above the York spring, talking about the ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan

... above the verge of the slope and screened the clearing all round. Nowhere could we catch sight of any sign of a town, village or farmstead, though there were three several rifts in the forest through which we could see far into the valleys to the eastward. The cliff above the clearing ran nearly from southwest to northeast, so that the place was ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... with his digging nails he clung Fast to the sand, lest the returning wave, From whose reluctant roar his life he wrung, Should suck him back to her insatiate grave: And there he lay, full length, where he was flung, Before the entrance of a cliff-worn cave, With just enough of life to feel its pain, And deem that it ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... Guy-Cliff, two miles from the town; so I walked to see it, and of all improvers commend me to Mr. Greathead, its present owner. He shew'd it me himself, and is literally a fat young man with a head and face much bigger than they are usually ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... of strange emotions flooding his heart, Peter Thorold crossed to where his father stood apart. The tide of his thought overflowed the shore of prose and landed his expression high on a cliff of poetry. No chance, but the urging of his own exalted mood, brought him the last lines of Moody's ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the messes that following night, to cut out the front logs. The same scheme has been often put in execution. It was argued that by stretching a warping-line across the rapids, from cliff to cliff, directly over the foot of the jam, a man might be lowered on it, with his axe, and cut away the logs. A large "basket"—so it was talked—might be swung on the cable. By slackening the line the axe-man could be lowered ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... Dandenong Ranges, grown bluer and bluer, were also lost in the sky. The vessel crept round the outside of the great Bay, to clear shoals and sandbanks, and, by afternoon, with the sails close rigged in the freshening wind, they were running parallel with the Cliff—"THE Cliff!" thought Mahony with a curl of the lip. And indeed there was no other; nothing but low scrub-grown sandhills which flattened out till they were almost ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... mines here are considerably elevated above the level of the sea, and are of the richest description. The veins are visible on the abrupt face of the cliff, which borders the harbour, and are worked by adits or openings, which serve both to carry off the water and to wheel away the coals. The quantity procured in this easy manner is very great, and might be increased to any extent. So much more coals indeed ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well—into an everlasting deep hole. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... their tip." This was all the jargon of delirium to the terror-stricken old woman; it may be clear enough to the ordinary reader, with what followed. "I tell you I saw the man that got away over the cliff, and shattered every bone in his body. I saw him carried out o' hospital and tied up and flogged, for a caution, till the blood run down and the doctor gave the word stop." He went on in a voluble and disjointed way to tell how this man was "still there! There where your son, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... annoy me when Europeans patronize us about being a new country, doesn't it you? The Palisades, it seems, boiled up and took shape as a wall of cliff thirty million years ago, or maybe more, in the Triassic period. What can you get anywhere older than that? And Europe would give a cathedral or two out of her jewel-box to look young as long as ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... country. On my left hand stretched a long fiat-topped mountain, forming the southern slope of the valley we ascended; steep, dark, and furrowed with innumerable torrent-beds, it frowned upon a river that rushed along the ravine at its foot to pour into the sea where the mountain broke as a rugged cliff. This was the Mons Moscius of old time, which sheltered the monastery built by Cassiodorus. The headlong, swollen flood, coloured like yellow clay, held little resemblance to the picture I had made of that river Pellena which murmurs so musically ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... on a low, pebbly ledge, just outside the black maw of the passage—an entrance hidden in a curtain-like fold in the face of the cliff that towered above them, casting an ink-black shadow. But beyond it the emblazoned firmament glowed irradiant, and at their feet the encircling waters ran, a broad ribbon of black silk purling between the cliff and the opposing ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... to my mind. I returned to the point at which the bear had hurled me down and peered over the edge of the cliff into the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... thou known, Ere rude hands scooped thy grave, Of Homestead Act, or Building Loan, Thou wouldst have quite disdained to own A rugged cliff or cave. ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... had left outside the gate, near Juno's temple, to the number of three hundred, entering the town, now full of tumult and lights, and not knowing the way by which the former had gone, and finding no track of them, slunk aside, and crowded together in one body under a flank of the cliff that cast a strong shadow, and there stood and waited in great distress and perplexity. For, by this time, those that had gone with Aratus were attacked with missiles from the citadel, and were busy fighting, and a sound of cries of battle ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... about Pushut are here only recognisable in two instances, the central one presenting three peaks, next to it the barren cliff, and the three mountains ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... doubt bed's the best place for 'un, an' gude 'ot drink. Burlacombe zays he'm like a man standin' on the edge of a cliff; and the lasts tipsy o' wind might ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... moss, among the brambles of the promontory. Around their heads passed and repassed large bats, carried along in the fearful whirl of their blind chase. The feet of Raoul were across the edge of the cliff, and bathed in that void which is peopled by vertigo and provokes to annihilation. When the moon had risen to its full height, caressing with its light the neighboring peaks, when the watery mirror was illumined in its full extent, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... had almost surrounded the white men, and more were continually crossing the stream. The soldiers had dismounted, and were firing into the camp from the top of the cliff." ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... some kind of a cliff around here, under which we can stand?" asked Granbury Lapham of the sleigh driver. Hendrik shrugged his shoulders for a moment, ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer

... sacrifice to his honour. On this occasion, the lord holds a great festival on his accession day; when all who are willing to give this cruel proof of their attachment, are attended to the summit of a high cliff in a certain valley, where, after some peculiar ceremonies, and certain words muttered over them, the victims precipitate themselves from the cliff, and are dashed to pieces. In reward of this sanguinary homage, the lords consider themselves bound to heap extraordinary honours and rewards ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... survey the channel every day. He bid them notice how the town of Havre divided Upper from Lower Normandy. In Lower Normandy the shore sloped down to the sea in pasture-lands, fields, and meadows. The coast of Upper Normandy, on the contrary, was steep, a high cliff, ravined, cleft and towering, forming an immense white rampart all the way to Dunkirk, while in each hollow a village or a port lay hidden: Etretat, Fecamp, Saint-Valery, Treport, Dieppe, and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... population, the men calling to us to land to be fleeced and insulted by way of Mahonga or Mutuari: they threw stones in rage, and one, apparently slung, lighted close to the canoe. We came on until after dark, and landed under a cliff to rest and cook, but a crowd came and made inquiries, then a few more came as if to investigate more perfectly: they told us to sleep, and to-morrow friendship should be made. We put our luggage on board and set a watch on the cliff. A number of men came along, cowering behind ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... dawn. The barges, the bushy willows above the water, the swirling flood began to take shape, and up above in a clayey cliff a hut thatched with straw, and above that the straggling houses of the village, where the cocks had begun ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... Greenland, so bold, so steep, and in places so grim, with the long fields of white glittering ice floating about on the cold blue sea, and our little vessels (for we looked pigmies beside the huge objects around us, whether cliff, berg, or glacier) stealing on so silently and quickly; the leadsman's song or the flap of wild fowl the only sounds to break the general stillness. One of the cliffs we skirted along was actually teeming with birds called "loons:" they might have been ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn

... Americans closed in on the flank and rear of the British and encircled them with a hot fire. For nearly an hour the battle continued, with a heavy fire on both sides. At length the right wing gained the summit of the cliff and poured such a deadly fire on the foe from their point of vantage that it was ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... arrived safely at Dover, on their way to Ramsgate; but on hearing a report that an epidemic of scarlet fever had broken out near East Cliff, they altered their route and proceeded ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore

... downs running up to the summits, and ending in a sheer precipice three or four hundred feet deep, at whose foot it was said a man-of-war had once been wrecked, and all souls drowned. Down beneath the cliff, too, were the rocks of every fantastic shape or form, now with the water just gently lapping their weed-hung sides, but in stormy weather covering them with foam as it alternately showed their grim and jagged shapes, or hid them from view. Woe, then, to the unfortunate vessel that came amongst ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn

... who have seen the effect of a raging sea even on a smooth beach, know that the power of the falling waves is terrible, and their retreating force so great that the most powerful swimmers occasionally perish in them. But the coast to which Rodgers volunteered to swim was an almost perpendicular cliff. ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne

... my first view of that beautiful sheet of water was from a projecting cliff 1000 feet above its surface, and it embraced not only the entire outline of the Lake with its charming bays and rocky headlands but also the magnificent forests of giant pines and firs in which it was embosomed, and the dozen or more lofty mountain ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... The falcon, from her cairn on high, Cast on the rout a wondering eye, Till far beyond her piercing ken The hurricane had swept the glen. Faint, and more faint, its failing din 70 Returned from cavern, cliff, and linn, And silence settled, wide and still, On the lone wood ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... impatiently, glanced at her with mingled anger and contempt, and muttering reproaches, threw her bundle and his own into the ravine, then roughly seized her hand and dragged her to the edge of the cliff. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... dismounted at the commencement of the action. Others engaged on horseback. On the retreat, some were fortunate enough to recover their horses, and fled on horseback. Others retreated on foot. From the point where the engagement commenced to the Licking river was about a mile's distance. A high and rugged cliff environed either shore of the river, which sloped off to a plain near the Licks. The ford was narrow, and the water above and below it deep. Some were overtaken on the way, and fell under the tomahawk. But the greatest slaughter was at ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint

... into the little triangular nook which had been anciently formed by the Colorow as it descended in power from its source in the high parks. On the left the ledges rose almost sheer for a thousand feet, and from the edge of this cliff ore-buckets, a-slide on invisible cables, appeared in the sky, swooping like eagles, silently dropping one by one, to disappear, tamely as doves, in the gable end of a huge, drab-colored mill which stood upon the flat beside the stream. Beyond the mill Mount Ignacio rose darkly ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... the pens an' he comes to that place on the road that branches out over the top of a canon, and there some one springs out of a clump of willows an' dashes into the herd and drives the wether that's leading right over the cliff. The leaders begin to follow that wether, and they go right over the cliff like the pore fools they are. The herder fired and tried to drive 'em back, they tell me, an' he an' the dawg were shot at from the clump of willows by some one else who was there. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... heard a tale of two Irishmen, one of whom lowered the other over a cliff, probably in search of the nests of sea-fowl. Presently the man at the top called out, "Hold hard while I spit on my hands," so he loosed the rope for that purpose, and his ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... reality from books than we get from life. Leslie Stephen liked the real country, also. In his holidays he climbed the Swiss mountains—wrote a book about them—it's on that top shelf. Don't you remember how he loved to roll stones off a cliff? And as a pedestrian he was almost as famous as George Borrow—walked the shirt off his back before his college trustees and all that sort of thing. But he got an even sharper reality from books. He liked the city, too, but in many a mood, there's no doubt about ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... to a cliff fully two hundred yards distant, and of half that height. On this projecting ledge stood a noble buck, with antlers and head raised, while he seemed to be gazing over the wild expanse of country below him. They knew ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis

... he does all day long is sit in the backyard and stare at the grass. He insists that he is standing on top of a cliff." ...
— Texas Week • Albert Hernhuter

... grave," said the coastguard simply. He pointed up at the old graveyard on the cliff above us. Then, touching my elbow, he turned away with me toward the little hamlet ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... Clefts in the cliff shelter the purple sand-peas And chicory flowers bluer than the ocean Flinging its foam high, white fire in sunshine, ...
— Flame and Shadow • Sara Teasdale

... that at the foot of the slide—that is to say, at the edge of the valley—there was a tall cliff, or rock wall, and over this precipice all the mass of snow now was pouring, driven with such mighty force against this wall of rock at its foot that it broke into fine particles more like mist than snow. In a vast cascade it poured down and out over the valley, making ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough

... jagged scythes and reaping-hooks of white electric fire, or leaping, dancing, playing, vanishing tongues of thin blue. Once this fire struck a krantz, under the lee of which the child was sheltering, and made a black scorched mark all down the cliff-face, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... where two Giants worked together amidst a metallic clangour. Against the sky, as the glare came about, his eye caught the familiar outlines of the old worksheds and playsheds that were made for the Cossar boys. They were hanging now, as it were, at a cliff brow, and strangely twisted and distorted with the guns of Caterham's bombardment. There were suggestions of huge gun emplacements above there, and nearer were piles of mighty cylinders that were perhaps ammunition. ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... Edgar is trying to persuade the blind Gloucester that he has in reality cast himself over the cliff, he describes the being from whom he is supposed ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... naked state roast him alive. The sea and the fresh water alike make no effort to uphold him if his vessel founders; he casts up his arms in vain, they come to their level over his head, filling the spot his body occupied. If he falls from a cliff the air parts; the earth beneath dashes him ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... the perfume of apple blossoms, the water from the old wheel fell with silvery echo and ran rippling over the stones into the river. Somewhere above the cliff a negro was playing a banjo and far down the river, beside a little cottage torn with shot and shell, but still standing, a mocking-bird was singing ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... autumn afternoon—clean air, quiet, and the sea. Far below the cliff walk, trawlers crawling slowly in; along the horizon a streak of smoke from some patrolling destroyer or battleship. And all along this cliff walk, Belgians—strolling with their children, sitting on the benches, looking out to sea. Just beyond that hazy white wall ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... trees and plants from India, the Sunda Islands, and Australia, all labelled with their English and scientific names. Monkeys climb actively among the trees, and sit swinging on the boughs, and a high waterfall tumbles down a cliff surrounded ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... hands, and patient souls—can this, then, be all you have left! this the sum of your doing on the earth!—a nest whence the night-owl may whimper to the brook, and a ribbed skeleton of consumed arches, looming above the bleak banks of mist, from its cliff ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... stage coach robbers and kept a hard-ware store and is only twenty-five and the other has not had quite as much experience but has been to Princeton, he is 23. The mixture of narratives which change from tricks of the hard-ware trade to dances at Buckingham Palace and anecdotes of Cliff House supper parties at San Francisco are very interesting. I am going to write a book for them and call it "Through Central America with a Phonograph" or "Who We Did, and How We Done Them." We sing the most beautiful medleys and contribute to the phonograph. I had to protest against them announcing ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... August (yes, there was one), I stepped out of my diggings in an obscure Cornish fishing-village to find a gentleman busily engaged strangling a lady on the cliff side. He had her by the throat and was gradually forcing her over the edge. Once in Bristol I interposed in a slogging contest between husband and wife and was very properly chastised for my interference, not only ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various

... and Agatha, fell on a little camp near the spit of coast-land toward which they had struggled. The point lifted itself abruptly into a rocky bank which curved in and out, yielding to the besieging waves. Just here had been formed a little sandy cove partly protected by the beetling cliff. At the top was verdure in abundance. Vines hung down over the face of the wall, coarse grasses and underbrush grew to its very edge, and sharp-pointed fir trees etched themselves against the clear blue of the ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... Bill Broom and his crew had been keeping watch upon their intended victims from the top of the cliff above the pool. They could see every move from the time the Frontier Boys had arrived until they lay down ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt

... as we rounded a point, we saw an Eskimo boy high on a cliff, with a net in his hand. He did not see us for some time, and we were so excited that we stopped rowing to watch him in breathless silence. Thousands of birds were flying round his head among the cliffs. How often ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne

... it? It is only a bare block of granite, jutting out of the cliff, and its happiness ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... plumage, and remove any suspicions we may have had, that, perhaps, from some cause or other, she was in some slight disfavor with Nature. After a few weeks Phoebe is seldom seen, except as she darts from her moss-covered nest beneath some bridge or shelving cliff. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... grotesquely, from the crevices of which sprays of peach-coloured orchids quivered, while the flora of land and sea commingled on the lustrous surface. Beyond again, the inlet wound round the base of it cliff vocal with the fugue of birds which flew from flowery ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... to tighten the clumsy wrappings of rags which served him for shoes, and hurried on after the little, shouting mob which had followed the butcher down to the steep hillside of Valley Forge, where he stood at bay with his back to the cliff. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... Island, so named from the position it occupies at the entrance of Port Discovery. Vancouver landed on it on the 1st of May 1792, and thus describes its appearance:—"On landing on the west end, and ascending its eminence, which was a nearly perpendicular cliff, our attention was immediately called to a landscape almost as enchantingly beautiful as the most elegantly finished pleasure-grounds in Europe. The summit of this island presented nearly a horizontal surface, interspersed with some inequalities of ground, which produced ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne

... it shortly and carelessly. It was a vast slide that broke the straight wall of a cliff, and was overrun with brush and creeping plants, where a score of tribes could have lain ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London

... suddenly failed, and about midnight her spirit left this world. The captain and I decided that the best thing to do was to burn everything—and in order to avoid publicity to do it at once. So having laboriously carried it all out onto the edge of the cliff, we set a light to the pile and were rewarded with a bonfire which would have made many a Guy Fawkes celebration. Quite unintentionally we were sending out great streams of light into the darkness over the waters away down below us, and actually giving the longed-for ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... had seated himself with his son, upon the moss, among the brambles of the promontory. Around their heads passed and repassed large bats, carried along in the fearful whirl of their blind chase. The feet of Raoul were across the edge of the cliff, and bathed in that void which is peopled by vertigo and provokes to annihilation. When the moon had risen to its full height, caressing with its light the neighboring peaks, when the watery mirror was illumined in its full extent, and the little red fires ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... is more unwholesome still never to let the contemplation of that end come into our calculations of the future, and to shape our lives in an obstinate blindness to what is the one certain fact which rises up through the whirling mists of the unknown future, like some black cliff from the clouds that wreath around it. Is it not strange that the surest thing is the thing that we forget most of all? It sometimes seems to me as if the sky rained down opiates upon people, as if all mankind ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... can not say; I only know that I gave no sign, and that soon all stir ceased in his direction and I was left to enjoy my triumph and to listen with anxious interest to the strange and unintelligible sounds which accompanied the descent of the horseman down the face of the cliff, and finally to watch with a fascination, which drew me to my knees, the passage of that sparkling star of light hanging from his saddle. It crept to and fro across the side of the opposite mountain as he threaded its endless zigzags ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... shattered into dyes, The light for ever is morning light; The hills are verdured pasture-wise; The angel hosts with freshness go, And seek with laughter what to brave;— And binding all is the hushed snow Of the far-distant breaking wave. And from a cliff-top is proclaimed The gathering of the souls for birth, The trial by existence named, The obscuration upon earth. And the slant spirits trooping by In streams and cross- and counter-streams Can but give ear to that sweet ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost

... into a little room where three ladies sat. 'What have you to say?' asked the little black-haired one in the corner—she with the great eyes and the face pale as a chalk-cliff. I said, 'I am instructed, mesdames, to deliver this simple message: Sir Max is quite well.' 'That will do. Thank you.' said the big eyes and the pale face. Then she gave me two gold florins. The money almost took my breath, and when I looked up to thank her, blest if the ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major

... Why, if we hold our own in respect to the material growth of our population, it is as much as we do. Where is the joyful buoyancy and expansive power with which the Gospel burst into the world? It looks like some stream that leaps from the hills, and at first hurries from cliff to cliff full of light and music, but flows slower and more sluggish as it advances, and at last almost stagnates in its flat marshes. Here we are with all our machinery, our culture, money, organisations—and the net ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... returned. 'You will soon see a far bigger hole in the cliff than that. There are heaps of caves about here; some quite shallow like that one; others very deep and high and dark, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... Sydney Harbour in shape, with one principal valley and no end of small cover and gullies running off from it, and winding about in all directions. Even the sandstone walls, by which the whole affair, great and small, was hemmed in, were just like the cliff about South Head; there were lines, too, on the face of them, Jim and I made out, just like where the waves had washed marks and levels on the sea-rock. We didn't trouble ourselves much about that part of it. Whatever might have been there once, it ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... that his companion was yielding to the spell of the hills and woods. For now they had but to skirt the base of Painter's Cliff; to cross Elder Branch and mount the hill beyond, and Goree would have to face the squandered home of his fathers. Every rock he passed, every tree, every foot of the rocky way, was familiar to him. Though he had forgotten the woods, they thrilled him ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... Creek. Opposite the house the river makes a sudden bend around the point of a high mountain, where the action of water and erosion of time had washed away the base of the mountain leaving a precipitous cliff, hundreds of feet high. Under this cliff a great amount of drift wood has been deposited, and here Jim Clark went for his fire wood. The high bank of the river next the house, which was 600 yards away, had been cut down so as to give an easy ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson

... that here indicated one should have anti-skidding tires on the rear wheels, take descents with care, and, if you be the owner of a powerful machine, do not make that an excuse for rushing up the tortuous, twisting, and frightfully dangerous roads, banked by a cliff on one hand, and by a precipice on the other, which ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... amaze My mind beyond that water fair: From a cliff of crystal, splendid rays, Reflected, quiver in the air. At the cliff's foot a vision stays My glance, a maiden debonaire, All glimmering white before my gaze; And I know her,—have seen her otherwhere. Like fine gold leaf one cuts with care, ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett

... the windows, whose jambs are enriched with empty niches; on the north the small windows are placed very high up, the twisted vaulting shafts only come down a short way to a string course some way below the windows, leaving a great expanse of cliff-like wall. At the bottom are the confessional doors, so small that they add greatly to the scale, and above them tall narrow niches and their canopies. But the nave piers are the most astonishing part of the whole building. Not more than three feet thick, they rise up to a height of nearly ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... "'You are preparing as before To deck your slender shape; And yet, just three years back—no more— You had a strange escape: Down from yon cliff a fragment broke; 35 It thundered down, with fire and smoke, And hitherward pursued its way; [3] This ponderous block was caught by me, And o'er your head, as you may see, 'Tis ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... and birthright seis'd By younger Saturn, he from mightier Jove His own and Rhea's Son like measure found; So Jove usurping reign'd: these first in Creet And Ida known, thence on the Snowy top Of cold Olympus rul'd the middle Air Thir highest Heav'n; or on the Delphian Cliff, Or in Dodona, and through all the bounds Of Doric Land; or who with Saturn old Fled over Adria to th' Hesperian Fields, 520 And ore the Celtic roam'd the utmost Isles. All these and more came flocking; but with looks Down cast and damp, yet such wherein ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... to find that the beans had grown up in the night, and climbed up and up till they covered the high cliff that sheltered the cottage, and disappeared above it! The stalks had twined and - twisted themselves together till ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... magazines, and wine-cellars. We proceed through the village of Rochecorbon, and along a road winding among the spurs of the Vouvray range, past hamlets, half of whose inhabitants live in these primitive dwellings hollowed out of the cliff, and finally enter the charming Valle Coquette, hemmed in on all sides with vine-clad slopes. Here a picturesque old house, half chteau half homestead, was pointed out to us as a favourite place of sojourn of ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... neighbours' gear; or else there sounded in his ears the love-song or the dirge, or the incantation of the forsaken girl rose amid the silence to the silver moon. Once again he stood upon the shore and watched the fishers cast their nets, while around him the goats browsed on the close herbage of the cliff, and the crystal stream leapt down, and the waves broke upon the rocks below, till he saw the breasts of the nymphs shine in the whiteness of the foam and their hair spread wide in the weed, and the fair Galatea, the enticing and the fickle, mocked the clumsy suit of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... erected buildings more suited to the splendour of his court, and found the place so much to his taste during his lifetime, that he was unwilling to leave it after death. He therefore caused his tomb to be cut in the steep limestone cliff which borders the plain about half a mile to the north-west of the town. It is an opening in the form of a Greek cross, the upper part of which contains a bas-relief in which the king, standing in front of the altar, implores the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... his comrades had found a remarkable camp at the edge of one of the beautiful small lakes in which the region abounds. The cliff at that point was high, but a creek entered into it through a ravine. At the entrance of the creek into the river they found a deep alcove, or, rather, cave in the rock. It ran so far back that it afforded ample shelter from the rain, and that was all they wanted. It was about halfway ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler

... succeeded "All aboard," and we whizzed along this most extraordinary line of railway, so prolific in accidents that, when people leave New York by it, their friends frequently request them to notify their safe arrival at their destination. It runs along the very verge of the river, below a steep cliff, but often is supported just above the surface of the water upon a wooden platform. Guide-books inform us that the trains which run on this line, and the steamers which ply on the Hudson, are equally unsafe, the former from collisions and "upsets," the latter from "bustings-up;" ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... you. I can't walk up a perpendicular cliff. I dare say I could come straight down if ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed

... cottage was not exactly so snug as it has been described in itself and its interior; for it was situated on a hill which terminated at a short distance in a precipitous cliff, beetling over that portion of the Atlantic which lashes the shores of Cumberland under the sub-denomination of the Irish Sea. But Forster had been all his early life a sailor, and still felt the same pleasure in listening to the moaning and whistling of the ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... tumbled from the mountain on the right hand side; in a few minutes that silent guide turned with an easy curve and disappeared in what had yet the appearance hardly distinguishable of an area wrenched with enormous labor from a low cliff of solid ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... 1625 was a significant day for the colony of New France. On that morning a blunt-prowed, high-pooped vessel cast anchor before the little trading village that clustered about the base of the great cliff at Quebec. It was a ship belonging to the Caens, and it came laden to the hatches with supplies for the colonists and goods for trade with the Indians. But, what was more important, it had as passengers the Jesuits who had been sent to the aid of the Recollets, the first of the ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... forbidden to stroll through the grounds attached to "Solitude," which was the nearest point where land and ocean met. Following a cattle-path that threaded the bare brown hills and wound through low marsh meadows, Salome at length climbed a cliff that overhung the narrow strip of beach running along the base of the promontory, and, while Stanley prepared his net, she applied herself vigorously to the completion of a cluster of lilies of the valley which she had begun ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... against him, what we shall afterwards prove, that the guilty are not to be directly put to death except by public authority. But what we may not directly bring about, we may not directly risk the occurrence of. As I may not throw myself down a cliff, so neither may I walk along the edge precisely for the chance of a fall. I may often walk there with the chance of falling, but not because of the chance. It will be said that the English love of fox-hunting and Alpine climbing is largely owing to the element of ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... straight out to sea, and those on the left and right commanded prospects along the shore to the north and south respectively. On the south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately in front was a strip—not considerable—of rough grass, dotted with old anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach. Whatever may have been the original distance between the Globe Inn and the ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... wigwam's cheering ray, Then, aloft through freezing air, With the snow-bird soft and fair As the fleece that heaven flings O'er his little pearly wings, Light above the rocks I play, Where Niagara's starry spray, Frozen on the cliff, appears Like a giant's starting tears. There, amid the island-sedge, Just upon the cataract's edge, Where the foot of living man Never trod since time began, Lone I sit, at close of day, While, beneath the golden ray, Icy columns gleam below, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... direct blast cut down Nevada's speed one-half. She made zigzag tracks in the snow; but she was as tough as a pinon sapling, and bowed to it as gracefully. Suddenly the studio-building loomed before her, a familiar landmark, like a cliff above some well-remembered canon. The haunt of business and its hostile neighbor, art, was darkened and silent. The elevator ...
— Options • O. Henry

... at Ocean Cliff, the home of Uncle William and Aunt Emily Minturn at Sunset Beach. School was soon to open, and Mr. and Mrs. Bobbsey were anxious to get back to their town home, for Flossie and Freddie were to start ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope

... French and Indians concealed by the prairie grass and timber, and from this situation, in almost perfect security, they fired down upon Braddock's men. The only exposure of the French and Indians, resulted from the circumstance of their having to raise their heads to peep over the verge of the cliff, in order to shoot with more deadly precision. In consequence, all of them who were killed in the early part of the action, were shot ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... come thou, hieing lief, Awhile to leave th' Aonian cave, Where 'neath the rocky Thespian cliff Nymph Aganippe loves to lave In ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... young Laird of Port Agnew reposed in the best room of his own hospital, and Andrew Daney was risking his life motoring at top speed up the cliff road to The Dreamerie with bad news for old Hector. Mrs. McKaye and the girls had retired but The Laird was reading in the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... view of that beautiful sheet of water was from a projecting cliff 1000 feet above its surface, and it embraced not only the entire outline of the Lake with its charming bays and rocky headlands but also the magnificent forests of giant pines and firs in which it was embosomed, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... "slumming," and he was disguised in "pearlies," whilst I was gowned "a la 'ARRIETT")—and I assure you our Donkeys went very fast. However—this is a digression—as the man said when he walked over the cliff, so let us "noch einmal zu unser schafen," as the German proverb runs. Although disappointed in the behaviour of La Fleche, my second string Llanthony maintained my reputation for correct tips, by running last, as I said he would!—It is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various

... collected a fleet to enable Sigurd to avenge his father. They encountered a great storm, and were driven past a certain promontory. A man was standing on the cliff ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... seized her around the waist. Bessie screamed and called for help, while the man who held her a helpless prisoner laughed sardonically. With his free hand he thrust aside the frail pine pole that formed a hand-rail to guard the edge of the cliff. It fell into the torrent and ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr

... thrice-lovely landscape unfolds beneath your gaze, you wander among quiet little paved piazzas with a bit of daisied grass in their midst, surrounded by great silent buildings, whence through some opening you descry a street which is a ravine, and the opposite cliff rising high above you piled close with gray houses overhung with shrubs and creepers, and little gardens in their crevices like weeds between the stones of a wall; or you come out upon a secluded gallery with tall, deserted-looking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... colours for the painting of the woodwork. This exasperated my aunt extremely—she called him a "Pestilential old Splosher" with an unusual note of earnestness—and he also enraged her into novelties of abuse by giving each bedroom the name of some favourite hero—Cliff, Napoleon, Caesar, and so forth—and having it painted on the door in gilt letters on a black label. "Martin Luther" was kept for me. Only her respect for domestic discipline, she said, prevented her retaliating with "Old ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... ministry to guide others into it. Though not the truth, an illustration is a stepping-stone towards it; an indentation in the rock which makes it easier to climb. No man had a happier knack in hewing out these notches in the cliff, and no one knew better where to place them, than this pilgrim's pioneer. Besides, he rightly judged that the value of these suggestive similes—these illustrative stepping-stones—depends very much on their breadth ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton

... cabin half-way down the cliff, You see it from this arch-stone; there we live, And there you'll find my mother. Poverty Weeps on the woven rushes, and long grass Rent from the hollows is our only bed. I have no father here; he ran away; Perhaps he's dead, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon it, and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... they seemed to be stratified with extraordinary evenness and regularity to within a few feet of the top, the summit being crowned with loose sand. Farther on, they sank to sand dunes piled into rounded banks and softly moulded ledges, like snow-drifts. Landing the next day at a bold bluff marked Cliff End on the charts, he found the lower stratum to consist of a solid mass of tertiary fossils, chiefly immense oysters, mingled, however, with sea-urchins. Superb specimens were secured,—large boulders ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... The dictionary definition is a ravine or gulch, but it also means a high bluff or cliff and in that sense is used ...
— The March of Portola • Zoeth S. Eldredge

... Isaac talk enough for one night," said Colonel Zane. "He is tired out. Major, tell Isaac and Betty, and Mr. Clarke, too, of your jump over the cliff." ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey

... was, they pushed doggedly on over snow-sodden tracks, that were speedily converted into drainage rivulets; trailing single file along the 'devil's pathways' that overhang the Wakhan river,—mere ledges cut out of the cliff's face, where a false step means dropping a hundred feet and more into the valley beneath; scrambling up giant staircases of rock, and glacier debris; zigzagging down one or two thousand feet, by the merest suggestion of a route, only to start a fresh climb—drenched ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... for me, and they have been confirmed by a very cordial letter from Caesar himself. The result of the British war is a source of anxiety. For it is ascertained that the approaches to the island are protected by astonishing masses of cliff. Moreover, it is now known that there isn't a pennyweight of silver in that island, nor any hope of booty except from slaves, among whom I don't suppose you can expect any ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... with the dead princes hung about her neck. A hermit comes to the rescue, and restores the babies to life. The king finds out his mistake, is reunited to the lady out of the hay, and the were-wolf is cast off a high cliff into the sea, and that is the end of him. The king, the queen, and the princes live happily, and may be living yet, for no notice of their death ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... rainbows. A long, curved, and inclined tunnel near the top of the mountain led to the undulating plains of the Transvaal—a marvellously rapid transition from a region filled with nature's wildest panoramas to one that contained not even a tree or rock or cliff to relieve the monotony of the landscape. On the one side of this natural boundary line was an immense territory every square mile of which contained mountain passes which a handful of Boers could hold against an invading army; on the other side ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas

... love to all the spots where we had first seen each other, then met and walked; where we had sat, and talked, and loved, during the long and heavenly intercourse between ourselves and lonely Nature. We began by the lovely hill of Tresserves which rises like a verdant cliff between the valley of Aix and the lake; its sides, that rise almost perpendicularly from the water's edge, are covered with chestnut-trees, rivalling those of Sicily, through their branches, which overhang the water, one sees snatches of the blue lake or of the sky, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... reached the limits of the world, marched resolutely back to Perth. The only road that then led through this Valley of the Shadow of Death was a rugged path, so narrow that not more than three men could walk abreast, winding along the edge of a precipitous cliff at the foot of which thundered the black waters of the Garry. Balfour's regiment led the van of this perilous march: the baggage was in the centre, guarded by Mackay's own battalion: Annandale's horse and Hastings' ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris

... the harbor of Cape Town, our friends stood on her deck and were deeply interested in the scene about them. As they steamed out around the breakwater, they had a fine view of Table Bay and the mountains that surround it. Then they passed a series of cliff-like mountains, known as the Twelve Apostles, and after them some brightly colored mountains that had a dazzling appearance in the bright sunlight. Thirty miles from Cape Town they passed the famous Cape of Good Hope, which is popularly but erroneously supposed to be the ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... 'ad," declared Prue, quite jubilantly. "'E droonk 'isself to death an' tumbled over a cliff near 'ere one dark night an' was drowned!" This, with the most ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... this tall cliff,—my wings are strong, The hurricane is raging fierce and high, My spirit pants, and all in heat I long To fly right upward to a purer sky, And spurn the clouds beneath me rolling by; Lo thus, into the buoyant air I leap Confident and exulting, at a bound Swifter than whirlwinds happily ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... saw that all was ruinous, Here stood a shattered archway plumed with fern; And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers, And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now were ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner

... who had a curacy there. Tom Starbrow went with them, and they were absent all day. Constance occupied herself with her writing, and Mary would not leave the house alone, but towards evening they went out for a walk on the cliff together, and there they were unexpectedly joined by Captain Horton and Mr. Northcott, who had apparently been consoling each other. The curate and Constance had some literary matters to discuss, and presently drifted away from the others. Then Mary's face lost ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... foreland[obs3]; promontory; ridge, hog's back, dune; rising ground, vantage ground; down; moor, moorland; Alp; uplands, highlands; heights &c. (summit), 210; knob, loma[obs3], pena [obs3][U.S.], picacho[obs3], tump[obs3]; knoll, hummock, hillock, barrow, mound, mole; steeps, bluff, cliff, craig[obs3], tor[obs3], peak, pike, clough[obs3]; escarpment, edge, ledge, brae; dizzy height. tower, pillar, column, obelisk, monument, steeple, spire, minaret, campanile, turret, dome, cupola;skyscraper. pole, pikestaff, maypole, flagstaff; top mast, topgallant ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... left of Tynemouth Castle, which was built as a protection for the monastery against the attacks of the Danes. It stands in a commanding position on a neighbouring cliff, and is now used as barracks for garrison artillery corps. During the days when Scotland harried the English borders, the Priors of Tynemouth maintained a garrison here; and later, in Stuart days, Charles I. visited the North, and the fortress was strengthened just before the outbreak of the ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... regicide who suddenly appears from the woods to head the colonists of Massachusetts in a critical emergency; then he tries his hand at a bit of allegory, and describes the search for the mythical carbuncle which blazes by its inherent splendour on the face of a mysterious cliff in the depths of the untrodden wilderness, and lures old and young, the worldly and the romantic, to waste their lives in the vain effort to discover it—for the carbuncle is the ideal which mocks our pursuit, and may be our curse or our blessing. Then perhaps we have a domestic ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... the road Paaker stood still, and with him Bent-Anat and Nefert. Neither of them had spoken a word during their walk. The valley was perfectly still and deserted; on the highest pinnacles of the cliff, which rose perpendicularly to the right, sat a long row of vultures, as motionless as if the mid-day heat had taken all strength out of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... asleep last night while in a state of great perplexity about the care and education of my daughter, I dreamt as follows. I was walking with the child along the border of a high cliff, at the foot of which was the sea. The path was exceedingly narrow, and on the inner side was flanked by a line of rocks and stones. The outer side was so close to the edge of the cliff that she was compelled to walk either before ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... escaped me. I looked over into a fearful abyss. Below was a fertile valley, but so deep was it that the river looked only like a silver thread, and the trees but an inch in height. I was standing on the edge of a huge granite cliff that went down sheer into the valley, its face almost as flat as the side ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... on a high bluff overlooking miles of sea, between which and the foot of the cliff stretched a low sandy beach a hundred yards or more in width, and gained by flights of ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley

... travelled on, and at night they camped in a hollow among the rocks at the foot of a tall cliff. Jack was not ill-treated, and plenty of food was given to him, but the keenest watch was kept upon his every movement, and escape was a thing altogether beyond his reach. His captors were six in ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... father utilized several of these vertebrae for stools, but seeing them for the first time, the little fellow looked down at them respectfully, hushed into silence by vague, sea-born feelings. Far down the beach to the southward rose the cliff's where thousands of sea-birds swarmed in the sunshine. Their screaming, softened by the distance, came to his ears with an eerie wildness. All at once he felt very small and alone among alien creatures. Kobuk had turned back without him and was bounding out of sight around Skeleton Rib. The giant ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... traverse them. Accordingly the trail had to go over the top of the mountain, both the ascent and the descent of the rock-strewn, forest-clad slopes being very steep. It was hard work to carry loads over such a trail. From the top of the mountain, through an opening in the trees on the edge of a cliff, there was a beautiful view of the country ahead. All around and in front of us there were ranges of low mountains about the height of the lower ridges of the Alleghenies. Their sides were steep and they were covered with the matted growth ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... him, and the glorious, abused word was tossed from cliff to cliff, across the river and back, ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... seemed to fascinate her. Then the thought that perhaps poor, wilful Tavia had fallen down such a place; that perhaps at that very moment, she lay alone, helpless, at the bottom of a cliff! ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose

... asylum from the wrath and cruelty of men. They rejoiced in their freedom to worship before Him. Often when pursued by their enemies, the strength of the hills proved a sure defense. From many a lofty cliff they chanted the praise of God, and the armies of Rome could not silence ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... there was a mocking in his voice and his face and in his whole huge body, which made the sword of Hallblithe uneasy in his scabbard; but he refrained his wrath, and said: "Big man, the longer I look, the less I can think how we are to come up on to yonder island; for I can see nought but a huge cliff, and great mountains rising ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris

... skidding of wheels, Winthrop whirled the car round a corner and into the Lafayette Boulevard, that for miles runs along the cliff of ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis

... the bears and wolves which he said he saw looking down from these cliff-like towers, were great stone figures of these animals, that projected from various angles and cornices here and there, ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott

... I watched the lines come out in bold relief from a wonderland of cloud! With what eternal life I seemed to tingle! 'Twas as though I, Richard Carvel, had discovered all this colour; and when a tiny white speck of a cottage came out on the edge of the cliff, I thought irresistibly of the joy to live there the year round with Dorothy, with the wind whistling about our gables, and the sea thundering on the rocks far below. Youth is in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... stubborn unreasoning of the time. It was useless to argue with her. Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff. And her training was everybody's. The brightest intellect in the land would not have been able to see ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the stream among the bushes between the water and the cliff. They could force their bodies that way but not the boat. I felt sure they had gone after my pistol shot, because I saw some of the bushes moving a little against the wind farther down the stream. It was proof. Besides, they had to go, knowing ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler

... We staggered below and dropped into a dead sleep. Had there been a ton of diamonds waiting on the cliff road beside us, with half Mahon rushing to loot them, we could not have ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... most woeful story indeed: how he had gone out to take a morning's walk on the hill, where he had encountered with his reprobate brother among the mist, who had knocked him down and very near murdered him; threatening dreadfully, and with horrid oaths, to throw him from the top of the cliff. ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... in Cranial Architecture Can Read—The Skulls of the Cliff Dwellers[A] Viewed by the Light ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor

... mainsail and out over the lee quarter. But the discomfort to which we were thus subjected was amply compensated for by the magnificent panorama of wooded mountain, brawling stream, sweeping bay, landlocked inlet, frowning cliff, and white sandy beach, as we skirted the shores of this most beautiful island ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood

... snowcapped and shining, before ever the purple mist began to slip from the slopes below it and disclose their true verdure. No sail broke the expanse of sea between us and the shore; and, as we neared it, no scarp of cliff, no house or group of houses broke the island's green monotony. From the water's edge to the high snow-line it might have been built of moss, so vivid its colour was, yet soft as velvet, and softer and still ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... place below Abingdon may have been at Appleford, but was more likely between the high cliff at Clifton-Hampden and the high and dry spit of Long Wittenham. Below this again for miles there was no easy ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... horse bolting with me without me being paid,' said Flash Jack. 'I know that horse; he's got a mouth like iron. I might be at the bottom of the cliff on Crown Ridge road in twenty minutes with my head caved in, and then what chance for ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson

... the name of a high cliff overlooking the Rhine. Clemens Brentano invented the myth, and the theme became popular in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Heine gave it its final form, in which it has practically become a folksong. The first four lines give us the mood of the poet, the second four give ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various

... between two and three miles, and their breadth is sufficient to let a carriage pass. Portholes are cut at intervals of twelve yards, so contrived that the gunners are safe from the shot of any possible assailants. At the end of one of the galleries hollowed out in a prominent part of the cliff is St. George's Hall, 50 feet long by 85 feet wide, in which the governor was accustomed to give fetes. Alterations, extensions, and improvements are continually taking place in the defensive system, and new guns of the most formidable sort ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various

... beautiful moon made its appearance. When parting from our friends, they urged our joining them at seven o'clock to visit the Cathedral, with the mayor as our guide. I accepted the polite offer, but the boys were frightened at the thought of another ascent; for the minster is perched upon a cliff, and you ascend some hundreds of steps ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... Valley, California, one midwinter's night had a dream in which he saw what appeared to be a company of emigrants arrested by the snows of the mountains, and perishing rapidly by cold and hunger. He noted the very cast of the scenery, marked by a huge, perpendicular front of white-rock cliff; he saw the men cutting off what appeared to be tree-tops rising out of deep gulfs of snow; he distinguished the very features of the persons, and their look of peculiar distress. He awoke profoundly impressed by the distinctness and apparent reality of the ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... of all. Emily, Bob's little sister, ventured too far out upon a cliff one day to pluck a vagrant wild flower that had found lodgment in a crevice, and in reaching for it, slipped to the rocks below. Bob heard her scream as she fell, and ran to her assistance. He found her lying there, quite still and white, clutching the precious blossom, ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace

... noticed it, and immediately explored the creek clear to its source—a spurt of water springing from the roof of a grotto in the cliff. Such a supply, evidently from the rocky heart of the ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... says I; 'mighty. The only reason there weren't was because the Injuns couldn't get at 'em—don't you notice that cliff at ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips

... Lawrence in June, the fleet which brought Wolfe and his army had landed them on the last day of the month on the Island of Orleans, opposite which rises the great cliff of Quebec. After the great action in which his General fell, the dear brother who accompanied the chief, wrote home to me one of his simple letters, describing his modest share in that glorious day, but ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... first was that of a perfect day on the coast of Normandy—a warm, still Sunday in the early part of August. From my pillow, on waking, I could look at a strip of blue sea and a section of white cliff. I observed that the sea had never been so brilliant, and that the cliff was shining like the coast of Paros. I rose and came forth with the sense that it was the finest day of summer, and that one ought to do something uncommon by way of keeping it. At Etretal it was uncommon ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... creeping over the river when Brighteye, awakened by a movement on the part of his mother, stole from his burrow into the tall grass at the edge of the gravel-bank by the pool. His home was situated in a picturesque spot between the river and a woodland path skirting the base of a cliff-like ascent clothed with giant beeches and an under-garment of ferns and whinberry bushes. Alders and willows grew along the gravel-bank, and through the moss-tangles among the roots many a twisting, close-hidden run-way led upwards to what might be called a main ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees

... deck from amongst the Gleam's ballast, and properly slung, was now made fast to the middle timber of the boom, and let go, when the weight of it sunk it to the bottom, and we passed on. We pulled on for about half a mile further, when I noticed, high up on a sunny cliff, that shot boldly out into the clear blue heavens, a small red flag suddenly run up to the top of a tall, scathed, branchless palm tree, where it flared for a moment in the breeze like the flame of a torch, and then as suddenly disappeared. "Come, they are on the look—out for ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... maze, Within whose foliage hide the sun's bright rays; And like a child she hoards the bright-eyed flowers, Companions of so many happy hours. With loving heart she greets each form of earth, To which God's kindly hand has given birth. But better far than all, she loves to roam Far on the cliff's lone height, and there at eve To watch the dark ships as they wander home. Strange dreams in this calm hour her fancies weave, So quaint and odd, they seem but shadowy rays, Caught from the sunset's deep, ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick

... did not hear us, and over he went down a frightful precipice. We ran forward, and thinking he must be killed, expected to see his mangled body hanging to some rugged projection in the rock; but the very precipitous character of the cliff had been the means of his preservation. He had fallen directly into a snow-drift, and though a limb apparently was broken, and he was much hurt, he speedily came to himself. To leave him where he was would have been sheer barbarity; ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston

... evening, and on a little wooded knoll, on the summit of a cliff that overhangs the St. Lawrence two or three miles above Quebec, there is a little group of persons, all of whom we have seen before. One of them is Boulanger, and in the man now seated beside him, notwithstanding his mean attire and his careworn ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach

... be queer work getting back!" he said to himself, then pressed onward to reach the side of the gulch, where now he could see Mary Selincourt crouched on a narrow ledge or shelf against a perpendicular cliff, while the water was rising higher and higher, creeping nearer and nearer to ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant

... in a broad band of silver foam. The tide was at its lowest, and the black rocks of Valpre stood up stark and grotesque in the evening light. The Gothic archway of the Magic Cave yawned mysteriously in the face of the cliff, and over it, with shrill wailings, flew countless seagulls, flashing their ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell

... further test by throwing the squirrel down a precipice six hundred feet high. Our traveler interfered, to see that the squirrel had fair play. The prisoner was conveyed in a pillow-slip to the edge of the cliff, and the slip opened, so that he might have his choice, whether to remain a captive or to take the leap. He looked down the awful abyss, and then back and sidewise,—his eyes glistening, his form crouching. Seeing no escape in any other direction, "he took ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... he said, as he perceived Anne's gaze on the inaccessible cliff and the whole scene, the wild beauty of which was lost to ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... young Mariner, You from the haven Under the sea-cliff, You that are watching The gray Magician With eyes of wonder, I am Merlin, And I am dying, I am Merlin Who follow The Gleam. . . . . . . . O young Mariner, Down to the haven Call your companions, Launch your vessel, And crowd your canvas, And, ere it vanishes Over the margin, After ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... Horatio and Marcellus would have dissuaded the young prince from following it, for they feared lest it should be some evil spirit, who would tempt him to the neighbouring sea, or to the top of some dreadful cliff, and there put on some horrible shape which might deprive the prince of his reason. But their counsels and entreaties could not alter Hamlet's determination, who cared too little about life to fear the losing of it; and as to his soul, he said, what could the spirit do to that, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... Into this chaos of cliff and peak and slanting canyon, midway to the westward, is let King Phillip Sound, a sheet of water dotted with islands and framed by forests. It reaches inland with long, crooked tentacles which end like ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... were loaded in the port, and the next morning Alexander came to the strand in high spirits, accompanied by his companions, who were happy over the prospective voyage. They were escorted by the emperor and the empress in her grief. At the port they find the sailors in the ships drawn up beside the cliff. The sea was calm and smooth, the wind was light, and the weather clear. When he had taken leave of his father, and bidden farewell to the empress, whose heart was heavy in her bosom, Alexander first stepped ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... the village, along the ocean shore, a stream came down from under a cliff, a stream, as Rachael and investigating children had often proved to their own satisfaction, that rose in a small but eminently satisfactory cave. The storm had washed several great smooth logs of driftwood into the cave, and beyond them ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... seemed to be stratified with extraordinary evenness and regularity to within a few feet of the top, the summit being crowned with loose sand. Farther on, they sank to sand dunes piled into rounded banks and softly moulded ledges, like snow-drifts. Landing the next day at a bold bluff marked Cliff End on the charts, he found the lower stratum to consist of a solid mass of tertiary fossils, chiefly immense oysters, mingled, however, with sea-urchins. Superb specimens were secured,—large boulders crowded with colossal ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... the large stone house on the cliff above the mills, which Bessie was to occupy, and furnished it with no sparing hand. In fancy she climbed the sleep steps every day, and went in and out with the freedom of a mother, for such she meant to be to the young couple, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes

... God is a lover of Beauty. We speak reverently. He fashioned the worlds in Beauty, when there was no eye to behold them but his own. All along the wild old forest he has carved the forms of Beauty. Every cliff, and mountain, and tree is a statue of Beauty. Every leaf, and stem, and vine, and flower is a form of Beauty. Every hill, and dale, and landscape is a picture of Beauty. Every cloud, and mist-wreath, and vapor-vail ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... seated himself with his son, upon the moss, among the brambles of the promontory. Around their heads passed and repassed large bats, carried along in the fearful whirl of their blind chase. The feet of Raoul were across the edge of the cliff, and bathed in that void which is peopled by vertigo and provokes to annihilation. When the moon had risen to its full height, caressing with its light the neighboring peaks, when the watery mirror was illumined in its full extent, and the little red fires ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... but still tearful Uzcoque maid stood thus revealed before the astonished senator, and his enraptured and speechless son, the approaching footfall of a horse at full speed was heard, and in an instant there darted round the angle of a cliff the martial figure of a Turk, mounted upon a large and powerful steed, of that noble race bred in the deserts eastward of the Caspian. The tall and graceful person of the stranger was attired in a close riding-dress of scarlet cloth, from the open breast of which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... in how few minutes a large herd of elephants descending a steep place will form a road. I have frequently seen them break down an alluvial cliff in the manner described, where at first sight I should have thought it impossible for an elephant to descend. Once within the river the fun began in earnest. After a march in the hot sun, it was ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... to hear of houses overwhelmed and families destroyed; but each came with the story that his own household was safe. It was not until the morning dawned that the true nature and extent of the sudden movement was ascertained. A great seam had opened above the long cliff, and the terrible Rattlesnake Ledge, with all its envenomed reptiles, its dark fissures and black caverns, was buried forever beneath a mighty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... summit of the cliff, now, and at the brink, turned back. The cymbals and the bugles pealed forth another sounding farewell to the Lord of the Castle of Content, whom Elaine well knew was waiting in the shadow of the portal till her company should ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... dimension of our proudest edifice, public or private. Another reason is in the London atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on either hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... know nought thereof ere it were tried; and withal they laid their ships alongside one of the other, and there began a great fight, and either side did boldly. But when they came to handy blows, Onund gave back toward the cliff, and when the vikings saw this, they deemed he was minded to flee, and made towards his ship, and came as nigh to the cliff as they might. But in that very point of time those came forth on to the edge of the cliff who were appointed so to do, and sent at the vikings ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... palace built on the river's cliff, and looked out over the gardens to the hills beyond, and saw the mosque, with its blue roof against the blue sky, and its wonderful covering of old tiles, which drop like leaves ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... within the misty Mine of human thoughts, we see [10] Soon abandoned when the Master Crowns life's Cliff ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... the beck where it rushes down between the stems of mountain-ash, this from beneath the vast ancestral elm below the palace, this from the sea-shore. Marvellous! And I am eager to descend again; I have not explored the cliff which breaks the descent of the torrent, nor the thicket in the gully. There must be marchantia under the spray of the one, and possibly dittany in the peat ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... see our strength or our weakness. We are still mighty and impregnable, while our dwelling is in the realm of the Unknown. Let the King, and his officers of state, and his chieftains of battle, descend to the pass. And behind, at the distance, let the spearmen range from cliff to cliff, as a ladder of steel; so will their numbers ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the signs of upheaval which the island presented. His geological studies had already indicated the direction in which a great deal might be done, beyond collecting; and it was while sitting beneath a low lava cliff on the shore of this island, that a sense of his real capability first dawned upon Darwin, and prompted the ambition to write a book on the geology of the various countries visited. (I. p. 66.) Even at this early date, Darwin ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... white sandy shore, laid him on the warm sand, taking care that his head was left where the sun shone warmest. Bells began to chime and ring through all parts of the building, and several young girls entered the garden. The little mermaid swam farther out, behind a tiny cliff that rose above the waves. She showered sea-foam on her hair that no one might see its golden glory, and then waited patiently to see if anyone would come to the aid ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... blue sky is bluer, and beyond which are the violet-hued Alban hills. Then, as now, the road led by the Casa dei Spirite, with its haunting associations, and its strange mural decorations of specters and wraiths. Past that overhanging cliff, with its tragic legend, they drove, encountering the long procession of wine carts, with their tinkling bells, and the dogs guarding the sleeping padrones. Passing the night in Albano, the next day they mounted donkeys for their excursion into the Alban hills, past lonely ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... hell of a name for a man born in Maricopa County to call a gun. Revolver! You 'mind me of the Boston perfesser who come to Arizona tryin' to prove the Cliff Dwellers was one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He blows in with an introduction to the Double U, where I was workin'. Colonel Pawlin's wife has a cold snack ready, it bein' middlin' warm. The perfesser makes a pretty speech, after he'd eaten two men's share of victuals ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... of the empty gulf between, the town lay like a stone image, lifeless except for the white smoke curling gently from a single tall chimney into the quiet evening air. Much nearer along the coast was the Castle of Duina standing on an abrupt cliff. It belongs to the Grand Duchess of Thurn and Taxis, who used to gather parties of poets, painters, and writers there to stay in what was like a legendary palace looking down from its high headland upon ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... hold of, or some rot he'd been reading. Stanley turned over on his back and kicked with his legs till he was a living waterspout. But even then... "I dreamed I was hanging over a terrifically high cliff, shouting to some one below." You would be! thought Stanley. He could stick no more of it. He stopped splashing. "Look here, Trout," he said, "I'm in rather a hurry ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield

... smooth and well-rolled lawn of soft ascents; that it is mountainous, precipitous, terrific—a country where all progress must be won by dint of intelligence and toil, and where it is as easy to lose the gains of civilization as it is to fall over a cliff or to surrender a wheat field to the weeds. An archeologist in Mesopotamia talked with an Arab lad who neither read, himself, nor knew any one who did; yet the lad, when he acknowledged this, stood within a stone's throw of the site where milleniums ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... on board, bidding my men to do so also and loose the hawsers; so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars. When we got to the land, which was not far, there, on the face of a cliff near the sea, we saw a great cave overhung with laurels. It was a station for a great many sheep and goats, and outside there was a large yard, with a high wall round it made of stones built into the ground and of trees both pine and oak. This was the abode of a huge ...
— The Odyssey • Homer

... frontier, Philippe, or rather the German side of the frontier?... A craggy cliff, a series of peaks and ravines which make this part of the Vosges ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc

... L. Mahan, United States Indian Agent for the Chippewas of Lake Superior, Red Cliff, Wisconsin, the following detailed account of mourning has ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... if that really is a cave up there," she thought. Fired by this ambition, she started to work her way up the cliff; no easy task and ruinous to riding boots of soft leather. By the time she had discovered this last fact she had covered about one-third of the distance and was crouching beside a protruding rock to get her breath. ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... the ground. The testimony as elicited at the trial showed that the brute had bounded along to the Grant cottage, leaped upon the window sill, sniffed eagerly about the spot, then ran down the path to a clump of bushes on the river cliff. Here the creature stopped and set up a piteous howl. The pursuing party hastened to the spot, and there lay the body of Belt, who had fallen and died, as the autopsy revealed, of internal hemorrhage produced by a pistol shot. As if to ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... England; to the south, the beach runs on toward Salisbury and Newburyport. But the great view from Boar's Head is from the ocean apex of the promontory. Here, beneath the grateful shade of an awning, with the waves breaking rythmically at the foot of the cliff far beneath, one can sit and ponder on the immensity of the ocean and dream of the lands beyond the horizon. From here the whole seaboard, from Thatcher's Island to York and Wells, is in view; the Isles of Shoals loom up on the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... behind a sort of avalanche: so that if the Doones had been keeping watch (which they were not doing, but revelling), they could scarcely have discovered me. And when I came to my old ascent, where I had often scaled the cliff and made across the mountains, it struck me that I would just have a look at my first and painful entrance, to wit, the water-slide. I never for a moment imagined that this could help me now; for I never had dared to descend it, even in the finest weather; still I had a curiosity to know what ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... (under which head are included the following bands: Fond du Lac, Boise Forte, Grand Portage, Red Cliff, Bad River, Lac de Flambeau, and Lac Court D'Oreille) number about five thousand one hundred and fifty. They constitute a part of the Ojibways (anglicized in the term Chippewas), formerly one of the most powerful and warlike ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker

... replied the red-haired helper. "But maybe it was Indians tied him that way, and was going to make his pony jump over a cliff. ...
— Jack of the Pony Express • Frank V. Webster

... view, while the red and green sides of the precipitous serpentine cliffs could now be distinguished, assuming various fantastic shapes: one shaped into a complete arch, another the form of a gigantic steeple, with several caves penetrating deep into the cliff, on a level with the narrow ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston

... attacked again on the road, although there were men who showed themselves now and then on inaccessible-looking crags, who eyed us suspiciously and made no answer to the shouted challenge of Anazeh's men. When the track passed over a spur, or swung round the shoulder of a cliff, we could sometimes catch sight of other parties—always, though of three, before and behind us, proceeding in ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... near by, on the head-land, too, was quite evident, by the occasional interchange of speech; though no person but himself was visible. The direction of the sounds would seem to indicate that a man was actually over the brow of the cliff, perhaps a hundred feet removed from the seat ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper

... salt. A blizzard started in their faces, and they ran for shelter to the lee of Little Razorback Island. The weather clearing they pushed on to the Glacier Tongue, and camped there for the night somewhat frost-bitten. Some difficulty was experienced the next morning in climbing the ice-cliff on to the Peninsula, but Atkinson, using his knife as a purchase, and the sledge held at arm's-length by four men as a ladder, succeeded eventually ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... low tide, and there watch for a boat, rowed by one with a red beard, and a Portugal by his speech. If he be asked, 'How many?' he will answer, 'Eight hundred and one.' Take his letters and read them. If the shore be watched, let him who comes show a light three times in a safe place under the cliff above the town; below is dangerous landing. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... of ochreish rock which appears in patches where the grass will not grow. The heights are occupied by no less than three lighthouses only one of which is now in use. As the ship gets closer, a great spire appears round the cliff in the silvery shimmer of the morning haze and then a ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home

... the Rambo farmhouse to return to the city, she came upon him, alone. She had wandered off to the Brandywine, to gather ferns at a rocky point where some choice varieties were to be found. There were a few charming clumps, half-way up a slaty cliff, which it did not seem possible to scale, and she was standing at the base, looking up in vain longing, when a voice, almost at her ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor

... the base of the ice cliff, and stood on a narrow ledge between the cliff and the churning sea. He saw no one. He extended the detector's range to maximum, and worked the scanners up the sheer face of the cliff ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova

... something in her mind. I had a fancy that when she spoke again it would be without that deliberation—almost restraint—which seemed to accord a little strangely with the girlishness of her appearance and actual years. She stood on the extreme edge of the cliff, her slim straight figure outlined to angularity against the sky. She remained so long without speech that I had time to note all these things. The sunshine, breaking through the thin-topped pine trees, lay everywhere about us; a little brown feathered bird, scarcely a dozen ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... tower about the centre, slightly removed from and commanding the road: but a mere handfull of troops stationed on the crags above could, by hurling down the loosened masses of rock which totter on the edge of the cliff, for a time effectually stop the progress of a hostile army from either side. I should imagine, however, that this as well as every other pass I have ever seen except the Khyber and Bolun would be more ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem

... eggs and young of the Gulls and Shags—at all events it is by no means a welcome visitor to the breeding stations of the Gulls, as in this summer (1878) I saw four Crows about a small gullery near Petit Bo Bay, one of which flew over the side of the cliff to have a look at the Gulls' eggs, probably with ulterior intentions in regard to the eggs; but one of the Gulls saw him, and immediately flew at him and knocked him over: what the end of the fight was I could not tell, but probably the Crow got ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith

... showing there is scarcely a fault in it. The mere settings—the fishing and prawn-catching; the scenery of port and cliff; the "interiors"; the final sailing of the great ship—are perfect. The minor characters—the good-tempered, thick-headed bourgeois husband and father; the wife and mother, with her bland acceptance of the transferred wages of shame, and (after discovery only) her ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... noise of his horse's hoofs sounding in the hollow cave. Once more he endeavored to check his career, but the reins broke in his hands, and in that instant the prince felt the horse had taken a plunge into a gulf, and was sinking down and down, as a stone cast from the summit of a cliff sinks down to the sea. At last the horse struck the ground again, and the prince was almost thrown out of his saddle, but he succeeded in regaining his seat. Then on through the darkness galloped the steed, and when he came into the light the prince's eyes were for some ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy

... was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... his eyes on his plate and did justice to the fare; for one cannot scorch from the Cliff House to the Western Addition via the park without being ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London

... over a rough tract of ground towards a rocky cliff that formed part of the Castle boundary. In this cliff was a deep cavern, on one side of which was a stout staple with a chain attached, only a portion of which was visible. Here their young host stopped and gave a low whistle. Instantly there was a rattle of ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey

... they had to get him with a shotgun that day, 'twas nobody's fault nor sin. If Guy Bullard seen Daniel there on the sand with an ax in his hand and foam-like on his lips, and the little ones cornered where he caught them between cliff and water—Guy's own baby amongst them—and knowing the sickness of the Kains as he and everybody else did—why, I'm free and willing to say 'twas his bounden duty to hold a true aim and pull a steady trigger on Daniel, man of his though ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... what he could not have. There was something in him now more deadly and inevitable. It made him like some figure of mythology, implacable, fateful. His great height, his bushy beard and stormy forehead, the eyes over which shaggy eyebrows hung like the shrubs on a cliff-edge, his face lined and set like a thing in bronze—all were signs of a power which, in passion, would be like that of OEdipus: in the moment of justice or doom would, with unblinking eyes, slay and cast aside as debris is tossed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... not propitious for a discussion of social values. Although Robin retired early, he was apt to pervade the conversation. And then Rosamund went away at intervals to have a look at him, and Dion filled up the time by smoking a cigar on the cliff edge. The clock struck ten-thirty—bedtime at Westgate—before one had at all realized how late it was getting; and it was out of the question to bother about things on the edge of sleep. That would have made for insomnia. The question of Mrs. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... or east end of the second narrow, lies Cope Gregory, which is a white cliff of a moderate height, and a little to the northward of it is a sandy bay, in which you may ride in eight fathoms water, with very good anchorage." "At the west end of the second narrow on the south shore, is a white headland, called ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... the Railway Station—a room in a crazy block of buildings that had been run up for the needs of the factory hands. It was like a great smooth cliff, this block, and was washed over a raw pink, but it glowed in the setting sun that evening, like the city herself and all the hills, the colour of bright blood. As Maso neared its blind face, stepping warily with outstretched neck ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... Lune, by Solway. He has seen extensive plains of useful and not unfragrant peat,—an article sufficiently accessible also to our Scotch and Irish industries. He has seen many a broad down and jutting cliff of purest chalk; but, opposite, the perfide Albion gleams no whit less blanche beyond the blue. Pure waters he has seen, issuing out of the snowy rock; but are ours less bright at Croydon, at Guildford, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... from the Circle proceeded to fortify the cliff above the marsh which on this side of Epipolae looks towards the great harbour; this being also the shortest line for their work to go down across the plain and the marsh to the harbour. Meanwhile the Syracusans ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides

... (Lyell's "Principles of Geology," 5th edition, volume iv., page 25.) found a deposit replete with existing species of shells, at the height of 200 feet. In an admirable series of drawings by Captain Moresby, I could see how continuously the cliff-bounded low plains of this formation extended with a nearly equable height, both on the eastern and western shores. The southern coast of Arabia seems to have been subjected to the same elevatory movement, for Dr. Malcolmson ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin

... Fire Creek, Hawk's Nest, Stone Cliff, Nuttallburg, Sewell, Fayetteville, and elsewhere in Fayette County. Prominent among the teachers serving in these towns were D. W. Calloway, A. T. Calloway, Miss L. E. Perry, Mrs. Lizzie Davis, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... wonderingly; nevertheless Lysia and Sah-luma still went on, and he—as perforce he was compelled—still followed. Arrived at the foot of the huge erection that towered above him like a steep cliff of molten gems, he fancied he heard a faint sound behind it as of clinking glasses and boisterous laughter, but before he had time to consider what this might mean, Lysia laid her hand lightly on a small, protruding knob of crystal, pressed it, and lo! ... the whole ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... read an' write an' figger some, but he's got about the same company manners as a steer, an' he's skeered of crowds. When he sees strangers he's liable to charge 'em or else throw up his head an' his tail an' run plumb over a cliff. He'd ought to go to school, but he says he's too big, an' he'd have to set with a lot of little children. Him an' Allie's alike, that way—it r'ars 'em up on their hind feet ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... yet furnished with wings, were suddenly inspired with the instinct of a bird, and precipitated itself from a cliff, would not the descent be hazardously rapid?" Doubtless the animal would be no better supported than the objection. Darwin makes very little indeed of voluntary efforts as a cause of change, and even poor Lamarck need not be caricatured. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... space. Close at hand was his now nearly deflated balloon and the car on its side looking minutely small, a mere broken toy, a shrivelled bubble, in contrast with the gigantic bulk of the nearer airship. This he saw almost end-on, rising like a cliff and sloping forward towards its fellow on the other side so as to overshadow the alley between them. There was a crowd of excited people about him, big men mostly in tight uniforms. Everybody was talking, and several were shouting, in German; he knew that because ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... transfigured: Foam and surging, strong-walled cities, Rocks and castles, quiet cloisters, Smiling vineyards on the hillside; From the tower calls the watchman, And the pennon gaily flutters, And from yonder cliff is ringing Wondrously the Lurley's song. But, alas! the good time passes; Nought but grief is then my portion; I devote myself to drinking, Pray at Coeln in the Cathedral, And become a beast of burden. Shabby tradesmen must I serve then, ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... affair, that dam. The old part was built on and from solid rock, being really a jutting out of a lime stone cliff which had stood high and dry before the water had been dammed up by the heavy timber cribs cutting across the original stream. Concrete abutments secured these timbers and linked the walls of stone with the huge gates opening into the millrace that fed ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart

... there was a warm wind blowing. Robinson had a fine day's work, as he had to walk back to the camp on the plain for the horses he got. In the afternoon I attempted the high bluff immediately overlooking the camp. I had a bit of cliff-climbing, and reached the summit of one hill of some elevation, 1300 feet, and then found that a vast chasm, or ravine, separated me from the main mountain chain. It would be dark before I could—if I could—reach the summit, and then I should get no view, so I returned to the camp. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... the N. by a dike about 3 m. long, composed entirely of large blocks of hewn granite. The walls are 20 ft. high and 3 m. in circumference. The defences were formerly of considerable strength, and included a well-built but now dismantled citadel on a precipitous cliff, 250 ft. high, at the extremity of the tongue of land on which the town is built. In the neighbourhood an engagement took place between the English and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... this time that a certain wild, rude valley, in the neighborhood of Five Forks, had become famous as a picturesque resort. Travellers had visited it, and declared that there were more cubic yards of rough stone cliff, and a waterfall of greater height, than any they had visited. Correspondents had written it up with extravagant rhetoric and inordinate poetical quotation. Men and women who had never enjoyed a sunset, a tree, or a flower, who had never appreciated the graciousness ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... the sort of freemasonry by which bold and ready spirits correspond in moments of danger, and become almost instinctively known to each other, they had established a mutual confidence."I'll climb up the cliff again," said Lovelthere's daylight enough left to see my footing; I'll climb up, and call ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... frequently, too, excursions to different parts of Attica; and it was in one of his visits to Cape Colonna, at this time, that he was near being seized by a party of Mainotes, who were lying hid in the caves under the cliff of Minerva Sunias. These pirates, it appears, were only deterred from attacking him (as a Greek, who was then their prisoner, informed him afterwards) by a supposition that the two Albanians, whom they saw attending him, were ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... on land and water seemed to fascinate the girl; she had walked a little way toward the cliffs, Siward following silently, offering no comment on the beauty of sky and cliff. As they halted once more the enchantment seemed to spread; a delicate haze enveloped the sea; hints of rose colour tinted the waves; over the uplands a pale mauve bloom grew; the sunlight turned redder, slanting on the rocks, and every kelp-covered reef became ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... either hand the hastening angel caught Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast To the subjected plain; then disappeared. They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that naming brand; the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon; The world was all before ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... historian who has yet laid hand on the story of the Constitution: "Henry showed his genial nature, free from all malignity. He was like a billow of the ocean on the first bright day after the storm, dashing itself against the rocky cliff, and then, sparkling with light, ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... in the dark, and the fragrance, strongest after sunset, effectively advertise the flower at dusk when its benefactors begin to fly. The sphinx moth, a frequent visitor, works as rapidly in extracting nectar from the deep tube as any hawk moth, so frequently mistaken for a hummingbird. The little cliff-dwelling bees (Halictus), among others, visit the flowers by day for pollen only. At first five outer stamens protrude slightly from the flower and shed their pollen on the visitor, immediately over the entrance. Afterward, having spread apart to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... the government (see p. 82), making such wise and lasting changes that he has been called "the second founder of the Persian empire"; established post-roads, instituted a coinage for the realm, and upon the great rock of Behistun, a lofty smooth-faced cliff on the western frontier of Persia, caused to be inscribed a record of all his achievements. [Footnote: This important inscription is written in the cuneiform characters, and in three languages, Aryan, Turanian, and Semitic. It is the Rosetta Stone of the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... bald and utterly commonplace; they have no positive quality; and when some of us think of such gems as "When daisies pied and violets blue," or, "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," or even the description of the Dover cliff, not to mention the thousands of other gems in Shakspere's great dramas, we feel inclined to be angry when we are asked to admire Congreve's stilted nonsense. There is much to be objected to in Shakspere. I hold that a man who wrote such a dull play as "Pericles" ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... mist spread from sea to sky, through which the stars gleamed forth heavily, and at distant intervals. The moon was abroad, but the vapours that surrounded her gave a watery and sicklied dulness to her light, and whereever in the niches and hollows of the cliff the shadows fell, all was utterly dark and unbroken by the smallest ray; only along the near waves of the sea and the whiter parts of the level sand were objects easily discernible. I strode to and fro for a few minutes before ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... First Fleet. One can hardy look at the obelisk, and at the tomb of Pere Receveur near by, without picturing the departure of the French ships after bidding farewell to the English officers and colonists. Sitting at the edge of the cliff, one can follow Laperouse out to sea, with the eye of imagination, until sails, poops and hulls diminish to the view and disappear below the hazy-blue horizon. We may be sure that some of Governor Phillip's ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott

... them. Fugitives would escape through the open country and meet in these recesses, and the Englishmen would follow, tracking them after the manner of hunters of wild game. Sometimes they would come to the top of a cliff, overlooking a cave in which they had seen men hide. Then they would lower lighted bundles of straw by iron chains until they came opposite the mouth of the cave. In a short time the men in hiding would be smoked out, and compelled to ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland

... Torres Vedras, intending to release the criminals confined there, and with their assistance to seize Cintra, and afterwards to attack the capital. On the march he threw the unfortunate alcalde and the notary of Torres Vedras, who had been captured at the same time, over a high cliff into the sea, and executed another government official who had the misfortune to fall into his clutches. The corregedor Fonseca, who was not far off, hearing of these excesses, immediately started at the head of eighty horsemen to oppose the ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous

... painter, George Scott, told me an incident which came to his own notice. He was riding up to the front the day after Semitli, and was just emerging from the awesome Kresna Pass, when he and his companion came upon a Greek dressing station. The narrow space between cliff and river was entirely occupied by some hundreds of Greek wounded, some of them already dead, many dying, and others fainting. They were lying about awaiting their turn for the surgeon's knife. In the center stood ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... temples built by the aborigines of America; for these tribes have had absolutely no part in creating our dominant civilization or developing its art. China and Japan are, at this late day, giving something to the world's store of beauty and utility; but the mound-builders and cliff-dwellers, the Mayas and Toltecs and Incas, have given absolutely nothing which the world cared to accept. But this does not argue that it is not worth while to learn what we can of the rude civilization of the races whom we have displaced. Their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... hostility for what it was, that did not bother her. Once more she whistled to the dolphins, waved a casual farewell with one hand, and headed up the beach toward the base camp. Ross chose a more rugged path over the cliff. ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... just as well you stayed behind—you'd never have got through those caves! You wouldn't believe I could ha' done it unless you'd seen me—clambering down iron ladders, and jumping on to rocks, and squeezing through tunnels, and then up a cliff like the side of a house. I do wish you ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various

... three thousand. The sea is far more restless than upon our coast, the surf habitually higher; and there is such a depth of water in many places around the shore, that, on one occasion, a whale-ship, drawn too near by the current, broke her mainyard against the cliff, without ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... thing! I never heard its equal in all my life. To think that your father has been alive all these months, though a prisoner in that cliff-bordered valley! But Andy, don't you see that now nothing is going to keep us from going down there, and finding him? Here is the clue you wanted, only instead of discovering his sad fate you are going to rescue him, ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy

... Here their eyes instantly became glued to a great bowl which was piled high with small rose-tinted cubes of some substance which resembled symmetrical and translucent crystals of pink quartz. That was Chaosite enough to blow the entire cliff into smithereens; and they were aware of it, and they ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... Alps W. of Plato, from W.N.W. to E.S.E. It is more than 80 miles in length, and varies in breadth from 6 miles on the S. to less than 4 miles on the N., where it approaches the S. border of the Mare Frigoris. For a greater part of its extent it is bounded on the S.W. side by a precipitous linear cliff, which, under a low evening sun, is seen to be fringed by a row of bright little hills. These are traceable up to one of the great mountain masses of the Alps, forming the S.W. side of the great oval-shaped expansion of the valley, whose shape has been appropriately ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger

... I like to see you in a passion; Such royal rage! Your forbear was, I know Kame-a-lili-like-kalico, Or some such name; who got in that great tiff And tumbled all his foes down off the cliff. I feel I'm lying with them in the valley While you stand all triumphant, ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... had been empty while they talked except that on the far side, beneath the towering cliff of the keep, a sentry went to and fro. But now another man had come into view, walking up from the way they themselves had come; and it would appear from the direction he took that he would pass within twenty or thirty yards ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... height, upon which the strata were laid so as to form a series of projections sufficiently resembling steps to make the ascent easy, comparatively speaking, except at one spot, where it was necessary to climb over a projecting angle of cliff and bear a little to the left. It was not a really difficult place, but what made it awkward was, that immediately beneath this projection gaped a deep fissure or donga, on the brink of which we now stood, originally dug out, no doubt, ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard

... from ridge to ridge, Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd, Larger than human on the frozen hills. He heard the deep behind him, and a cry Before. His own thought drove him like a goad. Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, And the long glories ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various

... In January I went to Dover with my wife to see the blasting of a cliff there: we also visited Sir J. Herschel at Hawkhurst. In April I was at Playford, on a visit to Arthur Biddell. On Apr. 9th my daughter Annot was born. From July 22nd to August 25th I was travelling in the South of Ireland, chiefly to see Valencia and consider the question of determining ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy

... its storms, and during one terrific night a large vessel was thrown upon the rocks in Bernowhall Cliff, and, beaten by the impetuous waves, she was soon in pieces. Amongst the bodies of the crew washed ashore, nearly all of whom had perished, was Frank Lenine. He was not dead when found, but the only words he lived to speak were begging the people to send for Nancy Trenoweth, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... of his childhood was but a humble one—one of those little cliff-houses cut out in the low chalky hillside, such as are [59] still to be found with inhabitants in certain districts of France—there were some who connected his birth with the story of a beautiful country girl, who, about eighteen years before, had been taken from ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater

... little scrambling, however, he found himself at the bottom of the cliff, and made his way as carefully as he could to the sea-lion rookery. But when he did come near and rounded a large boulder in order to get a fair view, he was inclined to think that shyness was the last ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... mind; and that dimensionality we attribute to space is progressive because progression is a law of the mind. The so-called dimensions of space are to space itself as the steps that a climber cuts in the face of a cliff are to the cliff itself. They are not necessary to the cliff: they are necessary only to the climber. Dimensionality is the mind's method of mounting to the idea of the infinity of space. When we speak of the fourth dimension, what we mean is the fourth stage in the apprehension of that infinity. ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... is magnificent to see Dionea, in her short white skirt and tight white bodice, mixing the smoking lime with her beautiful strong arms; or, an empty sack drawn over her head and shoulders, walking majestically up the cliff, up the scaffoldings with her load of bricks.... I am, however, very anxious to get Dionea out of the neighborhood, because I cannot help dreading the annoyances to which her reputation for the evil eye exposes her, and even some explosion of ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... the lovely blue of the sea in the spring sunshine, nor the striking forms of ruddy peaks of rock that enclosed it. Uneducated eyes, she thought, as she slowly manoeuvred the pony down the steep hill before coming to the Rockstone Cliff Road. The other two girls were following her direction across field and road, and making ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge









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