"Bottomless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... womanly course, as I hear. 'No,' says she, 'I'll go to bottomless brimstone before lendin' myself to such a dodge'—or words to that effect. 'But I'll tell 'ee what I will do,' says she, 'I'll offer this here silver cup on my own account, an' give it with my own hands to the winner. And you can stand by,' says she, 'an' look as pompous ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the chasm. To Helen's fancy it was bottomless, though in reality it was not more than forty feet deep, and the two walls fell away from each other at a practicable angle. In normal summer weather, a small crevasse always formed there owing to the glacier flowing over a transverse ridge of rock beneath. To-day the impact of many thousands of ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... a day on which the sun scarce cast a shadow, yet everything sent back his rays clearly, softened and sweetened, like the answer of an echo. It was a day for great deeds, such as were enacted before us; steel-strung frame pitted against steel-strung frame; bottomless endurance against its equal. And never were such jumpings, such prancings, such wild wavings of legs beheld by human eyes before. You cannot beat it into people's heads that the horned critters ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... to every thing—to good and bad; happiness and misery; hope, fear, faith and charity; even to a woman's mind, which I have sometimes fancied the most bottomless thing in nature. There may, therefore, well be a bottom even to the institutions ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... terrible that they scarcely bear the telling. I cannot be more particular; the whole bad business was hideous in the extreme, with all the hideousness that could come from a mind like Jensen's—a mind begotten of the Bottomless Pit. ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... failing arm. New Haven began to cave in. Doctors of Divinity, orthodox, heterodox, with only a doxy of doubt, 'no settled opinion,' had great alacrity in sinking, and went down quick, as live as ever, into the pit of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, the bottomless pit of lower law,—one with his mother, cloaked by a surplice, hid beneath his sinister arm, and an acknowledged brother grasped by his remaining limb. Fossils of theology, dead as Ezekiel's bones, took to their feet again, and stood up for most arrant wrong. ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... from absolute necessity. The town got through the summer season fairly well, but, as the winter that year proved to be an unusually rainy time, it soon became evident that something must be done. The streets became bottomless pits of mud. It is stated, as plain and sober fact, that in some of the main thoroughfares teams of mules and horses sank actually out of sight and were suffocated. Foot travel was almost impossible unless ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... our proof-reader, He can't call for him too soon." But his crudest device, "fatal," as his friend E.D. Cowen writes, "to the vengeance of every visitor who came with a threat of libel suit, and temporarily subversive of the good feeling of those friends he lured into its treacherous embrace, was a bottomless black-walnut chair." Its yawning seat was always concealed by a few exchanges carelessly thrown there—the floor being also liberally strewn with them. As it was the only chair in the room except the one Field occupied ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... of reaching Texas was a fearful one. Rivers that overran their banks, fever-stricken lowlands where gaunt faces peered out from moldering cabins, bottomless swamps where the mud oozed greasily and where the alligator could be seen slowly moving his repulsive form—all this stretched on for hundreds of miles to horrify and sicken the emigrants who came toiling on foot or struggling upon emaciated horses. Other daring pioneers came by ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... elder Wesley, no "seat of woe" on this side of the Bottomless Pit outrivalled Newgate except one. [Footnote: London Chronicle, 6 Jan. 1761.] The exception was Bristol jail. A filthy, evil-smelling hole, crowded with distempered prisoners without medical care, it was deservedly held in such dread as to "make all seamen ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... everybody ought to be a-praying. Not a day passes without something in the way of a warning. Now there is the big hole that they've just found in the earth right over yonder—a hollowness without end or bottom, and as dark as the bottomless pit. That's what it ought to be called, too—instead of the Mammoth Cave. For if that don't show that there is nothing but a dreadful, empty shell left of this awful world, I don't know what any true sign is. But all the same, I know ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... at the back of my thoughts, at the back of my heart. It is more like an artistic inspiration, one of those things that lie among the pleasant impulses of life. Right in the foreground I see the great groaning cycle of humanity being flung from the everlasting wheels into the bottomless abyss. I cannot take my eyes from the people, ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reluctant to do so, menace each other by threats and sabre-rattling, edging slowly forward, each hoping that his adversary will retreat rather than do battle"; but the Emperor's comparison was not exact, for one of these swordsmen had behind him a bottomless pit, ready to engulf him at the first backward step, so that having to choose between an ignominious death and a combat in which he might be successful he had to choose the latter. This was the situation in which Alexander found himself, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... Washington so trusted him that, when the dark days at Valley Forge were over, he placed him in command of the recaptured federal capital. Today the name of Arnold would rank high in the memory of a grateful country had he not fallen into the bottomless pit of treason. The same is in some measure true of Charles Lee, who was freed by the British in an exchange of prisoners and joined Washington at Valley Forge late in the spring of 1778. Lee was so clever with his pen as to be one of the ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... in the western sky at sunset, soft, elusive, fluent. To his rapturously shocked soul, it was a living thing. Instantly a spell was upon him; long he gazed into its depths. It was more than deep; it was bottomless. In some magic solution he there beheld himself and all the world; imperiously it commanded his being. To his ear utterance came from that lucent abyss, a murmur of voices, a confusion of tones; ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity. Between twelve and one that night a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering, brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank and woke, I thought all was over: the end come and ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of rock, which appeared to extend to the bottom. The sight of this horrible den acted as a "pretty considerable" sedative to our enthusiasm. Each exclaimed to himself, (at least I did for one) "Can I venture?"—as he contemplated the dismal, and, to all appearance, bottomless gulf, where nothing was visible but the strange figures of our guides at a prodigious distance beneath us, clinging to the wall with one hand, while they brandished their torches with the other. However, there was little space for reflection; and though, by this time, I shrewdly ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... further? This woman in the darkest hour of her bottomless and unhorizoned despair, with conscience gnawing at her heart, with present misery pressing on her breast, and shame to come hanging over her like a thunder cloud, could yet feel thankful that she had won this barren love, the spring of all her woe. ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... on his shirt-sleeve and hung his hat on the back of a bottomless chair. Jubal, who was rolling on the floor, gave a gurgle and made a grab at it, to be soundly boxed by his mother as she reseated him at Sairy Jane's feet. His gurgle wavered dolorously ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... aisy"—(here there was a sensation). "Ha! ha! that makes you open your ears, does it? More shame for you; you ought to despise that dirty enemy of man, and depend on something betther—but I see I must call you to a sense of your situation with the bottomless pit undher you, and no roof over you. Oh dear! dear! dear!—I'm ashamed of you—troth, if I had time and sthraw enough, I'd rather thatch the place myself than lose my time talking to you; sure the place is more like a ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... doubt, was this 'bottomless Whig.' When Johnson said 'so they all are now,' he was perhaps thinking of the Coalition Ministry in which Lord North and his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... imagined it to have the shape of an inverted round boat or bowl, the thickness of which would represent the mixture of land and water (ki-a) which we call the crust of the earth, while the hollow beneath this inhabitable crust was fancied as a bottomless pit or abyss (ge), in which dwelt many powers. Above the convex surface of the earth (ki-a) spread the sky (ana), itself divided into two regions:—the highest heaven or firmament, which, with the fixed stars immovably attached to it, revolved, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the circle, And with their tears besought him to hear what the Lord had done for them. Ever he shook them off, not roughly, nor smiled at their transports. Then the preachers spoke and painted the terrors of Judgment, And of the bottomless pit, and the flames of hell everlasting. Still and dark he stood, and neither listened nor heeded; But when the fervent voice of the white-haired exhorter was lifted, Fell his brows in a scowl of fierce and scornful rejection. ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... like a child; but he did as she bid, and so came safely through, while McFarlane set to work to blaze a new route which should avoid the slough which was already a bottomless ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... world is illustrated by the figure of a king, who, in the midst of ruins, places his foot upon the prostrate form of a chained victim; Happiness, with bandaged eyes, scatters treasures into the bottomless pit, a desperate youth being about to plunge into its depths; a kneeling woman, praying for light, sees brilliant figures soaring upward, their beauty charming roses from ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... gravestone which I knew well in a certain Sussex churchyard, the top of it carved into the rough resemblance of a human skeleton—that of a man, tradition said, who had been killed by a serpent that came out of a bottomless pool in the next field. How long I sat there I do not know; but at last I saw the faint gray light of morning begin to appear in front of me. The horse of death had carried me eastward. The dawn grew ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... mill again; the wheels were turning and stretching out ghostly hands to draw me into the yawning maw of the machine. Then again, I found myself in a long, low, pitch-black corridor, followed by Something I could not see—Something that drove me to the mouth of a bottomless abyss. I would start up out of my half sleep, listen and look about me, then fall back again into ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... ghastly phantasmagoria, pale to utter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoon in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidly grew. But still the Boreal moved, traversing, as it were, bottomless Eternity: and I reached latitude 72 deg., not far now from ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... the music of the Falls. Sometimes he saw her in his dreams, and through the long weeks in the hospital at the aviation camp when he had the fever she was with him constantly, beckoning, calling, luring him back to life when he was about to slip over the edge into the bottomless abyss, her laughter ringing in his ears after she had vanished into the mists. Then one night she and the fever had fled hand in hand and after that he could not recall her image, though her memory ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... then with the train divided into two sections steamed away for Marshall Pass, the huge rocks around us looking like grim battlements as they loomed up in the gathering darkness. Up and still up we climbed, the train running at times over chasms that seemed bottomless, upon slender bridges and then darting through narrow openings in the rocks that were but just wide enough for the train to pass. Reaching the summit of the pass, 10,858 feet above the sea level, we jumped from the coaches as the train ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... time in which to arrive. I am afraid that his temper got the better of him, and as the night drew on, unsolaced by a word from Froissart, and unrelieved by any literature more engrossing than old railway time-tables and hotel advertisements, he consigned to the Bottomless Pit the Chief of the Devonport Dockyard, the disgustingly virtuous and unenterprising Maynard, and even the harmless soul of his lately buried mother. Dawson in a royal ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... my wife and myself; and she will go over to England, but not I, or possibly incog. to Southampton, and then to Boscombe to see poor Lady Shelley. I am writing—trying to write in a Babel fit for the bottomless pit; my wife, her daughter, her grandson and my mother, all shrieking at each other round the house—not in war, thank God! but the din is ultra martial, and the note of Lloyd joins in occasionally, and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scarcely make headway against it, but after most strenuous effort we neared the village. We hoped to find shelter under a bridge, but found innumerable muddy streams running through the planks. So we resumed our plodding, slipping and sliding in the black, bottomless mud. ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... study—is for ever slammed in his face. Not that he will seriously try to open it; for with the ability to read the desire to read will have aborted. The distrust of the child, on which Western education is based, is a bottomless gulf in which educational effort, whatever form it may take or in whatever quarter it may originate, is for the most part swallowed up and made as though it had not been. The child who leaves school at the age of fourteen will ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... he said in a low voice. "I can touch the bottom—or a ledge, at all events; I will feel my way, and take care not to slip down into a bottomless pit." ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... same management was to be continued, and if the same ministers were to be again employed, a million a year would not be sufficient to carry on the exorbitant expenses so often and so justly complained of in this House." He deplored the vast sum "sunk in the bottomless gulf of secret service." "I heartily wish," he exclaimed, "that time, the great discoverer of hidden truths and concealed iniquities, may produce a list of all such—if any such there were—who have been perverted from their public duty by private pensions, who have been the hired ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... penny and his webs into a thread.—Take a fool's advice, neighbour Goldthred. Tempt not the sea, for she is a devourer. Let cards and cockatrices do their worst, thy father's bales may bide a banging for a year or two ere thou comest to the Spital; but the sea hath a bottomless appetite,—she would swallow the wealth of Lombard Street in a morning, as easily as I would a poached egg and a cup of clary. And for my kinsman's Eldorado, never trust me if I do not believe he has found it in the pouches of some such gulls as ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... to cause, until he reaches the first cause, the womb wherein was first generated the subsequent distant effect. So, likewise, they cannot realize that at the start the imperceptible deviation from the aim by and by widens to a bottomless gap until the aim is missed. Then the greatest and the most devoted sacrifices are useless. The legal conductors of the nation, since ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Caesar's vengeance on the house of Aulus?" A moment of silence followed. A bottomless abyss ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... soon he brought her gifts as well. Much he learned from her red, smart mouth. Much he learned from her tender, supple hand. Him, who was, regarding love, still a boy and had a tendency to plunge blindly and insatiably into lust like into a bottomless pit, him she taught, thoroughly starting with the basics, about that school of thought which teaches that pleasure cannot be be taken without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every look, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... the oxygen supply in their suits, and Stefens slipped back the sliding top of the jet boat. Out on the hull he secured a line to a projecting ring, and ordering Tom to stand by, he pushed himself off the ship into the bottomless ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... earth covering the roof. "Tcuka," earth, "katuto," to sit, and "atcvewata," one laid above another. Kiami An entire roof. Kwopku The fireplace. Kwitcki "Smoke-house," an inside chimney-hood. Sibvuttkmula A series of bottomless jars piled above each other, and luted together as a chimney-top. Sibvu A bottomless earthen vessel serving as a chimney pot. Bokci Any small hole in a wall, or roof, smaller than a doorway. Hitci An opening, such as a doorway. This term is also applied to ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... might have been expected when so many mysteries were credited to it, was commonly held to be bottomless. It is a very poor neighborhood indeed, that cannot show a pool with this distinction. Reuben, of course, knew the interpretation of the myth. He knew the Perdu was very deep. Except at either end, or close to the banks, no ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... The bottomless and abysmal nature of the human soul comes first into clear revelation in the Person of Christ, who is, Franck declares, truly and essentially both God and Man. In Christ the invisible, eternal, {55} self-existent God has clothed Himself with flesh and become Man, has made Himself visible and vocal ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... modest blushes, and bowers and meads. He always adds, "Wonderful boy!" to Chatterton's name as if it were a university degree (W.B.), and he invariably refers to Moore as the Bard of Erin, and to Milton as the Bard of Paradise—though Bard of the Bottomless Pit would be more appropriate. However, we are not concerned with Mr. Miller's language so much as with a very fruitful suggestion he throws out, that "it is surely worth while to trace a resemblance between the flower ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... eaten our breakfast in a cleft so close to the smoking crater that the empty bottles could be thrown directly into the bottomless deeps, we commenced our return journey. At first we took the same way as during the ascent, but afterwards held off to the right, down a much steeper and more difficult path than we had traversed before. The mountain side had here a slope of nearly forty-five degrees, and consisted of a quite loose ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... was only entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the benefits ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... pressure taken from it; mounts steadily, month after month, in practical success, and in height of humor in a still higher ratio. And in the course of the next Two Years rises to a great height indeed. Here—snatched, who knows with what difficulty, from that shoreless bottomless slough of an Austrian-Succession War, deservedly forgotten, and avoided by extant mankind—are some of the more essential phenomena, which Friedrich had to witness in those months. To witness, to scan with such intense interest,—rightly, at his peril;—and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and watched the small detachment of sailors carry the bodies down to the basin, and every one knew that Sancho Mendez and Dominic, heavily weighted, were rowed out to the middle and dumped into a bottomless grave. Some there were who declared that their bodies would sink for ages before reaching the bottom,—and no one thought of Sancho Mendez and Dominic without picturing them as gliding deeper and deeper into the endless ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Caesar was the flower of the Latin race. Nothing approximates him. Great qualities cluster in him like stars in the deep sky. But his ambition was like to that of Milton's Satan, and his lust was a bottomless pit. As a national heroic figure, Julius Caesar is dazzling as a sun at summer noon; but as a gentleman he cuts poorer figure than Lancelot or Sir Tristram. The gentleman is not an evolution, but a creation. Christ created the gentleman as certainly ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the bottomless pit, extending clear across the plain to the distant jungle. An enormous canyon cloven in the earth, filled with the slowly settling cloud ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... then a thing happened—it still haunts me in my dreams. I had turned my head to look at Cavor's face, and thrust out my hand in front of me as I did so. And my hand met nothing! I plunged suddenly into a bottomless hole! ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... in at the door of the magician's shop, he was busy with some scraps of leather. Around him were bottomless chairs, topless tables, and melancholy sofas with sagging springs exposed to view, and in one corner a tall, empty clock-case. With his spectacles on the tip of his nose and a pair of large shears in his hand, Morgan might have sat for the picture of ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... congregates, and when he throws in his hook it is dollars to buttons that "in the near future" he will get a bite. The bullhead is democratic in all its instincts. If the boy's shirt is sleeveless, his hat crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit, the bullhead will bite just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple and fine linen, with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head seems to be dozing—bulldozing we might say—on the muddy bottom, and a stranger might ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... pushed open the door, I observed that the nurse had procured a red silk shade to screen the single electric lamp on the table. The yellow rays were changed to a pink, reflected on the wall, sending their rosy lights into the depths of that bottomless blue; the breaking of a clear day after a spring rain has no softer mingling of colors. For a moment I looked at the chart, then with new hope ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... sled was a nightmare. It weighed a thousand tons. The very first afternoon out from Anvik, when in the desperate hauling and tugging that rescued it from a bottomless snow-drift, the lashing slipped, the load loosened, tumbled off, and rolled open, the Colonel stood quite still and swore till his half-frozen blood circulated freely again. When it came to repacking, he considered in detail ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... won big, he lost big; but he won always more than he lost, and what he paid out at one game with one hand, he drew back with his other hand at another game. His winnings from the Comstock he sank into the various holes of the bottomless Daffodil Group in Eldorado County. The wreckage from the Benicia Line he turned into the Napa Consolidated, which was a quicksilver venture, and it earned him five thousand per cent. What he lost in the collapse of the Stockton boom was more than balanced ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... original package to be counted, and also, if cement barrels are to be used in measuring the sand and stone, he should specify what a "barrel" is to be. When the concrete is to be mixed by hand the better practice is to measure the sand and stone in bottomless boxes of the general type shown by Fig. 10 and of known volume, and then specify that a bag of cement shall be called 1 cu. ft., 0.6 cu. ft., or such other fraction of a cubic foot as the engineer may choose. The contractor then has a definite basis on which to estimate ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... one material thing was hunger, the two spiritual things were a feeble love for Clare, and a strong horror of water of any seeming depth. Now a new element was added to this terror by the meddling of the moon in the fiendish mystery—the secret of which must, I think, have been the bottomless depth she ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... of all kinds, washed down by the current, grind and wear away the rock. In course of time great depths are hollowed out, and if it happens that some obstacle turns the course of the water, and the river finds a new outlet, a long deep gallery is left dry, and here and there an apparently bottomless pit where the water has acted on specially soft stone. From above, also, a steady action of moisture has been eating away the cliff, adding height to the cavern, as well as coating its roof and sides with a sparkling substance ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... believe that the sun revolved round the earth, and that he who thought otherwise was an Infidel, and would be damned in the "bottomless pit." But now—! Now they declare that Christ was God, and His mother a virgin; that three persons are one person; that those who trust in Jesus shall go to Heaven, and those who do not trust in Jesus will be "lost." And if ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... to elude all possibility of discovery and exposure. That mother who intrusts her daughter to a nunnery school, is chargeable with the high crime of openly conducting her into the chambers of pollution, and the path to irreligion, and the bottomless pit. ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... him know the truth, for I knew that if he suspected he was merely doing a good turn for the chum he left behind him, he, like the Home Secretary himself, without the right kind of inducement would have left his friend to stop where he was until the bottomless pit was frozen over hard enough to hold a barbecue on it. Barton, by my directions, told Smith of his good fortune, and that he hoped on his father's return to be liberated. Smith then did exactly ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... in that instant encountered a full, straight, intense look from her—a look that weighed, and wondered, and searched, and was piercingly, almost unbearably eager and wistful. He felt himself engulfed, as it were, in the bottomless depths of that long, clear gaze, that went over him like the surge of great waters, and drenched his consciousness to the core. Brand-new Eve might have looked thus at brand-new Adam, sinlessly, virginally, yet with an avid and fearful questioning and curiosity. For the second his ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... slippers, rose-coloured Turkish trousers (got cheap from somebody who had cheated some other somebody out of them), and a gown and cap to correspond. In that costume he would have left nothing to be desired, if he had been further fitted out with a bottomless chair, a lantern, and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... had been hollow to its root, and beneath the root a chasm bottomless, and that Plutus in that Narbonne jar had served as a supper to Pluto in the shades! Better had it been for thee, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... them long ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,—so have their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to do it. "But then the house'll be mine," she declared. "And if I make money on it, I must be allowed to spend it just as I like. It's not to go into your bottomless common ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... answer. She was trembling. Perhaps her nerves had been overwrought. The Punch-Bowl looked to her like the Bottomless Pit. ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... four minutes' walk to reach the base of the other cone and about twelve to ascend to its apex; on arrival at the brink, where we remained about two minutes, we had just sufficient time to observe that there was no deep hole or bottomless gouffre as we expected, but that it formed a crater with a sort of slant and not exceeding thirty feet in depth to the bottom, which looked exactly like a lime-kiln, being of a dirty white appearance, and in continual agitation, as it were of limestones boiling; so ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... footsteps. Imagination furrowed the floor of that place with bottomless crevices, and the cold hand of fear gripped our hearts. It required a mental effort to move one foot past the other, and whenever one of the girls stumbled, her little cry of alarm brought untold agony to Holman and myself as we took a ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... did, this income would have sufficed had there not been a bottomless hole always open in their house—kind-hearted generosity. It dried up the money in their hands as the sun dries the water in marshes. It flowed, fled, disappeared. How? No one knew. Frequently one would say to the other, "I don't know how it happens, but I have spent one ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds' pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.... In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... The pockets appeared to be practically bottomless, as Pat hauled out handful after handful till the skirt of Jane's neat little traveling dress began to ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... are surely selling me a bottomless pit [6], and not a landed estate. But if you are coming, ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... which my imagination had pictured as bottomless, proved to be not more than a hundred feet in depth; but as its walls were smoothly polished it might as well have been a thousand feet, for I could never hope to escape without ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... The scampering hoofs scarcely seemed to touch the ground at all. Like shadows they fled through the rising mist. It struck chill upon her face as they swooped downwards. She seemed to be plunging into an icy, bottomless abyss. ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... he posted a line to Hugh Carnaby. 'Is there any way in which I can be of use to you? If you think not, I shall be off tomorrow to Greystone for a few days. I feel as if we were all being swept into a ghastly whirlpool which roars over the bottomless pit. Of course, I will stay if I can do anything, no matter what. Otherwise, address for a week ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... march far exceeded those of any previous campaigns by the cavalry. Almost incessant rains had drenched us for sixteen days and nights, and the swollen streams and well-nigh bottomless roads east of Staunton presented grave difficulties on every hand, but surmounting them all, we destroyed the enemy's means of subsistence, in quantities beyond computation, and permanently crippled the Virginia Central railroad, as well ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... so wide and deep that the superstitious Romans viewed it with awe and affright. Whether it was due to an earthquake or the wrath of the gods is not for us to say. The Romans believed the latter; those who prefer may believe the former. But, so we are told, it seemed bottomless. Throw what they would in it, it stood unfilled, and the feeling grew that no power of man could ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... prostrated my health. Dethronement of my reason was apprehended by friends. But he was sincere, so peace to his ashes! Returning home, I often at night roused my father from his slumbers to pray for me, lest I should be cast into the bottomless pit before morning. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... again as eyes. Looking up into them, you saw them clearly; the rest of the person they belonged to arrived quite a little while after her eyes were there. Such eyes—neither grey, nor brown, nor violet, but a mingling of all these colours, and deepening as you gazed up into them into bottomless lakes of love. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... said Suleiman to the Caliph, "I will take no further coin from you, for the rapacity of the Governor is like a bottomless pit that would swallow all that ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... Harris, growing suddenly furious, "no! a thousand times! I'd sooner see her in the burning depths of the bottomless pit than have you get within a hundred miles of her with your contaminating presence. She is safely hidden away, and that forever, from the companionship of our sex. So let her be till death ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... corner after the two-hours sermons and the thirty-minutes prayers were done; of the utter absence of all cheerful themes or thoughts on the holy days which they so straitly remembered to keep; of the visions of sudden death, and the bottomless pit thereafter, which haunted the child through long nights; of the sighing for green fields and the singing of birds, on some summer Sundays, when the sun was warm and the sky was fair; and the clapping of the old-fashioned ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and a persevering one. No discomfort or risk discouraged him. Once, with a single daring companion, he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea, racing across the burning lava, leaping wide and bottomless crevices where a misstep would have meant death. His open-air life on the river and in the mining-camps had nerved and hardened him for adventure. He was thirty years old and in his physical prime. His mental growth had been slower, but ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Hide a still deeper curse. Ring then, ye cymbals, enliven this dream! Ye horns, shout a fiercer, more vulture-like scream! And jump, caper, leap, prance, dance yourselves out of breath! For your life is all art; Love has given you no heart: Therefore shout till ye plunge into bottomless death. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... twist, and twine, and wreathe itself like a mist of threads about him, and blind him to everything but her. Then the body will rise up within it, face to face with him, animated by a fiend, who, twining her arms around him, will drag him down to the bottomless pit." ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... the meantime the boat sank deeper; forty-five meters were passed—the pointer indicated forty-eight meters. I began to think the depth of the Chesapeake Bay must have some limit; we surely could not be heading for the bottomless pit? Then—the boat halted at a depth of fifty meters ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet in these decades such company over a pipe! We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic—his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... marching that human nature ever experienced. The dust that had accumulated by the armies passing over on their march to Gettysburg was now a perfect bog, while the horses and vehicles sinking in the soft earth made the road appear bottomless. We would march two or three steps, then halt for a moment or two; then a few steps more, and again the few minutes' wait. The men had to keep their hands on the backs of their file leaders to tell when to move and when to halt. The night being so dark and rainy, we could not see farther than "the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... vapor breaks out, is one of the most sacred in the ancient world. Here are the Lucrine Lake, the Elysian Fields, the cave of the Cumean Sibyl, and the Lake Avernus. This entrance to the infernal regions was frozen over the day I saw it; so that the profane prophecy of skating on the bottomless pit might have been realized. The islands of Procida and Ischia continue and complete this side of the bay, which is about twenty miles long as the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... preparation used in all hospitals to relieve the severe burning in the throat caused by gas. Of all the unpleasant experiences that I had at war, this throat swabbing was the worst. It seemed to me like the surgeon who performed this act had found in my throat a bottomless pit, and as the swab went up and down my burning esophagus, I suffered great agony. Although I knew this treatment was necessary, if I was to recover speedily from the gas burns, I ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... time, but what might they not expect now! From the moment he believed Michael Nikolaievitch no longer guilty, as he had imagined, Rouletabille fell into a bottomless abyss. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... interior, to which, when it is dry, a coat of white gypsum is applied (all with strokes of the bare hands), giving the room a clean, fresh appearance. In one corner of the room is built a fireplace and chimney, the latter often extended above the roof by piling bottomless jars one upon the other, a quaint touch, reminding one of the picturesque ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... myself in the bottomless profundity of Gilbert's papers. Fire, and water, and cubes, and sybils, and Mother Church, &c. &c. Poor fellow. I have been introduced to a man, not unlike him in his ideas,—Taylor the Pagan, a most devout Heathen! who seems to have some hopes of me. He is ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... foot of which runs a river with golden sands, in the vicinity of which there are likewise mines of silver. This mountain is steep, and almost inaccessible. On its top, which is always covered with ice and snow, is a black and bottomless lake, into which if a stone be thrown, a tempest suddenly rises; and near this lake, though invisible to men, is the porch of the palace of daemons. In a town adjacent to this mountain, named Junchera, lived one Peter ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... a thing for a gentleman to put into the head of a poor criminal scrambling out of the bottomless pit as it were! Oh, shame on you, sir! Oh, God forgive you! [He throws himself into the big chair and covers his face as ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... picture. He was like a man who has been groping his way through difficult paths in the dark—uneasy, it may be, and nervous, but with no serious alarm. On a sudden, a storm-flash may reveal to him that he is on the very edge of a precipice or already ankle-deep in some bottomless morass. The sight of his own face, interpreted with all Morewood's penetrating insight and mastery of hand, had been a revelation to him. No more mercilessly candid messenger could have been found. Arguments he would have resisted or confuted; appeals to ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... earthquake, but nothing seemed to fill it up, and the priests and augurs consulted their oracles about it. These made answer that it would only close on receiving of what was most precious. Gold and jewels were thrown in, but it still seemed bottomless, and at last the augurs declared that it was courage that was the most precious thing in Rome. Thereupon a patrician youth named Marcus Curtius decked himself in his choicest robes, put on his armor, took his shield, sword, and spear, mounted his horse, and leapt headlong ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... at all,—when, I say, the purchase was consummated, and an inventory of my remaining assets made, I discovered that the two cows had swallowed up nearly my entire estate, and that a few dollars of farther expenditure would plunge me into bottomless insolvency. I must confess that this disclosure of my financial condition added zest to the undertaking, and filled me with that fine excitement which accompanies a desperate speculation. I have always felt that another cow would have made a financier of me, and that I could have taken my place ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world—one would rather be running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. I hear the midnight mail go by—that same still face before it, the great human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... me; it is better to fall down a precipice and die than be laughed at by such a woman; so I clenched my teeth, and in another instant I was on that horrible, narrow, bending plank, with bottomless space beneath and around me. I have always hated a great height, but never before did I realise the full horrors of which such a position is capable. Oh, the sickening sensation of that yielding board resting ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... finished, he hurried away like a haunted man. There was little room in his mood for sustained thought: his wits were fathoming a bottomless pit of black despair. He felt like a man born blind, through skilful surgery given the boon of sight for a day or two, and suddenly and without any warning thrust ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... haymaker on its banks. He told us that the silver eel was formerly abundant here, and pointed to some sunken creels at its mouth. This man's memory and imagination were fertile in fishermen's tales of floating isles in bottomless ponds, and of lakes mysteriously stocked with fishes, and would have kept us till nightfall to listen, but we could not afford to loiter in this roadstead, and so stood out to our sea again. Though we never trod in those meadows, but only ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... eastwards were several high red sandhills; to these we went and dug another well and got more brine. We could see the lake stretching away east or east-south-east as far as the glasses could carry the vision. Here we made another attempt to cross, but the horses were all floundering about in the bottomless bed of this infernal lake before we could look round. I made sure they would be swallowed up before our eyes. We were powerless to help them, for we could not get near owing to the bog, and we sank up over our knees, where the crust was broken, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... Instinct indicated a delicate harmony between those events and the formless shadow to which Sally had all along been sensitive, of something equivocal in the pretensions of Mrs. Standish. But that clue played will-o'-the-wisp with her fancy, leading it ever farther astray in a bottomless bog of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... again. They had been close together half-an-hour earlier, and he had sedulously avoided touching hers. He dared not let such an accident happen now. And yet—surely she saw the situation! Was the inscrutable seriousness with which she applied herself to his lesson a mockery? There was such a bottomless depth in her eyes that it was impossible to guess truly. Let it be that destiny alone had ruled that their hands should be ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... into the dust-heap. I have been taken up to the gate of heaven and dropped a hundred and fifty years through darkness. Since I have seen you I have been the round of all the bright places and all the bottomless pits in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... murderous assault on the market people felt to me like Gehenna, without the fire and brimstone; but the heat was oppressive, and the firearms pouring their iron bullets on the fugitives, was not an inapt representative of burning in the bottomless pit. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... fox!" he cried. "If I had my hand under your twist, I would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit." ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... you the Lord only knows! They say that it is a bottomless abyss, with no outlet but one crooked one, miles long, that reaches to the Demon's Punch Bowl. But if there is a bottom to that abyss, that bottom is strewn with ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... and departed, saying, 'We have seen the fiend sailing in a bottomless ship; let us go home and pray;' but one young and wilful man said, 'Fiend! I'll warrant it's nae fiend, but douce Janet Withershins the witch, holding a carouse with some of her Cumberland cummers, and mickle red wine will be spilt atween ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... with such results as might be expected. The day I reached Seoul, one of its older citizens, standing on the banks of the Han just outside the ancient walls, remarked, "When I was young this was called the Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places nearly filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great damage was done by overflows right ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Mockery! She mocks at me as I weep!" That appeared incredible to me. All the memories of the past clustered about my heart when I thought of it. I seemed to see, one after the other, the specters of our nights of love; they hung over a bottomless eternal abyss, black as chaos, and from the bottom of that abyss there burst forth a shriek of laughter, sweet but mocking, that said: ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... contention—evil speaking of surmisings among professors, are tokens of a carnal mind, injurious to spiritual peace, and abominable to God. The envious, discontented, and malicious, are the devil's working tools. If such die unsubdued by divine grace, they plunge themselves into the bottomless pit. True wisdom avid strife and contention, is moderate in doubtful opinions, patient and cautious ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 70 We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin, Even as a vulture and a snake outspent Drop, twisted in inextricable fight, Into a shoreless sea. Let hell unlock Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire, 75 And whelm on them into the bottomless void This desolated world, and thee, and me, The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck Of that for which they combated. Ai, Ai! The elements obey me not. I sink 80 Dizzily down, ever, for ever, down. And, like a cloud, mine enemy above Darkens ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Ugh—he shivered—it was cold. Then an unreasoning terror took hold of him: he was only half-awake as yet. What could that dreadful gap be in the wall of his room, blacker than the darkness? Surely it was a bogey hole leading down to the bottomless pit? The next minute he laughed at his fears, as we usually do when we come safely out of nightmare land and feel the earth—or bed ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... between those that have taken sanctuary in Christ, and the bottomless pit, an invincible and mighty wall of grace and heavenly power, and of the merits of Christ to save to the utmost all and every one that are thus ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... up by their own war of words, grew vehement; and for the first time the unhappy artist reproached his benefactress for having rescued him from death only to make him lead the life of a galley slave, worse than the bottomless void, where at least, said he, he would have found rest. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... once the sound of his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions and the sense of masculine society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness about the male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottomless bucket; thought plunges into a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman against the Public House—that is, against the Parliament House. She is there to prevent waste; and the "pub" and the parliament are the very palaces of waste. In the ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. ...
— Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Lyman Carrier
... the vessels plunged through the fantastic horizon which the evening mist had made the sailors mistake for a shore. They kept rolling on through the boundless and bottomless abyss. Gradually terror and discontent once more took possession of the crews. They began to imagine that the steadfast east wind that drove them westward prevailed eternally in this region, and that when the time came to sail ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... a poor hand myself at reading writing, I would swear that we hold in our hands the discharge of some soldier of Mohammed who is now in the bottomless pit." ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... Ross hung on grimly. He wanted to shout, but no sound came from his parched tongue. He was bewildered. It seemed as if he were in the throes of a terrible nightmare, and that he would awake on finding himself falling into a bottomless abyss. ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... and Abel and running through the entire scripture a record of the conflict caused by the enmity between the seed of woman and that of her seducer. This conflict is to end when Christ the "seed of the woman" shall return to reign and shall cast his adversary into the bottomless pit. Along with this promise he also provided for them garments of the skins of animals such as were suited to their new and hostile environment and in which most writers find a suggestion of the covering ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... worse than they had expected, for all their experience in jungle and mountain traveling. In places it was necessary to dismount and lead the mules along, sometimes pushing and dragging them. More than once the trail fairly hung on the edge of some almost bottomless gorge, and again it wound its way between great walls of rock, so poised that they appeared about to topple over and crush the travelers. But they kept on with dogged ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall relate unto you in ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... passed his lips and we all bowed down below the level of the gunwale, the roar of the sea seemed hushed in the dead stillness that ensued; and then, with a wild shriek that sounded like the moaning of some lost soul from the bottomless pit, the wind, which had been gathering up all its strength in the interim, burst upon us, burying the cutter's bows as it ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... been there. So I have no doubt for the present the Pagan remains stubborn. Gone on into Italy I hear; doing me, violating the laws of Nature, and roving about the world, with his own solitary hands in his bottomless pockets,—like the wandering Jew! But, as some slight set-off in my run of ill-luck, I find at the post-office a pleasanter letter than the one which brings me this news. A rich elderly lady, who has no family, wants to adopt a nice child; will take Sophy,—make it worth my while ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... listened gravely. His receptiveness was enormous. Information dropped into him as into a bottomless pit, vanishing ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... idleness. These be they that when they have drawn men's wives to such incontinency, spend away their husbands' goods, make the women to run away from their husbands, bringing both man, wife, and children to idleness, theft, and beggary. Yea, who is able to number the great broad bottomless ocean sea full of evils that this mischievous generation may bring upon us ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Dill asked me yesterday if I did n't want to take Gran'ma Mullins to board for the honeymoon, an' I suppose I could maybe do it, but oh my! I can't say as I take to that idea much. I 'm fond o' Gran'ma Mullins, but these days Hiram is nothin' but a bottomless pit when she gets at him, 'n' a honeymoon is a long time to hear one person talk about one person. I can 't say as I ever had anythin' again Hiram except that time 't he did n't catch Jathrop to lynch him, but all the same I ain't over fond o' any one as goes around with their mouth half-open ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... leave the more room in your boundless heart for God and for your brother. All that God has made, or could make with all His counsel and all His power laid out, will not fill your boundless and bottomless heart. He must come down and come into your boundless and bottomless heart Himself. Himself: your Father, your Redeemer, and your Sanctifier and Comforter also. Let the whole universe try to fill your heart, O man of God, and after it all we shall hear ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... As to the terrific roar of the explosion, I do not think I heard it. But the form of the rocks completely changed in my eyes—they seemed to be drawn aside like a curtain. I saw a fathomless, a bottomless abyss, which yawned beneath the turgid waves. The sea, which seemed suddenly to have gone mad, then became one great mountainous mass, upon the top of ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... direction, you found a range of low thatched houses on each side of the road: and if one o'clock, the hour of dinner, drew near, you might observe columns of blue smoke curling up from a row of chimneys, some made of wicker creels plastered over with a rich coat of mud; some, of old, narrow, bottomless tubs; and others, with a greater appearance of taste, ornamented with thick, circular ropes of straw, sewed together like bees' skeps, with a peel of a briar; and many having nothing but the open vent above. But the smoke by no means escaped by its ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... of the trunk, but apparently there were none; with his middle finger he could find no bottom; for it was stopped by a dense stratum of MS.; below which, you know, other strata might lie ad infinitum. For anything proved to the contrary, the trunk might be bottomless. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... hour; Ne'er will I view that ruthful spectacle, For with my sword, this sharp curtleaxe, I'll cut in sunder my accursed heart. But O! you judges of the ninefold Styx, Which with incessant torments rack the ghosts Within the bottomless Abissus' pits, You gods, commanders of the heavenly spheres, Whose will and laws irrevocable stands, Forgive, forgive, this foul accursed sin! Forget, O gods, this foul condemned fault! And now, my sword, that ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... desert moorlands, and came, after three days, to the bleak hill-country, and the rugged mountain-land of the South. There the earthquake had split the mountains apart, and dug dark and bottomless gorges, and hollowed out many a low-walled cavern, where the light of day was never seen. Through deep, winding ways, and along narrow crevices, Loki crept; and he glided under huge rocks, and downward through slanting, crooked ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... coolness and skill of a young goddess all would have failed. This goddess was named Lu-o. She had been idly watching the growth of the planet, when, to her horror, she saw the newly made ball slipping slowly from its place. In another second it would have shot down into the bottomless pit. Quick as a flash Lu-o stopped it with her magic wand and held it firmly until the chief god came dashing up to ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... confirmed me in the idea which had already occurred to me, that you are possessed by the foul fiend himself, sent hither by the enemy of mankind to destroy my brother—I wish to see that face whereon the bottomless pit has written its blackest traces; I wish to behold the fire of that fatal gaze which bewilders men's minds. ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the vanishing ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... ancestry, a good wife, luck, and a friend with insight and skill, pulled Aleck Gray out of that bottomless pit, the gutter. Aleck had been a bookkeeper; but he didn't get on well with his employers, lost his job, got to drinking, and went so far downhill that his wife had to take their two children and go home to her people several hundred miles away. Aleck ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... it will be an easy matter with your hands to force the sharpened ends of your upright posts A, B, C, and D down into the yielding mud, but be careful not to push them too far because in some of these marshes the mud is practically bottomless. It is only necessary for the supports to sink in the mud far enough to make them ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... Thor tried to empty the famous drinking-horn in the games of Utgard, but to his surprise he found that, though the horn looked small, he could not empty it, for it turned out that the horn was immersed in the limitless and bottomless ocean. Again he tried to lift a small and insignificant-looking animal, but, labour as he might, he could not lift it, for it was grown into, and was organic with, the whole world, and could not be raised without raising the very ground on which the lifter stood! Somewhat so, the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... So it shaped itself before me, the vision of reconciling Mrs. Ambient with her husband, of putting an end to their great disagreement The project was absurd, of course, for had I not had his word for it—spoken with all the bitterness of experience—that the gulf that divided them was wellnigh bottomless? Nevertheless, a quarter of an hour after Mark had left us, I said to his wife that I could n't get over what she told me the night before about her thinking her husband's writings "objectionable." I had been so very sorry to hear it, had thought of it constantly, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... to their Christian ideal of saintliness. Their interpretation of the Christian spirit may be the best and truest. Yet the ideal must become flesh. Let them not be proud of their not having pride, and exclusive because God chose them to understand the bottomless deepness of the esoteric Christianity. By pride towards the proud and by exclusiveness they may spoil and darken their ideals and remain ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... she meant to introduce me, I had spent seventeen hundred and sixty francs out of the two thousand I brought from Angouleme, the money so hardly scraped together. 'How did you spend it?' you will ask. Paris is a strange bottomless gulf, my poor sister; you can dine here for less than a franc, yet the simplest dinner at a fashionable restaurant costs fifty francs; there are waistcoats and trousers to be had for four francs and two francs each; but a fashionable tailor never charges less than a hundred francs. You pay for ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... earth, drawn as it were to a single apex, without any neighbouring mountain for the senses and imagination to rest upon, and recover from their astonishment in their way down to the world—and this point, or pinnacle raised on the brink of a bottomless gulf, often discharging rivers of fire, and throwing out burning rocks, with a noise that shakes the whole island. Add to this, the unbounded extent of the prospect, comprehending the greatest diversity, and the most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... night I could still see him by lifting the grass; and as the weather changed again to warm, with southerly winds before morning, he stopped digging entirely. The next day I took him out, and put him into a bottomless tub sunk into the ground and filled with soft earth, leaves, and leaf mould, where he passed the winter safely, and came out fresh and bright ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... no game in the valley. In its centre was a solitary lake, black and bottomless, and haunted by a giant white water-snake, sluggish, blind and very old. Stray prospectors swore they had seen it, just at dusk, and its sightless, staring eyes were too ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... impostures before which they bow down. He is a mariner who, on the sea of life, keeps his gaze fixedly on a single star; and if that do not shine, he lets go the rudder, and glories when his barque descends into the bottomless gulf. ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... The planter often has some rough check-weighing system. Thus, for example, he notes the number of standard baskets of wet cacao put into the fermentary, and he measures the fermented cacao produced with the help of a bottomless barrel. By this means he finds that on fermentation the beans lose weight by the draining away of the "sweatings," according to the amount and juiciness of the pulp round them. The beans are still very wet, and on drying lose a high percentage of their ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp |
