"Cavernous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an interval of waiting, and both were astonished when the door opened almost at once, revealing a blackly cavernous interior. ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... women who cared for them so tenderly, states that she often found herself involuntarily placing her hand upon her cheek to ascertain whether their flesh was like hers, human and vitalized. The sunken hollow cheeks, the parchment skin drawn so tightly over the bones, the great, cavernous, lackluster eyes, the half idiotic stare, the dreamy condition, the loss of memory even of their own names, and the wonder with which they regarded the most ordinary events, so strange to them after their long and fearful experience, all made ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... a cavernous rock by the seashore, that jutted into the water like a small craggy promontory. Captain Cadurcis climbed to its top, and then descending, reclined himself upon an inferior portion of it, which formed a natural couch with the wave on each side. ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... bequeathed to their descendants. The churches were so vast, so solid, so venerable, and time-eaten; the dwellings so gray, and of such antique architecture, and in the large towns, like Rouen, rose so high, and overhung with such quaint projections the narrow and cavernous streets; the thatched cots were so mossy and so green with grass! The very hills about them looked scarcely as old, for there was youth in their vegetation—their shrubs and flowers. The countrywomen wore such high caps, such long waists, and such short ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... the most cavernous head, set upon the strongest shoulders, which has appeared upon the planet, since the soul of Socrates went back to God. Daniel Webster! strong mind in strong body, leader and king of men, deep-chested, lion-voiced, whose words of power ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere within, and at the centre of its caverns ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Roman Catholic chapel in London. He was a gaunt figure, extremely emaciated and hollow-cheeked, with a very bad cough, and as he stood in the pulpit, coughing hoarsely, he beat his breast with his hand and forearm, till it sounded like the reverberation of a huge cavernous drum." Grove went on to describe how the time was one of great spiritual excitement in the Church of England and in the Roman Church,—a time when people thought that Rome was going to reassert her ascendancy over English minds. During ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... light of day had never shone, past hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps, and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three, linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here and there, especially at first, the ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... balconies toward the country, and was full of sun; the bedrooms they were taken to, on the other hand, were dark, gloomy, and cavernous. Alzugaray requested the old woman to show them the other vacant chambers, and chose two on the second floor, which ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... him more and more. He is a big, powerfully-built man, but his face is thin, the fine moulding of the bones showing distinctly beneath their slight covering. The clean line of his jaw is a joy to behold; his eyes are dark and unusually deep-set—I would say "cavernous," if I had not a particular dislike to the word. He has large, expressive hands, and a low-pitched, unusually deliberate way ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... cast a frightened glimpse at the yellowed, bony face, the cavernous eye sockets, the bushy eyebrows, beneath which a cold intellectual gleam still feebly flickered. Andrew Fraser had bent his tall form over her, and peering down at her had whispered after their few words ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... of hours, days, years; becoming engulfed, submerged, foundered by them; all of us on the same adventure yet retaining nevertheless each his own individuality, as swimmers carrying each his undetachable burden through dark, enormous and cavernous seas. Mysterious journey! Uncharted, unknown and finally—but there is no finality! Mysterious and stunning sequel—not end—to the mysterious and tremendous adventure! Finally, of this portion, death, disappearance,—gone! Astounding development! Mysterious and ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... unawares, went down under the impact of her body. For one fleeting second he stared upward into blazing eyes. From between wide-sprung rows of flashing fangs the blood-dripping tongue seemed to writhe from the cavernous throat, and the foul breath blew hot against his face. Instantly his strong fingers buried themselves in the shaggy fur close under the hinge of the jaw, while his other hand closed about the dented brass of the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... spring; and as I stood, shaken with thoughts as the flowers are with the winds, Aunt Jane came around from the back of the house, her black silk cape fluttering from her shoulders, and a calico sunbonnet hiding her features in its cavernous depth. She walked briskly to the clothes-line and began patting and smoothing the quilts where ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... it comes to cheek, pure and unadulterated, commend me to a Virginia gentleman who has acquired the proper modicum of Western bluff," he laughed. Then, with a cavernous yawn dating back to the sleepless night: "Since there is nothing immediately pressing, I believe I'll go and call on the ladies. Won't you come along for ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... idea that he could look so ferocious. His eyes fascinated me, and he opened his cavernous mouth as if to swallow me. His lantern jaws snapped without a sound. He ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... legs emerged from the shortest of skirts, while her small body was well pinned up in a great blanket shawl, the point of which trailed fully a quarter of a yard on the floor behind her. She wore a woman's hood on her head, and from its cavernous depth, where there gleamed a pale, malignant small face, a voice issued—the far-reaching voice of a ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... wild voice of the sky! Thy shout rends the heavens, and earth trembles with dread; In hoarse hollow murmurs the billows reply, And ocean is roused in his cavernous bed. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Christ, whose gaunt, scarred figure hung out from the tilted cross, swaying a little under the beating of the rain. Martin was wiping the mud from his hands after changing a wheel. He stared curiously at the fallen jowl and the cavernous eyes that had meant for some country sculptor ages ago the utterest agony of pain. Suddenly he noticed that where the crown of thorns had been about the forehead of the Christ someone had wound barbed wire. He smiled, and asked the swaying ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... narrow-bladed knife is first used to transfix the penis between the spongy and cavernous bodies close to the root; the knife having been carried forwards for an inch and a half, its edge is turned perpendicularly downwards, and the urethra and skin flap are divided, the cavernous bodies and dorsal integument being then cut perpendicularly ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... ears of M'Snape—apparently from the recesses of the earth just in front of him—a deep, hollow sound, the sound of men talking in some cavernous space. He stops dead, and signals to his companions to do likewise. Then he listens again. Yes, he can distinctly hear guttural voices, and an occasional clink, clink. The saphead has been reached, and digging ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... this very canon, within a thousand yards of the house, old Lobo and his mate selected their den and raised their family that season. There they lived all summer, and killed Joe's cattle, sheep, and dogs, but laughed at all his poisons and traps, and rested securely among the recesses of the cavernous cliffs, while Joe vainly racked his brain for some method of smoking them out, or of reaching them with dynamite. But they escaped entirely unscathed, and continued their ravages as before. "There's where he lived ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... practical exhaustion, but were carried through by the fire of their leader. Work was dogged until he stormed into sight; then it became frenzied. He seemed to impart to those about him a nervous force and excitability as real as that induced by brandy. When he looked at a man from his cavernous, burning eyes, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... more quiet the giant visitor fell to pasturing among the crisp and tender water-weeds. It took a long time to fill his cavernous paunch by way of that slender neck of his, and when he was satisfied he went composedly to sleep, his body perfectly concealed under the water, his head resting on a little islet of matted reeds in a thicket of "mares' tails." When he woke up again the sun was half-way down to the west, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... tempered the wind from courtyard and garden was green with lichens. The wide stone gateway, with its oaken doors barred within by massive cross-hooks that could have withstood a siege; the courtyard, flanked by the house and its rambling appendages that contained within their cavernous interiors the cider-press and cellars; the stable with its long stone manger, and next it the carved wooden bunk for the groom of two centuries ago; the stone pig-sty; the tile-roofed sheds—all had about them the charm of ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... began, delivering his words in a voice no longer nasal, but deep—more than deep—a voice made purposely hollow and cavernous—"what! has the miracle of Pentecost been renewed? Have the cloven tongues come down again? Where are they? The sound filled the whole house just now. I heard the seventeen languages in full action: Parthians, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... owned no slaves, and where slaves appeared they exhibited the greatest delight to see the Union soldiers. All slaves had the belief that we had come to free them, and there was much difficulty in preventing them from marching with us. The country through which we passed was cavernous, and the surface had many bowl-like depressions, at the bottom of which was, generally, considerable water. Springs and streams were scarce. The Confederates on retiring drove their disabled, diseased and broken-down ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... riots to account. The first revolutionary consultations were held in his house. He wants to plough deep, and his devices for burying the ploughshare are such that Sieyes, a radical, if there ever was one, dubbed it a "cavernous policy."[1233] Duport, on the 28th of July, 1789, is the organizer of the Committee on Searches, by which all favorably disposed informers or spies form in his hands a supervisory police, which fast becomes a police of provocation. He finds recruits in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... order to disguise himself, Hugo had pulled out all these coarser hairs, leaving nothing on his brows but the soft and closely pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all such cases. This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes, which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse; but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more ordinary and less individual aspect. From a good-natured but shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and his costume into a well-fed and well-grown, but not very colossal, commercial gentleman. Hugo ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... door before me and stepped out. Though I could see nothing, I remembered the narrow landing at the top of the stairs, and, stretching out my arms, I felt for the boarding on either hand, guilding myself by it, and began to descend, when something rising, as it were, out of the cavernous darkness before me made me halt and draw back in mingled dread ...
— The Staircase At The Hearts Delight - 1894 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... not love us? the grey skulls hissed in his face; Were our lips not red? Were these cavernous eyes not bright? Yet us, whom the soft flesh clothed with such roseate grace, Our lovers would loathe if we ever returned to ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... centre-board to a place on the starboard sofa, then taking in her surroundings with a timid rapture that broke into delight at all the primitive arrangements and dingy amenities of our den. She explored the cavernous recesses of the Rippingille, fingered the duck-guns and the miscellany in the racks, and peeped into the fo'c'sle with dainty awe. Everything was a source of merriment, from our cramped attitudes to ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... the tip, tip, of those feet, amid which a cavernous growl now and then mingled; but he hesitated, for the tiger appeared to be too far off to spring his scheme ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... nutrition by the intra-ocular tension, which is generally elevated, but may not be above the usual normal. A special weakness in the nutrition of nerve tissue may be assumed. It would help to explain the cavernous atrophy of the optic nerve associated with simple glaucoma. The second type shows impairment of the regulative mechanism permitting rapid rise of the intra-ocular pressure. In persons of good nerve ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... "because of the rigours of the place," said the assistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by their fires, had another version. The assistant was a shrunken-shouldered, hollow-chested man, with a cadaverous face and cavernous cheeks that his sparse black beard could not hide. He coughed much, as though consumption gripped his lungs, while his eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptives in the last stage. Pentley was his name—Amos Pentley—and Bonner did not like ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... leaped past my lips. Quiet Jim was yelling; and Emett, silent man of the desert, let from his wide cavernous chest a booming ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... and from away over, there came a rumble, deep and cavernous, as if a gargantuan dray were being driven over subterranean roads. It died out in echoes amongst the foothills and the silence returned broken only by the wash of the sea ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... strong, and it was the flower of France. It landed without opposition and marched into the interior. And that was the last ever seen of it. The line of communication was snapped on the second day. Not a survivor came back to tell what had happened. It had been swallowed up in China's cavernous maw, that was all. ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... Egypt. It is hard to realize that this wild moorland path by which we are travelling was once a busy road, filled with camels, horses, chariots, foot-passengers, clanking companies of soldiers; that these crumbling, cavernous walls, overgrown with thorny capers and wild marjoram and mandragora, were once crowded every night with a motley mob of travellers and merchants; that this pool of muddy water, gloomily reflecting the ruins, was once surrounded by flocks ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... almost transfixed by eyes as black as her own, gleaming out of cavernous sockets and from the most emaciated face she had ever seen. It seemed as if the dead were speaking to her. At any rate, if the woman were not dead she soon would be, and the thought flashed through Belle's mind that she would be the cause of her death, since she had ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... has become severed from the adjacent ridge, of which it no doubt, formed a part, is matter of curious inquiry. Has nature done this by gradual recession, or by the slow upheaval of the land? On inspection, this rock is found cavernous, slightly crystalline, with its strata distorted in every conceivable direction. In its crevices grow a few cedars and vines. As the visitor approaches it by the road side its effect is grand and imposing; still ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... man rose, and, his eyes glittering, his voice cavernous, he cried, fastening his hands in his ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... flowering crest impearled and orient. A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals The soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:— Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or 'mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... know what went with the time. I know the look of Uncle Dan'l's kitchen as it was on privileged nights when I was a child, and I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with the firelight playing on their faces and the shadows flickering upon the walls, clear back toward the cavernous gloom of the rear, and I can hear Uncle Dan'l telling the immortal tales which Uncle Remus Harris was to gather into his books and charm the world with, by and by; and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost-story ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierges and palms—it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace. These, too, would be swept away in time, and another promontory would rise upon their site, as humanity piled itself higher and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the east where the south side is known as Ungava Bay, contracting at the west, to the Upper Narrows. The south side of the strait is Labrador; the north, Baffin's Land. Both sides are lofty, rocky, cavernous shores lashed by a tide that rises in places as high as thirty-five feet and runs in calm weather ten miles an hour. Pink granite islands dot the north shore in groups that afford harbourage, but all shores present an adamant front, edges sharp as a knife or else rounded hard to ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... drop its unconscious burden upon the deck, and the watching man, petrified with horror, saw within the gaping maw great sucking discs and beyond them a brilliant glow. The whole cavernous pit was aflame with phosphorescent light. Dimly he knew that this light explained the ability of the beastly arms to grope ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... thought of giving out: oh, bless you, no! When the engine screeched "Here we are," I clutched my escort in a fervent embrace, and skipped into the car with as blithe a farewell as if going on a bridal tour—though I believe brides don't usually wear cavernous black bonnets and fuzzy brown coats, with a hair-brush, a pair of rubbers, two books, and a bag of ginger-bread distorting the pockets of the same. If I thought that any one would believe it, I'd boldly state ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... close against the blanket and, raising his head, eyed Connie indifferently, and as if to emphasize his indifference he opened his huge jaws in a prodigious yawn—a yawn that exposed the interior of his cavernous mouth with its wealth ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... it was upright still because of the bar, and its having sunk of its own weight into the heap of ashes at its foot. There was now a gap at the top of the doorway, through which could be descried a gloomy passage, cavernous and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... paper and jade, where priests tapped their little gongs and sang all night the glory of the Good Lady; they visited the prayer store, emporium for red candles, "devil-go-ways," punks, votive tassels, and all other Chinese devices to win favor of the gods and surcease from demons; they explored the cavernous underground dwellings beneath the Jackson Street Theatre; they climbed a narrow, reeking passage to marvel at the revel of color and riot of strange scent which was the big joss house. Bertram's ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... then what we call in Scotland a "batty bird" skimmed past my face, attracted, I suppose, by the bright light. I suppose that bats that have not been disturbed before for generations have been aroused by the blast of war through all that region and have come out of dark cavernous hiding-places, as those that night must have done, to see what it is all about, the tumult ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... the shadow of age worked on in a stolid, plodding manner. Mingled indiscriminately with the colored people were not a few white women and children, and occasionally a white man. As a rule, these were better dressed, the white girls wearing sun-bonnets of portentous size, whose cavernous depths would make a search for beauty on the part of our artist a rather close and embarrassing scrutiny. The colored women as often wore a man's hat as any other, and occasionally enlivened the field with a red bandana. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... house from the top brick of the chimney to the darkest recesses of the cellar in quest of my vanished treasure. I began with a queer old triangular cupboard that occupied one corner of the kitchen. And in the deepest and dustiest corner of the top shelf of that cavernous old cupboard, what should I find but the cricket ball that I had lost the previous summer? My excitement was so great that I almost fell off the table on which I was standing. As soon as the flicker of my candle fell on the ball I distinctly remembered putting it ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... wine absently awhile; Sister Agnes was busy with some fine needlework; and I was striving to elaborate a giant and his attendant dwarf out of the glowing embers and cavernous recesses of the wood fire, while there was yet an underlying vein of thought at work in my mind which busied itself desultorily with trying to piece together all that I had ever heard or read of life ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... is of resplendent whiteness, appears only here and there between the foliage. It is difficult to imagine a more picturesque spot. It recalled forcibly to my remembrance the valleys of Derbyshire, and the cavernous mountains of Muggendorf, in Franconia. Instead of the beeches and maple trees of Europe we here find the statelier forms of the ceiba and the palm-tree, the praga and irasse. Numberless springs gush from the sides ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... cavernous salle a manger was apart: he sat alone, a solitary guest; the table from which the olive fell and rolled towards him was some distance away. The angle, however, made him an unlikely objective. Yet the lob-sided, juicy thing, after hesitating once or twice en route as ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... what they'll think of it at Brandon?' said the attorney, with a cavernous grin of sly enquiry at his companion, which, recollecting his character, he softened into a sad sort of smile, and added, 'No harm, I dare say; and, after all, you know, why should there—any man may have business; and, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... moment, indulging in a gigantic stretch and a cavernous yawn; but he finished both hastily, and rushed at his poor horse as if he intended to slay it on the spot. He only threw the saddle on its back, however, and then threw himself on ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... an ostrich!" declared Janice, after almost every cold scrap in the house had followed several slices of "bread-butter" down Pietro's cavernous maw. ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... three weeks all song ceased. They made incessant trips to the old orchard and returned with caterpillars to feed five cavernous yellow-throated mouths. ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... say he was a literary man, some critics would vow that I intended to insult the literary profession), once sent me his address at a little public-house called the "Fox under the Hill," down a most darksome and cavernous archway in the Strand. Such a man, under such misfortunes, may have a house, but he is never in his house; and has an address where letters may be left; but only simpletons go with the hopes of seeing him.—Only a few of the faithful know ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... against the stone; then, with a final dextrous twist of the paddle, he swung at a sharp angle and simultaneously checked the speed. Under scant momentum they slid from moonlight and the clean air of night into a close well between two walls, and then suddenly beneath an arch and into a cavernous chamber filled with the soft murmuring of water—and ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... its true kith and kin With that host of things known to be hollow within, It took up a stand with its handles akimbo, Bowels and bosom in a cavernous limbo. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the obscure places of antiquity, and shows us the templed or cavernous rites of the religious world, from Hindostan to Gaul, from Egypt to Norway, from Athens to Mexico. And this brings us to the Mysteries of Vitzliputzli, established in South America. Dr. Oliver, in the twelfth lecture of his History ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... beginning to be disappointed. Visions of the dark-eyed Reine, in veils of mauve and orange, silhouetted against the synchromatic scenery of the Marigny swam before my eyes. I gave vent to a cavernous yawn. I had often had supper at the Savoy. But such a performance was not my idea of romance. I had never considered that luxurious dining room in the light of adventure. But with Leonard's suggestion I entered and found that, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... they believe the twins' assertions that the dark Mausoleum, with its cavernous rock chambers and granite vaults, was the most impressive thing they had seen in Egypt. "You say that to be aggravating, because we weren't there," I heard Lady Biddell snap, over the grumbling of ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... sudden breath of the neighbouring gardens, the singular brightness of bright weather there, its singular darknesses which linked themselves in his mind to certain engraved illustrations in the old big Bible at home, the coolness of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church, with its giddy winding stair up to the pigeons and the bells—a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble—all this acted on his childish fancy, so that ever afterwards the like aspects and incidents never failed to throw him into ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... up to a large, low, cavernous gateway, another man in the same uniform, but wearing a silver star on the grey breast of his coat, came out to meet them. This impressive person said ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... along a dusty hallway, up a flight of stairs that was little more than a ladder, and into the cavernous loft of the old barn which had been transformed ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... the grass from window and door of the Turrentine house; Judith's play-party was in full swing. They were dancing or playing in the big front room which was lit only by the rich broken shimmer and shine from a fire of pine sticks in the cavernous black chimney. Though it was early July the evening, in those altitudes, had its own chill, and the heat from this was not unpleasant, while its illumination became necessary, for all the lamps and candles available were in use out ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... of the ponderous and rusty bolt reached him across the cavernous space. He had not expected their immediate departure, and was rather alarmed. His first impulse was to try whether he could not shoot the bolt from the inside. This he soon found to be impossible. He next turned ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Island, a desolate cavernous rock three miles from the coast, dominated by a lighthouse, was a familiar hunting-ground of his in days gone by, and he decidedly enjoyed the prospect of doing the honours of the place to his ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... to rake the cabin with his eyes, wall to wall, corner to corner. He turned, cautiously, and glanced at the door into the lean-to. It gaped, cavernous and empty. But the sense of being watched persisted, and when he looked at the floor the field mice ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was heard. Out of such a place it would have been hopeless to have thought of starting a bear—unless it should please Bruin to make a voluntary exit. It was, therefore, with no little anxiety that the hunters listened to the "tongue" of the dogs, as it echoed within the cavernous hollow. ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... below the window, lifted her head and showed herself by the yellow flare of her lantern. Framed among rags, a perfect bundle of them, a face looked out from under a tattered kerchief—a blue, seamed face with a toothless, cavernous mouth and fiery bruises where the eyes should be. And Nana, seeing the frightful old woman, the wanton drowned in drink, had a sudden fit of recollection and saw far back amid the shadows of consciousness ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... disordered, several well-worn books and papers, two patch-covered foot-stools, a straightbacked rocking-chair, in which the august woman rocks her straighter self, and a great tin cage, from between the bars of which an intelligent parrot chatters—"my lady, my lady, my lady!" There is a cavernous air about the place, which gives out a sickly odor, exciting the suggestion that it might at some time have served as a receptacle for those second-hand coffins the ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... the Coliseum as it stands with its thousand arches looking out into the city like so many sightless eye-holes in the skull of the past. The tender light pours up streets dank and ill-paved,—into noisome and cavernous dens called houses, where the peasantry of to-day vegetate in contented subservience. It illuminates many a dingy court-yard, where the moss is green on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall into quaint old sculptured basins. It lights up the gorgeous palaces of Rome's modern princes, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... that period of his life the embodiment of health and good spirits. His stalwart frame, his massive head, crowned with a wealth of black hair, his heavy eye-brows, overhanging his great, expressive, and cavernous eyes, all distinguished him as one of the powers of the realm of the intellect—one of the few to whom Divinity has accorded a royal share of the Promethian fire of genius. His department was ceremonious, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... infiltration, the prepuce cannot be pulled back—a condition known as syphilitic phimosis. (3) On the glans penis the infiltration may be so superficial that it resembles a layer of parchment, but if it invades the cavernous tissue there is a dense mass of induration. (4) On the external aspect of the prepuce or on the skin of the penis itself. (5) At either end of the torn fraenum, in the form of a diamond-shaped ulcer raised above the surroundings. (6) In relation to the meatus and canal of the urethra, ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... went down into her kitchen everything looked just as she had left it, and there was no trace of the acrid smell she had expected to find there. Instead, the cavernous, whitewashed room was full of fog, but she noticed that, though the shutters were bolted and barred as she had left them, the windows behind them had been widely opened to the air. She had ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... aware who Guillaume Rym was. A rare genius who in a time of revolution would have made a brilliant appearance on the surface of events, but who in the fifteenth century was reduced to cavernous intrigues, and to "living in mines," as the Duc de Saint-Simon expresses it. Nevertheless, he was appreciated by the "miner" of Europe; he plotted familiarly with Louis XI., and often lent a hand to the king's ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... be a royal fountain: My harp shall tell how from yon cavernous mountain, Topt by the brown ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... that, he will understand it," he added, turning his ear, so that he could catch any response; but the dim, soothing murmur of the cascade was the only sound that came up from the cavernous depths. ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... altitude; his vineyards, too, and his glades; for our mountain scenery, its beauty alternating between the placid and the rugged—the tame terrace soil and the wild, forbidding majesty—is allwhere almost the same. But where in these rocky and cavernous recesses of the world can we to-day find the ancient Lebanon troglodyte, whom Khalid has seen, and visited in his hut, and even talked with? It is this that forces us to seek his diggings, to trace, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... floor of the furnace room, a flight of stone steps surmounted by an arch led into the coal cellar, beneath the street. The coal cellar was of brick, with a cement floor, and in the left wall there gaped an opening about three feet by three, leading into a cavernous void, perfectly black—evidently a similar vault belonging ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and though beautiful in colour, is in form hideous beyond description. The skin is of a rich brilliant green, with chocolate-coloured patches, oval in form, and symmetrically disposed. The lips are bright yellow, the cavernous mouth pale flesh colour, the throat and under-surface dull white. The body is lumpy, and about the size of a large man's fist. The eyes, placed on the summit of a disproportionately large head, are embedded in horn-like protuberances, capable of being ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... Benigno, and Fernandez and Francisco, and Benito. Benito was a tall, swarthy man, with immense gray moustachios, and hair as harsh as tropical grass and gray as ashes. When he could spare his cigarette from his lips, he would tell you in a cavernous voice, and with a wrinkled smile that he ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... arrival as the first evidence of beauty in the city. There were horse trams instead of cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the elevated railway, the first sign of power that one notices after leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot remember New ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... magnificent thing to see. Riding down the cavernous vastness of the building through the rich lights streaming in long rays from the pictured windows—oh, there was ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... at the destruction of his friends, that he cared neither for the size of the dragon's jaws nor for his hundreds of sharp teeth. Drawing his sword, he rushed at the monster, and flung himself right into his cavernous mouth. This bold method of attacking him took the dragon by surprise; for, in fact, Cadmus had leaped so far down into his throat, that the rows of terrible teeth could not close upon him, nor do him the least harm in the world. Thus, though the ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... in the bosom of the mountain, filled with the purest water, gives a possibility of more superb effects than have been attained anywhere else in the world. The Fountain of the Winds is one, where a vast mass of water springs into the air from the foot of a great cavernous rock; there is a succession of exquisite cascades called the Race-Course, filled with graceful statuary; a colossal group of Apollo slaying the Python, who in his death agony bleeds a torrent of water; the Basket of Flowers, which throws up a system of forty jets; the great single ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Neuvic to be a cheerful, pleasant little town, with a venerable-looking old church, apparently of the twelfth century. It is entered by a cavernous portal under a very massive low tower, but the interior shows little of interest. What struck me, however, as something quite uncommon was a small altar in the centre of the nave just below the sanctuary. Upon it was an image of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... mountains. A low murmur of hidden streams sounded on the deep stillness and enhanced the fascination of the surrounding landscape, which was more like the landscape of a dream than a reality. The deep breadths of dense darkness lying lost among the cavernous slopes of the hills were broken at intervals by strange rifts of light arising as it were from the palpitating water, which now and again showed gleams of pale emerald and gold phosphorescence,—the stars looked large and white like straying bits of the moon, and ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... against his leg. How the knowledge of what it was and what to do came to him so quickly, and how he acted upon that knowledge swiftly almost as light moves, he could not have told; but he knew that a shark was after him; he knew that it must turn over on its back in the water before the cavernous, fang-set jaws could crunch his bone and flesh, and like a flash he dived. Queerly, as he shot down through the water, he thought again of something outside the desperate need of self-preservation. "This ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... of the slimy fucus that fringed the tide-washed shore. And all the while the two boats made the water glisten, and the blue lights threw up the face of the rock so clearly that, unless he had found some deep, dark, cavernous niche, there was but little chance for an escaping convict to cling ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... picture him to myself in the peopled gloom of the cavernous place, with the light of the globe-lamp falling on a small portion of the bulkhead that had the weight of the ocean on the other side, and the breathing of unconscious sleepers in his ears. I can see him glaring at the iron, startled by the falling rust, overburdened by the knowledge of an ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... made at the moment when the two cavernous voices of the ferocious beasts were heard loudly answering to one another. Under the impression produced by the terrible dialogue, Tiburcio's offer was hastily accepted. The Senator took his place; while the young man, with sparkling eyes and firm ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... little, but not much, more sociable, for, although Nigel's active mind would gladly have found vent in conversation, he experienced some difficulty in making headway against the discouragement of Van der Kemp's very quiet disposition, and the cavernous yawns with which Moses displayed at once his desire for slumber and his magnificent ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... myself murmuring: "Get the proportions of things, get the proportions of things!" I had an absurd impression of a duel between myself and the cavernous antagonism of the huge black spaces below me. I argued that all this pain and waste was no more than the selvedge of a proportionately limitless fabric of sane, interested, impassioned and joyous living. These ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... in the darkness at the edge of the forest, while cross the patch of sand beneath their rock galloped swift shapes which halted and sniffed towards them. Also on the river side of them appeared huge, hog-like beasts, with gleaming tusks, and red cavernous mouths, and beyond these again, crashing through the brushwood, a gigantic brute that bore a single horn upon ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... again rang out clearly in the great cavernous basilica as he repeated the prayer in clear impassioned words—that same prayer which the Empress was repeating ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... species, those animals which live farthest south spend the whole year abroad in mild seasons. The grisly rarely chooses that favorite den of his little black brother, a hollow tree or log, for his winter sleep, seeking or making some cavernous hole in the ground instead. The hole is sometimes in a slight hillock in a river bottom but more often on a hill-side, and may be either shallow or deep. In the mountains it is generally a natural cave in the ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... tidings, proclaimed himself, by his visible existence, one of the submerged clinging to his last spar, fighting still with hands which beat the air, yet carrying the undaunted light of battle in his blazing eyes, deep-sunken, almost cavernous, the last refuge, perhaps, of that ebbing life. Drops of perspiration were upon his forehead, his breath came hard and painfully. Before he had reached his destination, one could almost hear the rattle in his ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... man took a final look at the glittering instruments, and departed. Wherewith the junior operator swung half around in the swivel-chair and exposed to Peter an expression of mild imploration. Two gray lids over cavernous sockets lifted and lowered upon shining black eyes, one of which seemed to lack focus. Peter recalled then that the Chief had said something about a second operator having only one human eye, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... Arles is vaster and more sublime in its desolation than the tidy theatre at Nismes; the crypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner of speculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated; while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous, like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest pictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of the smaller theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments and their ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... had been less abrupt in my questioning. Peters did manage quite coolly and rationally to answer "Yes" to all my questions. But at the words "Pym," "Bernard," "Grampus," his eyes began, in appearance, to start from their sockets; those awful teeth gleamed from that cavernous mouth, as he uttered demoniac yell on yell, and raised himself to a sitting posture in the bed. I thought his eyeballs must certainly burst, as he looked off into nothingness wildly, as if a troop of fiends ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... Long poles upon which were suspended old clothes hung out to air, and ragged linen to dry, stood out like tattered banners from the attic windows. Here, too, every ground-floor was a shop, open, unglazed, cavernous, where the dealer lay perdu in the gloom of midday, like a spider in the midst of his web, surrounded by piles of old bottles, old iron, old clothes, old furniture, or whatever else his stock ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... present in their different contours inimitable tints of white, melting away into white, or shades lengthening themselves out without mixing over other shades. You see, here and there, issuing from the cavernous sides of those mountains, tides of light precipitating themselves, in ingots of gold and silver, over rocks of coral. Here it is a gloomy rock, pierced through and through, disclosing, beyond the aperture, the pure azure of the ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... tall Sikh, whose finely-cut face and cavernous eye-bones suggested a carving in old ivory, bowed himself almost to the ground before the girl who had saved his admired Captain Sahib from the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... proceedeth an incredible resolution of the spirits, that oftentimes there do not remain so many behind as may suffice to push and thrust forwards the generative resudation to the places thereto appropriated, and therewithal inflate the cavernous nerve, whose office is to ejaculate the moisture for the propagation of human progeny. Lest you should think it is not so, be pleased but to contemplate a little the form, fashion, and carriage of a man exceeding earnestly set upon some learned meditation and ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... newspaper writers have dwelt largely upon the horrors of a series of subterranean chambers, extending beneath the Adelphi Terrace in the West Strand, and locally and popularly known as the "Adelphi Arches." To this day they are a forbidding, cavernous black hole, suggestive of nothing if not the horrors of thievery, or even murder. They are, however, so well guarded by three policemen on "fixed point" duty that at night there is probably no more safe locality in all London than the former unsavoury neighbourhood, a statement ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... often not less than a third of universal space. When he has added figure to figure in the endeavour to picture the multitudinous disarray of the fallen Angels on the lake, one line suffices to reduce the whole spectacle to its due dimensions beneath that cavernous tent of darkness:— ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... behind the shop; but no one responded to Robert's "Hulloa!" The reason of this was sufficiently obvious. The merry party was so much absorbed in its own merriment as to be deaf to all commonplace summonses from the outer world; and it was only when Robert, advancing further into the cavernous little shop, made so bold as to open the half-glass door which separated him from the merry-makers, that he succeeded ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... After the cavernous obscurity of the jungle the night seemed suddenly to lighten and O'Reilly found himself looking out over a level waste of stumps and tree-trunks perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, extending right and left as far as he could ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... slippery stone tripped the roan's fumbling feet. Now and again a swaying branch slapped Barton stingingly across his straining eyes. All around and about them tortured forest trees moaned and writhed in the gale. Through every cavernous vista gray sheets of rain went flapping madly by them. The lightning was incredible. The thunder like the snarl of a glass ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... where possible usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an index, and ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... lead somewhere!" cried Walter excitedly; and, lifting the roughly constructed wooden latch, he pushed the door open, disclosing a cavernous darkness. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... a devouring monster, broke over their frail skiff, sweeping the sail off like a strip of ribbon, snapping the mast and rolling over and over them with a thousand heads of foam that, spouting upwards, again fell into dark cavernous deeps, covering and dragging down everything on the surface with a tumult and roar! It passed on thundering,—but left a blank behind it. Skiff and men had vanished,—and not a trace of the wreck floated on the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... I met at his door the barge-builder into whose cavernous loft I had stumbled on my first visit to Pascoe. He said it was a fine afternoon. He invited me in to inspect a figure-head he had purchased. "How's the old 'un?" he asked, jerking a thumb towards the bootmaker's. Then, with some amused winking and crafty tilting of his chin, he ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... when the sun blazes, and the awnings are down, sheltering those chatting on the terrace, the interiors of these brasseries appear dark and cavernous. ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... were ready to fancy that in that terrible dark forest they had stumbled upon some strange abode of the fabulous gnomes or kobolds described by the old German romanticists as being the haunting inhabitants of the mines and cavernous underground regions. ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... abyss of blackness, Into its cavernous chaos, I saw birds wing. Sweeping down Through the mist Of its mighty waters, Undaunted by the roar, Unmindful of the churning, Of the terror of its power, On sure pinions And happy in flight They dipped and soared ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... building receiving bundles of iron rods that fell clanging into their place. Wagons rattled past over the uneven pavement, and below along the river locomotives whistled. Above all was the bass overtone of the city, swelling louder each minute with the day's work. A picture of a fair palace in the cavernous depths of a Sienna street came over the young man with a vivid sense of pain. Under his breath he muttered to himself, "Fierce!" Then he glanced with compunction at the gentle old face by his side. How had he kept so perfectly sweet, so fine in the midst of all this welter? ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... giving himself a shake as though to arouse himself from his thoughts, and after listening a moment or two to make sure that no one was nigh, he walked softly to the fireplace, and stooping, peered up the chimney. Above him yawned a black cavernous depth, inky with the soot of years. Hans straightened himself, and tilting his leathern cap to one side, began scratching his bullet-head; at last he drew a long breath. "Yes, good," he muttered to himself; "he who jumps into the river must e'en swim the best he can. It is a vile, dirty ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... and unavowed alliances transfigure the unlovely streets, and light in the cavernous blank houses many a glowing and familiar hearth. As he goes on, careless of distance or direction, he is now inwardly busy with fresh and delightful dreams. He plights his troth and earth is Eden; he imagines brilliant hours ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... length showed like a mound in the smooth water, and the body alternately rose and dipped as the whale swam slowly along. It was doubtless feeding on the tiny marine creatures which are the sole food of the right whale. It took great "gulps" of sea water into its cavernous mouth, water which it strained out through its curtain of baleen, swallowing only the tiny fish down a gullet so small that it would not ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... one side of the altar the men formed opposite them, advancing and taking each a cup from the female opposite. Then the chant began once more, and presently from a dark passageway beyond the altar another female emerged from the cavernous depths beneath the chamber. ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... human kindliness, dominated by a reflective system of economics. Mr. Carson—the late Solicitor-General for Ireland, and Mr. Balfour's chief champion in the Coercion Courts—with a long hatchet face, a sallow complexion, high cheek-bones, cavernous cheeks and eyes—is the living type of the sleuth-hound whose pursuit of the enemy of a Foreign Government makes the dock the antechamber to the prison or the gallows. Sir Edward Grey, with his thin face, prominent ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... under dripping umbrellas, that hid their faces as if in premeditated disguise, hurried from the main thoroughfare. A woman in a hooded waterproof like a domino, a Mexican in a black serape, might have been stage conspirators hastening to a rendezvous. The cavernous chill and odor which I had before noted as coming from some sarcophagus of larder or oven, where "funeral baked meats" might have been kept in stock, began to oppress me. The hollow and fictitious domesticity of this common board had never before seemed so hopelessly displayed. And Tom, the waiter, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
