"Rayless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... captain, and uncomfortable to all of us. All possible documents are produced for their satisfaction,—bill of lading, bill of health, and so on. Still they persevere in tormenting the whole ship's crew, and regard us, when we pass, with all the hatred of race in their rayless eyes. "Is it a crime," we are disposed to ask, "to have a fair Saxon skin, blue eyes, and red blood?" Truly, one would seem to think so; and the first glance at this historical race makes clear to us the Inquisition, the Conquest of Granada, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... the sun's approach, a huge figure made haste along the narrow streets in the northern part of the town. If any person had been looking out through the little holes, called windows, in those silent and rayless huts, it would have been easy to recognize M. Roussillon by his stature and his gait, dimly outlined as he was. A thought, which seemed to him an inspiration of genius, had taken possession of him and was leading him, as if by the nose, straight away to Hamilton's ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... her ebon throne In rayless majesty now stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world... Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause; An awful pause, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... in a mood for no more speech but sat in this rayless cavern of a hold and strove to hear any sounds which might indicate the course of events on deck. There was no hubbub of firearms nor the cries of wounded men. It was foolish to assume that the dozen seamen who had been left to keep the ship ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... exchange from the black, rayless shadows that surrounded them would be a relief; and it was with a faint feeling of hopefulness—that they recognized their movement northward, which slowly increased in speed as the tide gained mastery of the slight natural ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... spurred her horse on, letting her thoughts run away with her, unwilling that he should overtake her until she had got herself well in hand; and Carew followed behind, feeling again that sense of a black, rayless abyss all about him. Why had he looked full and deep into her eyes like that?... Why had he not gazed only upon the mountains that soothed and refreshed him?... The mere discovery that the past he thought to have outlived slept so lightly ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... night; Again he met his mother's eye, As erst in joyous days and bright, And heard the accents clear and mild, Now hushed in death, breathe o'er her child A fervent blessing and a prayer; Again his father's silver hair Gleamed on his sight, although the tomb Had closed him in its rayless gloom. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... there came in a drowsy amble an old white bob-tail horse, his polished coat shining like silver when he crossed an expanse of sunlight, fading into spectral paleness when he passed under the rayless trees; his foretop floating like a snowy plume in the light wind, his unshod feet, half-covered by the fetlocks, stepping noiselessly over the loamy earth; the rims of his nostrils expanding like flexible ebony; and in his eyes that look ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... ever shut in by a fog? Lost at mid-day in a soundless, rayless world of nebulous vapor—so seemingly alone in the universe that your voice found no echo, and your ears caught no footfall in all the vast domain of silence about you? The other morning, when I left the house, I paused in wonderment at the strange world into which I was ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... pressing forward, drove the miserable wretches below; where, without light and air, they were locked and barred like felons, in a space too limited to permit their living during the long voyage before them. Think of eight hundred and fifty human beings all full grown men, pressed into this contracted, rayless, airless dungeon, in which they were to be deported from China to Havana, all the long way over the China sea, the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... must also be considered, that this doctrine, which throws such darkness over the future, also sends down a rayless night over the present. It refutes every theodicy; it nullifies every solution of evil. The consolation for the sufferings of this world is, that the fashion of this world passes away, and that there is ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... through the dim profound, With melancholy aspect looks the orb Of stifled day, and while he strives to pierce And dissipate the slow reluctant gloom, Seems but a rayless globe, an autumn moon, That gilds opaque the purple zone of eve, And yet distributes of her thrifty beam. Lo! now he conquers; now, subdued awhile, Awhile subduing, the departed mist Yields in a brighter beam, or darker clouds His crimson ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... disc of the sun appears a vast electric light of overpowering rayless brilliancy, every star and planet in the black vault of the lunar heavens is shining with steady brightness at all times; as, whether the Sun be present or absent during the long fourteen days' length of ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... and, putting his little, plump, round face almost against the pane, gazed out upon the world. Everything was bright, sparkling and cold, for the earth was covered with snow and the clear gray of the early morning spread its rayless illumination over the great dome, in the fading blue of which a few ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... night, and splendid for the day. . . . Mother of the dews, dark eye-lash'd twilight, Low-lidded twilight, o'er the valley's brim, Rounding on thy breast sings the dew-delighted skylark, Clear as though the dewdrops had their voice in him. Hidden where the rose-flush drinks the rayless planet, Fountain-full he pours the spraying fountain-showers. Let me hear her laughter, I would have her ever Cool as dew in twilight, the lark above the flowers. . . . All the girls are out with their baskets for the primrose; Up lanes, woods through, they troop in joyful bands. My ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... doubted as he doubted now. Never before had all glint of hope been lost in rayless blackness. If he had the five hundred men, if he had them now, there was a fighting chance. But if he must wait another week before ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... as she had hoped, that her whole situation was altered by the arrival of her suitor. A woman boasting the possession of even the most rayless of that species is in a very different category from the woman as mere unsought unit. As unit she sinks easily into the background, is merged with other unemphatic things, but as sought she is always in the foreground, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... friends disappointed and disheartened. This we can easily imagine, but not what the suspension was to the suffering prisoners who had for a short season enjoyed this one gleam of light from the outer world, and were now plunged into a rayless hopeless night. When the time of deliverance came, as we all know, many of them were past the power of ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... from her ebon throne, In rayless majesty, now stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... year fell on a Sunday. It was a model Christmas-day. My uncle and I walked to church in the morning. When we started, the grass was shining with frost, and the air was cold; a fog hung about the horizon, and the sun shone through it with red rayless countenance. But before we reached the church, which was some three miles from home, the fog was gone, and the frost had taken shelter with the shadows; the sun was dazzling without being clear, and the golden cock on the spire was glittering keen ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... captured of his regiment, Williams, a delicate lad, sickened at once; Dean, a stout old Scotchman, was close on idiocy in a month; Allan, the color-bearer, was shot by the guard,—he had slipped near the dead line, and fallen with his head outside; fourteen were dead of disease; twelve more sank in rayless, hopeless apathy; and Drake—was busy on "A History of the Stockade Prison." The way in which he got the idea and his stationery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... discernible objects on this wide expanse of optical delusion. Mirage was seen at times, but nothing pretty. We encamped late, midway through the vast plateau, when shadowy night began to establish her sable throne, in "rayless majesty," over this silent, sombre Desert. On such a horrid waste as this, when crime and murder shall have depopulated the world, the last man will breathe his last sigh! Another long and weary day was this. With difficulty could I descend from my camel, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... up on the sand. Then they all looked in each other's faces, and said no more. There was nothing more to be done: it was now ten o'clock. Slowly the sad procession wound back to town through the rayless hemlock woods. Midway in them, they met a rider, riding at the maddest gallop. It was the doctor! No one had known where to send for him; and there was no time to be lost. Coming home, and wondering, as he entered, at the open doors and the unlighted windows, he had found Norah sitting ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... fable goddess! from her ebon throne, In rayless majesty here stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... time thickened overhead to such an extent that the sun showed in it as a mere white, rayless disc, the light of which seemed to be gradually dying out; and by the time that noon had arrived the atmosphere had become so obscure that the horizon was no longer distinguishable, and I, therefore, lost my observation for the latitude. At one o'clock, when our neat stewardess summoned me below ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... past midnight when the "all night" operator took it from the wires at Boston. But it was freighted with a mandate from the San Francisco office; and a messenger was procured, who sped with it through dark snow-bound streets, between the high walls of close-shuttered rayless houses, to a certain formal square ghostly with snow-covered statues. Here he ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and pulled a bronze bell-knob, that somewhere within those chaste recesses, after an apparent reflective pause, coldly communicated the fact that a stranger ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... dry mist, that morning, the sun rose broad and red; At first a rayless disk of fire, he brightened as he sped; Yet even his noontide glory fell chastened and subdued On the cornfields and the ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... like an awful thing Frozen upon the very verge of life, And looking back along eternity With rayless eyes that ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... they sat down under the rayless boughs. Some sheep lying there ran round to the other side and stood watching them, with a frightened look ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... voice of passion to her soul Swept, as the storm-voiced surges roll Up toward a star-like beacon steep, Dashed backward rayless to the deep. ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... to the mariner Wast thou, Felipa, to his dauntless soul. Through adverse winds that threatened wreck, and nights Of rayless gloom, thou pointed ever to The north star of his great ambition. He Who once has lost an Eden, or has gained A paradise by Eve's sweet influence, Alone can know how strong a spell lies in The witchery of a woman's beckoning hand. And thou didst draw him, tidelike, higher still, Felipa, whispering ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... been laid upon her heart, so that she almost fainted. As she looked across the sea, all there grew darker; a heavy mist came rolling onwards, and clung to bush and tree, distorting them into fantastic shapes. She turned and glanced at the moon, which had risen behind her. It looked like a pale, rayless surface, and a deadly weight seemed to hang upon her limbs. "Hold," thought she; and then she turned round a second time to look at the moon. A white face appeared quite close to her, with a mist, hanging like ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... given in their verdict. I go to meet the judgment and justice of my God! (He clambers up a steep cliff jutting out over the abyss.) I see thee, my eternity, as thou rapidly floatest on to meet me, black with the shadows of eternal night! shoreless, limitless, infinite! And in the midst of thy rayless gloom, like a burning sun, eternally shining, but illumining nothing, I see my God! (He takes some steps forward, and stands on the brink of the precipice.) Ha! they run, the New Men—they see me now! Jesus! Mary! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sunset breeze was blowing from Rye Bay. Northward, the Coast—as the high bank marking the old shores of England before the flood was still called—was dim, like a low line of clouds beyond the marsh. The sun hung red and rayless above Beggar's Bush, a crimson ball of frost ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... worthy Stauffacher, I've look'd but now On him, who could not look on me again, I've laid my hands upon his rayless eyes, And on their vacant orbits sworn a vow Of vengeance, only to ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... rayless sun Glares fiercely on the battle plain;— Morn saw the deadly fray begun, Morn heard thy bugle wake a strain, Poor soldier! and its warning breath Call'd thee, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... every close of day? Gone, disappeared, extinguished, carried off without leaving a single gold band or the flash of a single sunbeam in the evening sky! Day after day through a cold streak of heavens as bare and poor as the inside of a rifled safe a rayless and despoiled sun would slink shamefacedly, without pomp or show, to hide in haste under the waters. And still the King slept on, or mourned the vanity of his might and his power, while the thin-lipped intruder put the impress of his cold and implacable spirit ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... astronomy, he took a sick man's pleasure in speculating as to the dwellers on the unseen worlds of those incredibly remote suns, to haunt whose houses of light, life came forth, a shy visitant, from the rayless crypts of matter. He could no more apprehend limits to time than bounds to space. No subversive radium speculations had shaken his steady scientific faith in the conservation of energy and the indestructibility ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... with elemental sparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, thorough the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whose dancing tassels will in a few months be coquetting with the west wind on those boundless prairies, flashing along the slimy decks of old sunken galleons, which have been rotting for ages; messages of friendship and love, from ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... succession of mere costumed figures seized by a corpse and shrinking away from its touch, Holbein's groups are instinct with life, character, and emotion. In particular is this true of the figure of Death, although it is a mere skeleton,—the face without a muscle, and for the eye but a rayless cavern. Death is not one whom "a limner would love to paint or a lady to look upon"; but Holbein has given a strange and fascinating interest to the figure, which in all other hands is merely repulsive. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... seemed a bed of leaden mist, brought with him only a pallid, lifeless twilight. It was not that his rays were impeded by cloud or haze; he had lost his power to shine. He hung there in the heavens like a great white shield, and looked down on us as rayless and powerless and devoid of life as a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... had a diminished diameter and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. A dense bank of cloud became visible to the northward; it had a sinister dark olive tint, and lay low and motionless upon the sea, resembling a solid ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... was strange, the flight was long; at last the angels came Where swung the lost and nether world, red-wrapped in rayless flame. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... gray with the smoke. Farther along, St. Allwoods bulked mistily amid its grounds. The crescent of shore line half a mile distant was wholly obscured. Up over the eastern mountain range the sun, high above the murk, hung like a bloody orange, rayless and round. No hotel guests strolled by pairs and groups along the bank. She could understand that no one would come for pleasure into that suffocating atmosphere. Caught in that great bowl of which the lake formed the watery bottom, the smoke eddied and rolled like ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... eternity to which they look forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look of recognition,—something as if he were one of Heaven's assessors, come down to "doom" every acquaintance he met,—that I have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a violent cold, dating from that instant. I don't doubt he would cut his kitten's tail off, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... into the ancient blackness, pierced here and there with a rayless star; taking the sweet air of the moors and the night into his bosom deeply; seeking, perhaps finding, peace after the manner of the unhappy. He turned round as she came in, and showed her a pale face against ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thin, dry mist, that morning, The sun rose broad and red; 10 At first a rayless disk of fire, He brightened as he sped; Yet even his noontide glory Fell chastened and subdued On the cornfields and the orchards ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the richest thing in Nature's splendid dower had been obliterated, except a soul, which never in its deepest sufferings lost its noble faith in God and man, or allowed its indomitable courage to be one whit weakened. That there were periods of utterly rayless despair and gloom we may guess; but not for long did Beethoven's great nature cower ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... fraternity. For 400 years the Bastille had been the outward symbol of oppression. Within its walls the noblest had perished. It was a perpetual threat. It was the last and often the first argument of king and priest. Its dungeons, damp and rayless, its massive towers, its secret cells, its instruments of torture, denied the existence of God. In 1789, on the 14th of July, the people, the multitude, frenzied by suffering, stormed and captured the Bastille. The battlecry was, "Vive ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... thought would never again have unclosed, the young lord looked up in his face, as if to thank him for the relief. Dick saw by the expression of wonder and astonishment in those eyes, so lately fixed and rayless, that he knew him, and that the delirium had passed away. Lord Reginald tried to speak, the colour for a moment mounted to his pallid cheek as he said, "Hargrave, I don't deserve this kindness at your hands." Then with a deep sigh he once ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... murdered man cast off his slayer from his breast; started erect upon his feet! tore out, from the deep wound, the fatal weapon which had made it; hurled it far—far as his remaining strength permitted—into the rayless night; burst forth into a wild and yelling cry, half laughter and half imprecation; fell headlong to the earth—which was no more insensible than he, what time he struck it, to any sense of mortal pain or sorrow—and perished ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Gaul and Germany and among the Hyperboreans; Egypt was satisfied with her crocodiles and Anubis; the Persians were yet devoted to Ormuzd and Ahriman, holding them in equal honor; in hope of the Nirvana, the Hindoos moved on patient as ever in the rayless paths of Brahm; the beautiful Greek mind, in pauses of philosophy, still sang the heroic gods of Homer; while in Rome nothing was so common and cheap as gods. According to whim, the masters of the world, because they were masters, carried their worship and offerings indifferently from altar to altar, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... not have comfortable quarters, and may we not be placed in one cell?" I asked, appealing to Hymbercourt. "I have been confined in a reeking, rayless dungeon unfit for swine, and doubtless Sir Max has been ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... A red rayless sun, which one might have imagined sullen and disconsolate because he could not make the dead earth smile into flowers, was looking through the frosty fog of the winter morning as I walked across the bridge to find Thomas Weir in his workshop. The poplars ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... The earth-smells deepened and the thudding thickened. Mitha Baba was not climbing any more; moving smoothly, on what felt like firm soil, she seemed to turn and turn again. It was fathoms deep in rayless night—the place that never knew the light ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... I wrote to my publishers for a fresh supply of books, and started for Michigan, the State which held within its boundaries the first scenes of sorrow my young life had known, when, amid helpless and hopeless hours of persecution, my girlhood seemed rayless and forsaken, but when kind friends had come in the hour of need, and helpful hands had lifted me from the dark depths. From there I wrote to Mr. Arms, communicating to him my intention to travel. He sent ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... There was the sea, floundering and rushing against the ship's side just by her head, and thence stretching away, dim and moaning, into an expanse of indistinctness; and far beyond all this two placid lights like rayless stars. Now almost fearing to turn her face inwards again, lest Mrs. Jethway should appear at her elbow, Elfride meditated upon whether to call Snewson to keep her company. 'Four bells' sounded, and she heard voices, which gave her a little courage. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... gave back no tread, She stood by me in the wan moonlight— In the white robes of the dead— Pale—pale, and very mournfully She bent her light form over me— I heard no sound—I felt no breath Breathe o'er me from that face of death; Its dark eyes rested on my own, Rayless and cold as eyes of stone; Yet in their fixed, unchanging gaze, Something which told of other days— A sadness in their quiet glare, As if Love's smile were frozen there, Came o'er me with an icy thrill— O God! I feel its presence still! And fearfully and dimly The pale ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... Of Nature's psalm no echo lingers. The death-cold mist, with ghostly fingers, Shrouds world and soul in rayless night. ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... these rocks. They sound a loud but melodious chorus from their sea-shells, and a faint and distant chorus soon answers from the island. The mermaidens immediately repeat their salutations, and are greeted with a nearer and a louder answer. As the red and rayless sun drops into the glowing waters, the choruses simultaneously join; and rushing from the woods, and down the mountain steeps to the nearest shore, crowds of human beings, at the ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... became impenetrable. The traffic had stopped, and the lights, patches of opaque rayless crimson, added to the confusion. There were people moving, however, faceless ghosts with loud footfalls, feeling their way hesitatingly, and among them Mr. Ricardo vanished. Almost at once Stonehouse lost his own bearings. In the complete paralysis ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chilled into ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... sceptre in his ivory fingers, his white skull crowned with the diadem of gold. The peeping emperor looked upon him with awe, half afraid of the mysterious and penetrating shadows that reached forth out of his rayless eyes. Before he left, however, he peered about, touched the sceptre and the throne, fingered this and that, and having, as it were, trimmed the nails and combed the beard of the great spectre, retired with a valet's bow. Observing that Charlemagne had lost most of his nose, he caused it to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... rendered the scene familiar to her alone. Accustomed, through a perpetual night, to thread the windings of the city, she had led them unerringly towards the sea-shore, by which they had resolved to hazard an escape. Now, which way could they wend? all was rayless to them—a maze without a clue. Wearied, despondent, bewildered, they, however, passed along, the ashes falling upon their heads, the fragmentary stones dashing up in ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Lord's Prayer. The Divine Words came not at my call—no! not one of them, from the beginning to the end! I started up on my knees. A blaze of lurid sunshine flashed before my eyes; a hell-blaze of brightness, with fiends by millions, raining down out of it on my head; then a rayless darkness—the darkness of the blind—then God's mercy at last—the ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... affected, there was a clinking of glasses, and then the carriage bore the party swiftly along the avenue of lindens, where a cold, red, rayless sun was setting. Behind them the park relapsed into its gloomy silence. Great dark shadows gathered at the foot of the hedges, invaded the house, crept stealthily along the paths and across their intersections. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... No longer dreading the rayless night-mist, sail towards me confidently, O seafarers; for all wanderers I light my far-shining torch, memorial of the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... for the theatre of our labours, the garrisons are both few in number and weak in strength, and evidence of cultivation is seldom to be found at any distance in the interior; so that all beyond a certain extent of clearing, continued along the banks of the lakes and rivers, is thick, impervious, rayless forest, the limits of which have never yet been explored, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... turned to retrace his steps, and Wallace pursued his way through the rayless darkness toward the ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... quite minutely this magnificent harbor, then solitary and fringed with rayless forests, now alive with commerce, and decorated with mansions of refinement and opulence. The long promontory, now crowded with the busy streets and thronged dwellings of Boston, was then a dense and silent ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... little ripple in his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis. When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... from my frequent inspection of war maps, and the friendly north star gave me my bearings. The rope-ladder had either become broken or disarranged, but it afforded me a short hold at the top; so I balanced myself, trusted to fortune, and fell into Rat Hell, which was a rayless pit of darkness, swarming with squealing rats, several of which I must have killed in my fall. I felt a troop of them, run over my face and hands before I could regain my feet. Several times I put my hand on them, and once I flung one from my shoulder. Groping ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various |
