"Fissure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its ascensional force, approached the ground; the anchors ran along until, at last, one of them caught in the fissure of a rock, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Chartres is now but a murky fissure, from which the groping wayfarer sees, flung against the sky, the tangled filigree of Moorish iron balconies. The old houses of monsieur stand yet, indomitable against the century, but their essence is gone. The street is one of ghosts to ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... water had become very loud, and as I emerged from the gorge through which the path ran on to this plateau I saw, on the further side of this tableland, the yellow robe of the mendicant. He was walking straight for the face of the precipice, and straight for the spot at which, from a fissure in the rock, a little stream leapt out, to fall sheerly ten or fifteen feet into a winding channel, along which it bubbled away westward, doubtless to ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... slung to his back, his fingers gripping at cracks and seams and little knobs of stone, he made what speed he could. The way he followed led along a long, horizontal fissure for a space, then dipped dangerously near the perpendicular, then slanted off so that the danger was less, greater speed possible. He did not look down to the lake, fearing the dizziness which might lay hold of him and whip him from the face of the cliffs ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... removed to the Island of Wia, where he was received by Ranald Macdonald; thence he visited places called Rossinish and Aikersideallich, and at the latter had to sleep in a fissure in the rocks. Returning once more to South Uist, Charles (accompanied by O'Neal and Mackechan) found a hiding-place up in the hills, as the militia appeared to be dangerously near, and at night ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... 'There is a fissure some inches wide in the main wall from the ground to the roof, and a little more force would have effected the evident object of making the residence of the obnoxious agent a heap of ruins. The damage done is estimated at ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... ascent, where its two stupendous sides raise their gigantic masses in rocky precipices, upwards of two thousand feet high; which seem to frown upon the bold traveller who ventures within their cavernous precincts; one cannot contemplate the vast fissure other than as the work of a beneficent providence, as a gateway in ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... clearly defined walls. It is much more rational to suppose that the increased hardness imparted to the slates and schists at or near their contact with the lode is due to an infiltration of silica from the silicated solution which at one time filled the fissure. Few scientists can now be found to advance the purely igneous theory of lode formation, though it must be admitted that volcanic action has probably had much influence not only in the formation of mineral veins, but also on the occurrence of ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... on the west and south. There the mighty storm-waves had battered the granite crags for centuries, undermining them in soft veins till huge masses had fallen again and again, making openings which had been enlarged till there was one long cove; the fissure where they had taken boat with old Daygo; and another spot farther ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... month of December, about the warmest period of the year, during my rambles through the forest in search of insects, I met with this manna in the above-mentioned state, but could never find in any part of the bark a fissure or break whence such a substance could flow. Wherever it appeared, moreover, the red-eyed cicadae were in abundance. I was inclined to think that the puncture produced by these suctorial insects into the tender shoots for juice, would in all probability give an exit for ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... exploration, the silence fell profound; and this silence was the ruin of the islanders. A sound of stones rattling caught the ear of Teina. He looked, thinking to perceive a crab, and saw instead the brown hand of a human being issue from a fissure in the ground. A shout recalled the search parties and announced their doom to the buried caitiffs. In the cave below, sixteen were found crouching among human bones and singular and horrid curiosities. One ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... frame. The great, dull, bloodshot eyes glared at him with a dumb, wondering fury; the large wet nostrils were so near that their first snort of inarticulate rage made him reel backwards as from a blow. The gully was only a narrow and short fissure or subsidence of the plain; a few paces more of retreat and he would be at its end, against an almost perpendicular bank fifteen feet high. If he attempted to climb its crumbling sides and fell, there would be those short ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... desert where the trails run red, Judah and Erin speed their camel pace, Sighting green palms. The flush on either face Is from the fissure where each wedged her head From sandstorms, that hurled heavens down, as they sped; It is no blush for thought, or conduct, base To the high trust to bring the Human Race, Truths, without which Time's ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... north and south line, parallel with the river, and a little more than midway between it and the Connecticut and Massachusetts lines, as far as they extended. Into and through the strip of land the Quaker stream flowed, like a liquid injected into a fissure in the rocks. Each Quaker home as it settled became a resting place for those who followed, for it was a cardinal principle of Quaker hospitality to keep open house for all fellow members, under ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... possession that could never be taken from him, the knowledge of her hidden despair, her hidden need of love. And by that sensation of hatred of his knowledge she measured the gulf between them. When had come the very first narrow fissure she scarcely knew. But she knew how to-day the gulf ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... the mark at the discharge, but somehow the report always throws his ocular apparatus out of gear. In a moment I espied one of the bears scrambling over an ice-cake. The other had already disappeared; or else was killed, and had fallen down some fissure. ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... looked up the old irregular shaft, with its cavernous hollows, where the smoke blundered about on its way to the square bit of sky at the top, from which the daylight struck down with a pallid glare upon the tatters of soot draping the flue as seaweed drapes a rocky fissure. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... herd trumpeted madly and barged for the higher ground of safety. Too late did instinct warn it of the widening fissure underfoot. Before it could stop the pressure of the herd drove ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... companion an inanimate mass beside me, life utterly extinct. While I was bending over his corpse in grief and horror, I heard close at hand a strange sound between a snort and a hiss; and turning instinctively to the quarter from which it came, I saw emerging from a dark fissure in the rock a vast and terrible head, with open jaws and dull, ghastly, hungry eyes—the head of a monstrous reptile resembling that of the crocodile or alligator, but infinitely larger than the largest creature of that kind ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... thickest of those intermediate suits, leaving our tunics behind, and made this scramble quite successfully, though I got a pretty heavy fall just at the end, and was only kept on the second ledge by main force. The next stage was down a sort of "chimney"—a long irregular fissure; and so with scratches many and painful and bruises not a few, ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... It stood, unpainted and unkempt, in a wedge-shaped acre of neglected garden which, between high weeds and uncut shrubbery, had long before gone to straggling ruin. And that wedge-shaped acre which cut a deep fissure in the edge of the immaculate pastures of Boltonwood's wealthiest citizen was like a barbed thorn in ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... As he slowly recovered, a real booming disassociated itself from the noises in his head; and he eagerly raised his head. His eyes swept over a far and wide expanse of snow, a dish-like plateau among the hills. His heart leaped; for through the centre of the plateau ran a black fissure, like a crack in the dish; and off to the left a fleecy cloud rose lazily from the gorge, blushing pinkly in the light of the setting sun. This must mark the falls; the Death River lay at ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... raised a shout of triumph, and, leaping a wide fissure, made for the summit of the mountain. A single bound would carry him to the brow of the precipice and assure his safety. Before taking the leap he shook his hand defiantly at Hawk-eye, who waited with ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... just within the lips, recurved, slender, and exceeding in keenness even the finest of cambric needles, they are penetrated in their longitudinal diameter by a delicate, hair-like canal opening into a groove at the apex, terminating on the anterior surface in an elongated fissure. As the canal is straight, and the tooth falciform, a like groove or longitudinal fissure is formed at the base, where it is inclosed by the aperture of the duct that communicates with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... from the sea, where the first houses come into view, there can be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep hills very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the appearance from the settlement is of one irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to answer you'; and she led the way down among the ruins towards one of the dens formerly occupied by the wild beasts, and disclosed to us a set of beings scarcely less savage. The sombre walls of this gloomy abode were illumined by a fire, the smoke from which escaped through a deep fissure in the mossy roof, whilst the flickering flames threw a blood-red glare on the bronzed features of a group of children, two men, and a decrepit old hag who appeared busily engaged ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... who was still on the watch at the fissure in the rocks, here turned round and motioned ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... base of the projecting rock and wedging her slender body into a small fissure, peered cautiously through the cleft. So close that she could almost touch him, alert and motionless, stood the weasel-faced man. His small eyes were fixed upon the water. The hand which was nearest her ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... for a long time, hoping they might return, they only flew round me and past me, showing me the great black sweep of their wings as they went. But as I sat there, on that wild crag and that wild morning, I noticed a tuft of dog-violets, growing out of a fissure in the grey rock, and shaken and pounded by the bitter wind. How wonderful is the tenacity of nature. A few grains of dust blown into a crack of barren rock, a few seeds wind-carried also, and then germination in the rain and sun, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... but not the table's. However, it is not a bad illustration, Dora. When beds of rock are only interrupted by a fissure, but remain at the same level, like the two halves of the table, it is not called a fault, but only a fissure; but if one half of the table be either tilted higher than the other, or pushed to the side, so that the two parts will not fit, it is a fault. You had better ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... distance, but for the most part the shivered crowns and broken bulks had been served otherwise; the force of the blast had disintegrated them, but had not scattered them; the greater part of this newly-rent stone had toppled into the fissure in the ground, and lay there mixed with earth, almost filling the hole. It was impossible to determine just where and how the blast had been set off; the rocks hid the facts. But Cleggett judged that the force must have come from below ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... our vessel. How rich we thought ourselves with the little we had saved! We sought a convenient place for our tent, under the shade of the rocks. We then inserted a pole into a fissure in the rock; this, resting firmly on another pole fixed in the ground, formed the frame of the tent. The sailcloth was then stretched over it, and fastened down at proper distances, by pegs, to which, for greater security, we added some boxes of provision; we fixed ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... querulous moods. The feathery white plume of steam, woven by the wind into soft, fantastic shapes, no longer capped the crater; its place had been usurped by thick, dark fumes of smoke swirling sullenly about. In the fading light I marked the red, malignant glow of a fissure newly broken out in the side of the ragged cone, from which came a thin, white trickle ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... opposite the aperture and between the giant cliffs that rose on either side of the narrow entrance a sight was revealed that filled their hearts with renewed hope and rejoicing, for a tiny cove was seen to lie beyond the fissure—a cove with a long, wide, sandy beach up which the waves, broken at the entrance to the little haven, ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a large number of other subcastes, and the tendency to fissure in a large caste, and to the formation of small local groups which marry among themselves, is nowhere more strikingly apparent than among the Brahmans. This is only natural, as they, more than any other caste, attach importance ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... freely. One-half of the work was done. Now it was necessary to slip out of the cave noiselessly and run about fifty paces; afterwards to hide in a fissure, open the case, put the rifle together, load it, and fill his pockets with cartridges. The caravan then would ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Indians which so unaccountably yet so obviously had been aroused, and also to the wholesome dread that they must have of us upon finding that every one of their companions had been slain. The bodies of our poor Otomis we placed in a deep fissure in the rock, and there heaped stones upon them, while Fray Antonio said over them the briefer office; but the body of Dennis we carried with us, that we might give him a more tender and reverent burial in gratitude for his brave struggle to save our lives when he knew that his own ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... in that same number! Also you have extended your sweep of power—the sea-weed is thrown farther (if not higher) than it was found before; and one may calculate surely now how a few more waves will cover the brown stones and float the sight up away through the fissure of the rocks. The rhythm (to touch one of the various things) the rhythm of that 'Duchess' does more and more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and prose ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... distant. And its walls, partly clothed with shrubbery, partly naked, were so seamed and cleft and creviced that they appeared to promise many convenient retreats. But across the mouth of the valley extended an appalling barrier. From an irregular fissure in the parched earth, running on a slant from one wall to the other, came tongues of red flame, waving upwards to a height of several feet, sinking back, rising again, and bowing as ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... by a narrow path, cut here and there into steps, and passing many rocks covered with inscriptions, broken walls of mendongs, and other remains of the via sacra between the village and temple. At one spot we found a fissure emitting hot vapour of the temperature of 65.5 degrees, that of the air being about 50 degrees. It was simply a hole amongst the rocks; and near the Rungeet a similar one is said to occur, whose temperature fluctuates considerably with the season. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... if truth attaches to the received story of his death, Roncesvalles is, no doubt, the site. But the legend has shed its romance on the immortal heights of the towers of Marbore; and, to account for the fissure in the rock, it must be with these in our recollection, that we read that quaint apostrophe to his sword which the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... higher motor center is the "motor area" of the brain, located in the cortex or external layer of gray matter, in the cerebrum. More precisely, the motor area is a long, narrow strip of cortex, lying just forward of what is called the "central fissure" or "fissure ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... should be made of oak or hard wood from 25 to 30 millimetres thick, dry and joined with groves, so that there may be no fissure. ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... we followed to the latter place, which takes its name from a remarkable spring breaking out beneath a mountain, a considerable brook at once. Some sixty feet up the hill-side is the mouth of a cave at the bottom of which is the underground stream, which finds its way out by another fissure. The village was the rendezvous where Beauregard overtook Hood on the evening of the 9th of October, and held their first consultation in regard to the campaign. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxix. pt. i. p. 796.] It was a pretty place which had not suffered the ravages of war; the situation ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... intensity of frost— Bursting one upon another Through the horror of the calm. The paralysis of arm In the anguish of the heart; And the hollowness and dearth. The appealings of the mother To brother and to brother Not in hatred so to part— And the fissure in the hearth Growing momently more wide. Then the glances 'tween the Fates, And the doubt on every side, And the patience under gloom In the stoniness that waits The finality ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... around, they beard for the first time a peculiar subterranean rumbling, and going back a few feet, saw the river disappear in a smooth, green slide down into a wide fissure. They stood looking down, fascinated at this mysterious, silent, and stealthy disappearance of the waters that come with such a sparkle out of the bright valley; then dropped stones down, and stooped their ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... Buxton abounds in the most wild and romantic scenery—steep rocks, dark chasms, and wooded hills, mixed in delightful confusion. Among the favourite places of resort are Ashwood Dale, with its famous Lover's Leap rock; Shirbrook Dale, with its fissure and cascade; Diamond Hill, so called from the quartz crystals or "Buxton diamonds" found there; Chee Tor, a huge limestone rock 350 feet high, which rises sheer from the bed of the Wye, washing its base; and Axe Edge, 2-1/2 miles from Buxton, ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... Fissure and rent, where the intrusive dike's Creative and destructive agency Leaves many an enduring monument Of metamorphic and eruptive power; Of molten deluge, and volcanic flood; Fracture and break, the silent stories tell Of dire convulsion ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... dispose of them? I meditated this matter whilst I smoked. First I thought I would drag them to the fissure or rent in the ice just beyond the stern of the schooner and tumble them into it. But even then they would still be with me, so to speak—I mean, they would be neighbours though out of sight; and my eagerness was to get them away from this island altogether, which was only to be done by casting ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... that a part of the flooring, in the left hand corner, was decayed; and that the ceiling beneath had a fissure ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... lash. The hesitation was only for a moment, for a voice among them cried out, and the whole pack gave tongue shrilly and surged on again. But that instant of check had given the stranger his chance. He was up the ladder, and, gripping the parapet, found rest for his feet in a fissure. Then he bent down, drew up the ladder, handed it to McGuffog, and with a mighty heave pulled ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... Where the gorge is the deepest, opposite the Castle of Belfort (the modern Kulat-esh-Shukif), the river suddenly makes a turn at right angles, altering its course from nearly due south to nearly due west, and cuts through the remaining roots of Lebanon, still at the bottom of a tremendous fissure, and still raging and chafing for a distance of fifteen miles, until at length it debouches on the coast plain, and meanders slowly through meadows to the sea,[147] which it enters about five miles to the north of Tyre. The course of the Litany may be roughly ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... taenia lata, or broad tape-worm, is distinguished by the greater breadth of its segments, and the location of the genital organs, which are found in the centre of each segment. Its small elongated head is unarmed, and has a longitudinal fissure on each side. It usually attains a greater length ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... calcareous tufa. One enormous fresh-water lake, in which probably sported the Dyconodon, was let off when the remarkable rent was made in the basalt which now constitutes the Victoria Falls. Another seems to have gone to the sea when a similar fissure was made at the falls of the Orange River. It is in this calcareous tufa alone that fossil animal remains have yet been found. There are no marine limestones except in friths which the elevation of the west and east coasts have placed far inland ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... went regularly to Les Touches. He paced round and round the lawn, where he had sometimes walked with Beatrix on his arm. He often went to Croisic to stand upon that fateful rock, or lie for hours in the bush of box; for, by studying the footholds on the sides of the fissure, he had found a means of getting ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... arms; thence to the middle is of brass. And downward all beneath well-temper'd steel, Save the right foot of potter's clay, on which Than on the other more erect he stands, Each part except the gold, is rent throughout; And from the fissure tears distil, which join'd Penetrate to that cave. They in their course Thus far precipitated down the rock Form Acheron, and Styx, and Phlegethon; Then by this straiten'd channel passing hence Beneath, e'en to the lowest depth of all, Form there Cocytus, of whose lake (thyself Shall see ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... tower at Tarascon. From below, the winking light of the guides going up, looked like a glow-worm on the march. He was forced to follow, however, for the snow beneath his feet was not solid, and gurgling sounds of circulating water heard round a fissure told of more than could be seen at the foot of that wall of ice, of depths that were sending upward the chilling ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... industries include not only very great acreage of coal measures, which have been producing coal for commercial purposes for local and foreign trade for thirty years and are scarcely scratched as yet, but also fissure veins of the precious metals—gold, silver, lead, [Page 63] copper, antimony, arsenic, and also iron, asbestos, fire clays, kaolin, granite, ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... that filled his throat he raised his little arm straight up, like a flag. And Clotilde kept her unconscious smile, seeing him so healthy, so rosy, and so plump, thriving so well on the nourishment he drew from her. During the first few weeks she had suffered from a fissure, and even now her breast was sensitive; but she smiled, notwithstanding, with that peaceful look which mothers wear, happy in giving their milk as ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... than that, it would have been necessary to suppose the roller channel placed beneath the level of the water, and it would consequently have been necessary to isolate this channel from the canal by a tight wall. The least fissure in the latter would have inundated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... were off. Into the storm they drove, head down, buffeted by a screaming wind laden with stinging sleet that swept howling across the lake. All about them they heard the sharp reports of cracking ice. At any moment a fissure might open, and its width might be an inch or several yards. In the blinding gale they could see nothing. Literally, they ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... this, for it told me how safe my hiding-place was, and showed that the opening was so curiously hidden that a stranger might pass it a hundred times and not see it. So I helped her to climb up the cliff until I got to a small platform, and afterward passed along the fissure between the rocks and drew her after me, and then, when she had followed me a few steps, she saw how cunningly Nature had concealed the place, and fearful as she was, she uttered a low exclamation of pleased surprise. For from this place we could see without being seen, ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... drop down fairly sharply on each side, and in the failing light there seems no object in following the stream any further, when quite suddenly the green slope on the right stands out from a scarred wall of rock beyond, and when we are abreast of the opening we find ourselves before a vast fissure that leads right into the heart of the fell. The great split is S-shaped in plan, so that when we advance into its yawning mouth we are surrounded by limestone cliffs more than 300 feet high. If one visits Gordale ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... one on each side of the chest, embracing the heart, (fig. 88,) and separated from each other by a membranous partition. The color of the lungs is a pinkish gray, mottled, and variously marked with black. Each lung is divided into lobes, by a long and deep fissure, which extends from the posterior surface of the upper part of the organ, downward and forward, nearly to the anterior angle of the base. In the right lung, the upper lobe is subdivided by a second fissure. This lung is larger and shorter ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... of the single phrases, taking first one and then another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to their ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... glance into this great fissure convinced them that it was impassable. Their hunt was at an end. They could go no farther. Such ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... followed the river across the great natural park; now paralleling its convolutions, and now cutting diagonals. Late in the afternoon we came to the end of the park land. A more or less precipitous formation of glistening quartz marked its boundary, and into a fissure of this the stream, now a small river, plunged with accelerated speed. The going became difficult. The walls of the fissure through which the river rushed were smooth and water-worn, impossible to ascend; and between the brink of the river ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... this suspense was followed by such delighted exclamations when the cake came out, done to a turn, so high, so delicately brown, and with a light golden fissure breaking through the warm swell, like the furrow in a hill-side, betraying the perfect lightness and spongy perfection at the centre—altogether, the whole thing was quite a household picture, a pleasant domestic scene, full ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... the head of the Barranca del Oro, a vast cleft that traversed the plain leading down to the deserted mine. This chasm, like a fissure caused by some terrible earthquake, extended for a distance of twenty miles. On either side was a trail; for on both the table-plain ran in horizontally to the very lips of the abyss. About midway to the mine, on the left brow, the guide knew of a spring, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... mountain falls abruptly away, its summit presenting a red and bare appearance, owing to the alternate action of summer sun and winter frost. As the slopes approach the valley they become clothed with a garb of wild vegetation, which bursts forth from every fissure, and finds a foothold on every projecting rock: the base of the mountain is hidden in a tangled mass of glowing green, which the moist yet sunny Spring calls forth in abundance whenever the slopes are not too steep to retain a ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... consequence of the wind and the thaw, and there was a sort of icy wave cast up near the land, over which it was indispensable to pass, in order to get fairly on the river. As the top of this ridge, or wave, was broken, it exposed a fissure that enabled us to see the thickness of the ice, and this Guert pointed out in proof of its strength. There was nothing unusual in a small movement of the covering of the river, which the current often produces; but, unless the vast fields below ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... the high road at the pretty little village of Evanton, and pursued the course of the river Auldgrande, first through intermingled fields and patches of copsewood, and then through a thick fir wood, to where the bed of the stream contracts from a boulder-strewed bottom of ample breadth, to a gloomy fissure, so deep and dark, that in many places the water cannot be seen, and so narrow, that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace their branches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by the river, and charged ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... length, hand in hand, even where no steep step or wide fissure gave reason for the clasp. But she seemed unconscious. They were nearing the last height, a bare eminence, when she broke from him and ran up the smooth stone. When he surmounted it she was standing ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... the dark place where the waters roared, opened a fissure in the rock, and into it poured the miniature cataract; I understood now the phenomenon of minor whirlpools for which the little river above was famous. Such were my impressions of that brief ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... am still strong enough to bear you!" The young man understood in an instant. His father propped himself up against the rock. Harry got upon his shoulders, so that with his pick he could reach the line of the fissure. Then with quick sharp blows he attacked it. Almost directly afterwards a slight sound was heard, like champagne escaping from a bottle—a sound commonly expressed by ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... the littered, ink-stained desk a man and a woman faced each other. Threads of gray lightened the hair of each. Faint lines, delicate as pencillings, marked the forehead of the woman and radiated from the angles of her eyes. A deep fissure unequally separated the brows of the man, and on his shaven face another furrow added firmness to the mouth. Their eyes met squarely, without a motion from faces imperturbable in middle age ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... yards long, and placing strong iron wedges at equal distances along this line; these wedges are struck in succession with heavy hammers, till the mass splits down. Another method of detaching masses of rock, is by driving wooden wedges into a deep artificial or natural crack, or fissure; the wedges are then wet, and, in consequence of ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... measured the chain—98 feet. Then I called in a couple of monks, locked the door, took a candle, and made them lower me in the bucket. When the chain was all paid out, the candle confirmed my suspicion; a considerable section of the wall was gone, exposing a good big fissure. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... green mosses that be-ruff the roofs of farm and cottage, when the sunbeam slants on them and goes. The old road out towards the common, and the hoary dikes that might have been built in the reign of Alfred, have not been forgotten by the generous adorning season; for every fissure has its mossy cushion, and the old blocks themselves are washed by the loveliest gray-green lichens in the world, and the large loose stones lying on the ground have gathered to themselves the peacefulest mossy coverings. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... led him through the midst of it towards a descent into a valley, from which there ascended a loathsome odour. They stood behind one of the tombs for a while, to accustom themselves to the breath of it; and then began to descend a wild fissure in a rock, near the mouth of which lay the infamy of Crete, the Minotaur. The monster beholding them gnawed himself for rage; and on their persisting to advance, began plunging like a bull when he is stricken by the knife of the butcher. They succeeded, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... denominated "the path of the dead." Phantoms flitted before him, shrieks appalled him, pitfalls and sacrificial knives threatened him. At last, after many frightful adventures, the aspirant arrived at a narrow stone fissure terminating the range of caverns, through which he was thrust, and was received in the open air, as a person born again, and welcomed with frantic shouts by the multitudes who had been waiting for him without during the process ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... northward. A single egg is laid in crevices among the rocks or in burrows in the ground. It is similar both in size and shape to that of the Puffins, but is often quite heavily blotched with brown. Size 2.70 x 1.80. Data.—Unak Is., Alaska, June 30, 1900. Egg laid in a fissure of the rocks; ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... anchored in the fissure, lean over the brink of the precipice, and look downward, a little to the left, on the belt of woods which covers the strand between the water and the base of the cliffs. Here a gang of axe-men are ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... problem how to get the wagons down that yawning fissure; the alternative being to retrace ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... zone of the cortex we now know to be situated in the convolutions bordering the fissure of Rolando. Vision is evidently excited from the occipital lobes, though not yet conclusively proved. Smell, presumably, is located in the temporal lobes. Considered action is directed from the upper hemispheres only. ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... only promised the desired information, but gave Dietrich the magic sword Nagelring, which alone could pierce the giants' skin. Then he led both heroes to the cave, where Grim and Hilde were gloating over a magic helmet they had made and called Hildegrim. Peering through a fissure of the rock, Hildebrand was the first to gaze upon them, and in his eagerness to get at them he braced his shoulder against the huge mass of stone, forced it apart, and thus made a passage for himself and for ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... cataract, breaking the stoutest supporting beams like glass. Quite recently, at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the collecting sewer under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or emptying the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal, water suddenly became abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was beyond the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send a diver to explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow entrance of the grand basin, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... penetrate small holes made in little sticks, one of which was cut into the shape here exactly copied (Fig. 55). The short end of the stick beyond the hole was purposely split, but not the opposite [page 75] end. As the wood was highly elastic, the split or fissure closed immediately after being made. After six days the stick and bean were dug out of the damp sand, and the radicle was found to be much enlarged above and beneath the hole. The fissure which was at first quite closed, was now open to a width of 4 mm.; as soon as ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... Gonye have not been made by wearing back, like those of Niagara, but are of a fissure form. For many miles below, the river is confined in a narrow space of not more than one hundred yards wide. The water goes boiling along, and gives the idea of great masses of it rolling over and over, so that even the most expert swimmer would find it difficult to keep on the surface. Here ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Through so slight a fissure as this piece of discontent cracked in him, the crowd of his grievances with the woman rushed pell-mell, deluging young shoots of sweeter feelings. She sulked! If that woman could not get the command, he was to know her incapable of submission. After besmutting the name she had filched ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... vehicle that ever man made could have passed up this new track. It was difficult for ridden horses, and our loaded beasts had to be given time. We seemed to be entering by a fissure into the womb of the savage hills that tossed themselves in ever-increasing grandeur up toward the mist-draped heights of Kara Dagh. Oftener than not our track was obviously watercourse, although now and then we breasted ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... game, is it?" mumbled Ta-Vwots. "I know a way out of this that you don't know." With a few puffs of his breath and a few kicks of his legs he reached a great fissure that led into the rock behind him, and along this passage he scrambled until he came to the edge of it in a niche, from which he could watch his enemies digging. When they had made the hole quite large he shouted, "Be buried in the grave you have ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the sun sets down the valley between the hills; when snow comes, it goes down behind the Cumberland and streams through a great fissure that people call the Gap. Then the last light drenches the parson's cottage under Imboden Hill, and leaves an after-glow of glory on a majestic heap that lies against the east. Sometimes it spans the Gap with ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... column or cone (see my elegant drawing) of lava [Figure 4]. I do not doubt that the dikes are thus indirectly connected with eruptive vents. E. de B. seems to have observed many of his T; now without he supposes the whole line of fissure or dike to have poured out lava (which implies, as above remarked, craters of an elliptic or almost linear shape) on both sides, how extraordinarily improbable it is, that there should have been in a single line of section so many intersections of points eruption; he must, I think, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... cried Gonzaga excitedly. "There from that fissure in the stone. Saw you nothing?" And he pointed to the ground at a ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... smooth sheet of ice, and as they neared the farther end of the lake Miss Goldthwaite turned aside to explore an opening between the trees. A moment more and Tom heard a crash, followed by a faint scream. He looked round, to see the edge of Miss Goldthwaite's fur cloak disappearing through a huge fissure in the ice! He had presence of mind to utter one wild, despairing cry, which re-echoed far off in the lonely pine wood, and then he plunged after her and caught her dress. Superhuman strength seemed to come ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... Southey's verses, though it is worthy of better poetry than that. After all, I do not know that the cascade is anything more than a beautiful fringe to the grandeur of the scene; for it is very grand,—this fissure through the cliff,—with a steep, lofty precipice on the right hand, sheer up and down, and on the other hand, too, another lofty precipice, with a slope of its own ruin on which trees and shrubbery have grown. The right-hand precipice, however, has ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... head with a blow from her inverted wand; and charms are repeated, the converse of the charms that had been uttered. The longer she chaunts them, the more erect are we raised from the ground; and the bristles fall off, and the fissure leaves our cloven feet; our shoulders return; our arms become attached[27] to their upper parts. In tears, we embrace him {also} in tears; and we cling to the neck of our chief; nor do we utter any words before those that ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... or, as it was sometimes, by a curious perversion, called, the "rock-in-spring," was a spring running out of a cave-like fissure in a high limestone cliff. Here the old man sheltered himself on that dreary Christmas evening, until Bud brought his roan colt to the top of the cliff above, and he and Ralph helped the old man up the cliff and into the saddle. Ralph ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... ruins, towards one of the dens formerly occupied by the wild beasts, and disclosed to us a set of beings scarcely less savage. The sombre walls of the gloomy abode were illumined by a fire the smoke from which escaped through a deep fissure in the mossy roof; whilst the flickering flames threw a blood-red glare on the bronzed features of a group of children, of two men, and a decrepit old hag, who appeared busily engaged in some ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... that wreathed so daintily With flow'rs each fissure Circumstance had formed, And, by its touch, like snows by sunsets warmed, Each rigid thought was ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... receptacle, is not long in increasing, preserving its rounded form up to the development of the asci. At this period, under the influence of the rapid growth of these organs, it soon produces at its summit a fissure of the external membrane, which becomes a more marked depression in the marginate species. The receptacle thus formed increases rapidly, becomes plane, more convex, or more or less undulated at the margin, if at all of large size. Fixed to the place where ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... washtub size made by the 75's to the great fissure-torn holes made by the big naval guns, and which would make an ample cellar for an ordinary dwelling house. I have seen horses which had fallen into these great holes shot and covered over because they could not be gotten out ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... after Barbee, yearning to shoot to kill and yet not daring to shoot at all. Blenham and Terry struggling upon the iron side of the mountain, Terry striking and striking at him frantically, Blenham with his arms about her, dragging her back toward a wide fissure in the rocks, the sun ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... waters from which Bath gets its fame are believed to owe their origin to the surface drainage of the E. Mendips, which percolates through some vertical fissure, perhaps at Downhead, to the heart of the hills, and are conducted by some natural culvert beneath the intervening coal measures, washing out as they go the soluble mineral salts, and whilst still retaining ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... regarded as coats of the nucleus; while in Podocarpus and Dacrydium, the outer cupula, as I formerly termed it,* may also, perhaps, be viewed as the testa of the ovulum. To this view, as far as relates to Dacrydium, the longitudinal fissure of the outer coat in the early stage, and its state in the ripe fruit, in which it forms only a partial covering, may be objected.** But these objections are, in a great measure, removed by the analogous structure already described ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... to be seen, and in the fissure made by the saint the flowers and ferns were still growing; but there did not appear to be any danger of the immediate fulfilment of the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... creeping around some gaping fissure, that opened across our track—there wading over a sandy swell—and anon rolling briskly along the smooth, herbless plain; for the country we were passing through was a ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... chestnuts, defective (incompatible?) unions can generally be spotted the first year. They develop with a transverse fissure into which the bark ingrows. Good unions show new tissue entirely around the closing wound; the final scar as healing approaches completion being vertical, i. e. longitudinal with the stock. This result can ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... Iguanodon was gradually built up by later discoveries, and in 1877 an extraordinary find in a coal mine at Bernissart in Belgium brought to light no less than seventeen skeletons more or less complete. These were found in an ancient fissure filled with rocks of Comanchic age, traversing the Carboniferous strata in which the coal seam lay, and with them were skeletons of other extinct reptiles of smaller size. The open fissure had evidently served as a trap into which these ancient giants had fallen, and either ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... vessel struck, now calm and peaceful after the storm, he shortened sail and rowed inshore. A little distance up the face of the red cliff, above the high-water mark, and hidden by a projecting rock, there was a "scurro," or fissure, which opened into a large cavern. He had discovered this cavern when he was a boy, on some bird-nesting expedition; and now, scarcely knowing why he did so—except, perhaps, for the passing thought that some of the wreckage had been washed into ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton |
