"Bottomless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dark void, every faculty had violently expanded, so that he seemed to see and think at every pore. The next instant his rudely battered body refused to bear the soul's messages; light and knowledge sank into bottomless darkness! ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... reports, odious suggestions, and slanderous defamations, blast our credit, raise a storm of general hatred, and conjure up thousands of enemies against us; may, by insidious practices, supplant and undermine us, prejudice our welfare, endanger our estate, and involve us in a bottomless gulf of trouble." ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... halls of learning—the door of independent 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 ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... by all strangers that come among you, and be scorned, and contemned; a custom both fulsome 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 horrible Stigian smelle of the pit that is bottomless." ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... offences with which they were charged. While they lay in prison, Bobadilla busied himself with inventing an excuse for this violent behaviour. Finally he hit upon one at which Satan from the depths of his bottomless pit must have grimly smiled. He said that he had arrested and imprisoned the brothers only because he had reason to believe they were inciting the Indians to aid them in resisting the commands of Ferdinand and Isabella!! In short, from the day of his ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... seemed to be impending. The measure came to a vote on the 6th of February, the interest in the discussion continuing to the last. Mr. Owen Lovejoy sought occasion to give the measure a parting malediction, declared that "there is no precipice, no chasm, no yawning bottomless gulf before this nation, so terrible, so appalling, so ruinous, as the bill before the House," and Mr. Roscoe Conkling sought the floor to say that he concurred "in every word" Mr. Lovejoy had spoken. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... that make great and wise men, and, at the same time, filled with all the narrow conceptions and bitter intolerance of political bigotry. These die; and the world is none the wiser for what they have said and done. Their names sink in the bottomless pit of oblivion; but their acts of folly or knavery curse the body politic and at ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... if the idea was so brilliant, after all," she returned, with a certain grimness of expression. "We're plunging, Louise; and it may be into a bottomless pit." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... up to the Doctor's gates, where they arrived hot and breathless to find a larger crowd than before which had gathered to satisfy themselves with the rather empty view of the damaged hedge, the big footmarks, and a wheelwright and some of Ramball's men getting the great bottomless elephant-van into condition ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... seductive on the bicycler's road map may be a sea of sand or a veritable quagmire, but with a fine bicycle path at the side. As you get farther east these cinder paths are protected by law, with heavy fines for driving thereon; it requires no little restraint to plough miles and miles through bottomless mud on a narrow road in the Mohawk valley with a superb three-foot cinder path against your very wheels. The machine of its own accord will climb up now and then; it requires all the vigilance of a law-abiding driver to keep ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... the world of the bottomless resource of ecclesiastical confiscation, the Assembly have proceeded to other confiscations of estates in offices, which could not be done with any common color without being compensated out of this grand confiscation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... demonstration was made upon the Reds by the English marines and American machine guns firing across the river and by the Canadian artillery shelling the woods where the Red reserves were thought to be. The plan failed because of the inability of Captain Cherry to reach his objective, on account of the bottomless swamps that he encountered. Captain Donoghue gained a foot-hold and then was forced to dig in and during the afternoon repulsed two counter attacks of the Bolos, having paid for the capture of the two Bolo machine ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... to suit this frame, are kept by supply dealers; such as extractors, comb-baskets, uncapping cans, etc. With any of these frames a hive can be made large or small, by regulating the number of frames. If the hives are bottomless, as many make them, a tall hive can be made by tiering up, as is practiced by those who work for extracted honey. The Adair frame was formerly used in a hive called the "New Idea, or Non-swarming Hive." Its non-swarming qualities consisted ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... stabbed her bridegroom. Only one had pity, and though the other forty-nine were not punished here, yet, when they died and went to Tartarus, they did not escape, but were obliged to be for ever trying to carry water in bottomless vessels. The people of Argos called themselves Danai, and no doubt some of them came ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... festival drew still nearer, to the children's delight, as they watched the previously described graceful bamboo arch rise before their gateposts. Then came a party of three with an oven, a bottomless tub, and some matting to replace the bottom. They shifted the pole that carried these utensils from their shoulders, and commenced to make the Japanese cake that may be viewed as the equivalent of a Christmas pudding. They mixed a paste of rice and put the sticky mass, to prevent ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... there is no such separation: nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? Despise not the rag from which man makes ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... bottle, containing, not the ruddy burgundy which had become customary of late, but sparkling champagne. Surface referred to it, gracefully, as his medicine; doctors, he said, were apparently under the delusion that schoolmasters had bottomless purses. To this pleasantry Queed made no reply. He was, indeed, spare with his remarks that evening, and his want of appetite grieved old ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... his wife, lest her instinct might guess his thoughts. Yet he must not leave her any longer or his absence would make her anxious. Not that his love for Asako had been damaged; but he felt that they were traveling along a narrow path over a bottomless gulf in an ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... know to have been going on in Germany, and the cumulative effects of the British blockade. But it would have taken at least six months more fighting, the loss of thousands more precious and irreplaceable lives, and the squandering of vast additional wealth in the bottomless waste of war." ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... into the wild until, in the nineties, there came the discovery of acres of gold which attracted the wildest rush in the history of mining. There have been many wild rushes in different parts of the world, but those who went on the Yukon rush faced climatic conditions in blizzards, bottomless snow drifts and desperate cold, as well as on torrential streams and treacherous rapids, which, from the standpoint of hardship and privation, dwarf all other mining expeditions into insignificance. Of all this ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... cymbals, enliven this dream! Ye horns shout a fiercer, more vulture-like scream! And frisk caper skip prance dance yourselves out of breath! For your life is all art, Love has given you no heart: So hurrah till you plunge into bottomless death. ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... fifty feet of the bow and as much of the stern, but the bow-bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. The engine-room lies almost amidships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow tanks, is an aperture—a bottomless hatch at present—into which our coach will be locked. One looks down over the coamings three hundred feet to the despatching-caisson whence voices boom upward. The light below is obscured to a sound ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... like a deep, bottomless abyss, into which I subside deeper and deeper. There is nothing now which could ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... maelstrom, in what we should call the High Bailiff's pews—but they call them the stalls—while the mushroom himself went back to the cavernous depths of the body, which in a theatre they have properly christened the pit, and this morning it looked like the bottomless one. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... bottom 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 ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... bottomless conceit Can comprehend in still imagination! Drunken Desire must vomit his receipt, Ere he can see his own abomination. While Lust is in his pride, no exclamation Can curb his heat or rein his rash desire, Till like a jade ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... thoroughly this time. Behind you there is a hole partly filled with water. If you drop a stone into this well, it is several seconds before you hear the splash, and there is a saying hereabouts that it is bottomless. I am curious to know if this be true, and I am going to send you to see. Of course, if the story is well founded, I shall not expect you to come back. That would be ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... unstained morning the passion of living would stir even the blood of a clod. It comes over the mountains, Anna, pink darkening into orange red, everywhere a wonderful cloud sea, scintillating with colour. It is enough to make a man throw away canvas and brushes into the bottomless precipices, enough to make one weep with despair at his utter and absolute impotence. Nature is God, Anna, and the greatest artist of us all a pigmy. When I think of those ateliers of ours, the art jargon, ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... by those bottomless sciences having only mythological ideas of power—by ideas moulded by personal ambitions, personal interests, or downright ignorance. Periodically we have had all the evils of the lack of a common aim and scientific ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... lunching on Ruskin's glacier, leaves its chicken bones and eggshells to offend all subsequent picnickers. At Woodbridge people did not make public messes of themselves. If they picnicked on a glacier they did up their eggshells in a neat package, which, in default of a handy bottomless pit, they took home with them and put in their garbage pails. That's the way nice people behaved, and what on earth was there to ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... 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
... my lonely deafness, I had an ear all the keener for those sighs and moans which nobody could hear but myself. And in vain I drank, in vain I sang riotously. After every bumper of wine it seemed to me as if I was plunged more and more deeply into a roaring bottomless sea, and at last I could not even hear my own howling. Then my soul died away within me, I cast myself despairingly on my bed, and then for the first time in my life it occurred to me to pray. The only thing I could think of to say was: 'My God! my God!' as I wrung my ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... 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 fled to him ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... shook her head vigorously: that she would not do—go on pouring money into the bottomless pit of Clark's Field! Of course the trust company had considered this point and made up its mind already to advance the estate the necessary funds up to a safe amount, which would become another lien on the little girl's income ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... with another question—I could not afford to let the time run out in long silences—but abruptly the muscles about his eyes tightened and subtly a new aspect replaced their hopeless dejection. Now they expressed a black, bottomless terror. For a moment I marveled that so small a portion of a facial ...
— There is a Reaper ... • Charles V. De Vet
... staggered to her feet, and went away blindly through the door, which opened just wide enough to let her through. There were clouds on the sky. The patio, in its blackness, was like the rectangular mouth of a bottomless pit. I picked up the candlesticks, and lighted myself to my room, walking upon air, upon tempestuous air, in a feeling of insecurity ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... (said Luther) that the day of judgment draweth near, and that the angels prepare themselves for the fight and combat, and that within the space of a few hundred years they will strike down both Turk and Pope into the bottomless pit of hell. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 some wonder-working ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... no risks or contingencies. Other investments may fail. A house may burn down. Banks may break; and their stock be worthless. Bonds and mortgages may be seized for debt, and all property or evidences of property may fall into the bottomless gulf of bankruptcy. But money secured to your family by life assurance will go to them without fail or interruption, provided you have used due discretion in the selection of a sound and honorable assurance company. Of two courses, one of which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... awoke, but Harboro's crowning torture came when he saw the expression in her eyes. The horror of one who tumbles into a bottomless abyss was in them. But now—thank God!—she drew herself to him passionately and wept in his arms. The day had brought back to her the capacity to think, to compare the fine edifice she and Harboro had built with the wreck which a cruel beast had wrought. She sobbed her strength away ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... meant peace? Lying on his back with wide, staring eyes, he saw vast nocturnal spaces of his soul opened up, where in bottomless depths another chaotic life had been born—a multitude of tormenting visions, in which things and persons most familiar had arisen in combination with things and persons entirely strange. He tried to ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... on the very brink of a precipice! It hovered there for a moment—just long enough for her to fling herself sideways against the wall; then it, and the team, vanished over the side, taking a mass of snow down, down into the bottomless depths. ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... 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 horror to ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... or not, are roused to consider their bearing upon themselves, both for the honour of God, and from tenderness for those many souls who, in consequence of the confident tone of the schools of secular knowledge, are in danger of being led away into a bottomless ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the bluff, with Rex Krane and Aunty Boone, we watched and waited. The wooded Neosho valley full of inky blackness seemed to us like a bottomless gorge of terror which no moonlight could penetrate. We strained our ears to catch the rattle of the wagons, but the noise from the saloon, coming faintly now and then, was all the sound we could hear save the voices of the night ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... as any in the world. They are as superstitious, as credulous of marvels, fairies, magicians, and omens, as the men whom St. Patrick preached to, and at the same time they are shrewd, skeptical, sensible, and bottomless liars. Upon the whole, I met with no nation on my travels whose company I enjoyed so much, or who inspired me with so much ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... and the horse will fall, and the hair will 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
... monument, so that a loss of one granite chip is a loss of a frightful infinity; yet, again, for that very reason, the loss of all but a chip, leaves behind riches so appallingly too rich, that everybody is careless about the four cubits. Enough is as good as a feast. Two bottomless abysses take as much time for the diver as ten; and five eternities are as frightful to look down as four-and-twenty. In the Ceylon legend all turns upon the inexhaustible series of ages which this pillar guarantees. But, as one inexhaustible is quite ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... passing Escondidas, we began a descent, which seemed absolutely endless. Time after time we thought we had reached the bottom, only to find that we were on a terrace from which another drop led us still further down. On and on into this bottomless pit we descended to Ziracuaretaro, a striking town. Banana plantings surrounded the houses; orange-trees covered with their golden spheres reared themselves to the unusual height of thirty feet or more; mameys, with their strange nut-brown fruits, and coffee-trees, loaded to breaking, were ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... to kill her I don't know, for she set down. And jest then somebody yells, "Here we go down to the bottomless pit." ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... Pony Riders actually paled. This was indeed the next thing to a bottomless pit. Walter Perkins recalled afterwards that his head had spun dizzily, Ned that he was too ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... settlement saw the rest of her day really filled out with the pomp of all that Mrs. Beale assumed. The assumption rounded itself there between this lady's entertainers, flourished in a way that left them, in their bottomless element, scarce a free pair of eyes to exchange signals. It struck Maisie even a little that there was a rope or two Mrs. Wix might have thrown out if she would, a rocket or two she might have sent up. They had at any rate ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... Atlantic and the Rockies. He's a true man, is Gough, every inch of him, and men and women that's bin used chiefly to cursin' in time past have heaped more blessin's on that man's head than would sink you, Crux,—if put by mistake on your head—right through the lowest end o' the bottomless pit." ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... this 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
... journeying on under a species of golden arcades, and past fiery obstructions, fancied cairns, logan-stones, stalactites and stalagmite of topaz. Deeper than this their gaze passed thin flakes of incandescence, till it plunged into a bottomless medium of ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... starting up, "these are not the forebodings of fate, but the temptation of some evil spirit from the bottomless pit!" So saying, he strode out ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... never felt quite so sick as I've done most of this last day and night. Just before I woke it seemed to me I saw them in my dreams tens and twenties of her victims; men she's charmed and led on and on, and demoralized, ruined, killed and buried, and helped down-hill the way of the bottomless pit. I am better now; but I'm shaken. How thankful I'll be if only I get out of her, and can only stop thinking about ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... honour, an unattainable ideal, had stood out in forlorn splendour against a darker and a dirtier background. He had felt himself obscurely tainted and involved. Now he realized, as he had never realized before, that the foundations of Rickman's were laid in bottomless corruption. It was a House built, not only on every vile and vulgar art known to trade, but on many instances of such a day's work as this. And it was into this pit of infamy that his father was blandly inviting him to descend. He had such an abominably clear vision of it that he writhed ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared old Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... 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
... temperature not so bad as it had been, -27.4deg. F., and the distance covered very creditable. The next day we got our first idea of the meaning of these little mounds, as the surface was cut up by crevasse after crevasse. These fissures were not particularly wide, but were bottomless, as far as we could see. About noon Hanssen's three leading dogs, Helge, Mylius, and Ring, fell into one of them, and remained hanging by their harness; and it was lucky the traces held, as the loss of these three would have been severely ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... Pericles. On one hand we behold the richest cultivation of the most varied and extensive genius; the confidence of courage, the sedateness of wisdom, the stateliness of integrity; on the other, coarse manners, rude language, violent passions continually exploding, a bottomless void on the side of truth, and a rueful waste on that of common honesty.... So many pernicious faults were not committed by Xerxes or Darius, whom ancient historians call feeble princes, as were committed by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... long-suffering lobster. Whereby, of course, the Congress of Cambrai did straightway disappear, the floor miraculously vanishing under it; and sinks—far below human eye-reach by this time—towards the Bottomless Pool, ever since. Such was the beginning, such the end of that Congress, which Arouet LE JEUNE, in 1722, saw as a contemporary Fact, drinking champagne in Ramillies wigs, and ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... plan nor the courage to execute; and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole's ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... this 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 as the James River ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... English lips, again her eager hands, so anxious to search friends out, found their sure way to one at least. Bianca Maria, affianced of the Roman King, delighted to kiss and be kissed, announced herself the shy girl's lover. Pleasure broke over her face, broke the glaze of her bottomless eyes with a gleam like the sun's when in still water it betrays deep green ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... answer to her monosyllabic inquiry. She realized at once that to whomsoever it belonged its owner would never recover it, for it was grazing on the far side of the great "Muskeg," that mighty bottomless mire which extends for forty miles north and south and whose narrowest breadth is a span of ten miles. She was looking across it now, and innocent enough that level plain of terror appeared at that moment. And yet ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... mountain. Having no means at all of judging which was the right way of the three, and knowing that the other two would lead to almost certain death, in the ruggedness and darkness—for how could a man, among precipices and bottomless depths of water, without a ray of light, have any chance to save his life?—I do declare that I was half inclined to go away, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... was needed, for as he felt his way onward with the pole the General had suddenly felt it go down into a rift stretching right across their road; and as it proved to be bottomless as far as he could tell, and went to right and left for some distance, there was nothing to be done but to camp just as they were, and wait through the cold wet night ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Ann Veronica felt suddenly an effect of tremendous pathos; she would have given anything to have been able to frame and make some appeal, some utterance that should bridge this bottomless chasm that had opened between her and her father, and she could find nothing whatever to say that was in the least ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Way, near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it beautiful and populous ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... oars, and it took every ounce of strength and skill on the part of the rowers and Seventh Man to avoid shipwreck. Each breaker as it passed tossed the frail craft skyward, and we fell into the abysses as a rock into a bottomless pit. Every instant it seemed that we must capsize. While we fought thus, in a frenzied effort to keep off the rocks, the sun rose, and every curl of water turned to clearest emerald, while the hollows of the leaping waves were purple ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Southern Cross, through the blank Antarctic deserts extending through the empty space of the heavens overhead, as well as over the dreary waves below, where the despairing eye finds nothing to contemplate in the sombre depths of a sky without a star, vainly arching over a shoreless and bottomless sea! He had long followed the glittering yet fleeting traces left by the meteors through the blue depths of space; he had tracked the mystic and incalculable orbits of the comets as they flash through their wandering paths, solitary and incomprehensible, everywhere dreaded for their ominous ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... several times on quite ordinary hands, largely because his capital was so small that he could not be bluffed out. The betting was fierce and furious. Steve, "on velvet," played brilliantly. But he was in fast company—too fast for his modest means. The Transient seemed to have a bottomless purse. The Stockman had cattle on a thousand hills, the Merchant habitually sold goods ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... helped himself freely with matter from Dictys towards the end of his work; but, as we have seen, even this reinforcement could not be great in bulk. Expansion, however, so difficult to some writers, was never in the least a stumbling-block to the trouvere. It was rather a bottomless pit into which he fell, traversing in his fall lines and pages with endless alacrity ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Argus was nothing compared with the scrutiny to which we were now subjected. Every wreath of curling smoke which rose from our lips was watched by the staring eyes as intently as if it were some deadly vapour from the bottomless pit, which would shortly burst into report and flame. A loud and vigorous sneeze from Dodd was the signal for a second panic-stricken withdrawal of the row of heads, and another comparison of respective experiences outside the curtain. It was laughable enough; but, tired of being ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Scripture; that it is inconsistent with the laws of human nature may be asserted, but never can be proved. Theories manifold have been invented in order to make it plain. I do not know that any of them have gone to the bottom of the bottomless. But Christ in His perfect manhood, wedded, as I believe it is, to true divinity, is capable of entering into—not merely by sympathy, though that has much to do with it—such closeness of relation with human kind, and with every man, as that on Him can ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... a cedar, looked into the gulf from which they had climbed. As more of the stars had gone away he could not now see the bottom. The great defile had all the aspects of a vast and bottomless abyss, and he felt that their emergence from it was a marvel, a miracle in which they had been assisted by some greater power. He was assailed by a weakness and, trembling, he drew back from the ledge. But neither the hunter nor the Little Giant had seen his momentary ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... mahogany—on the landing-place outside, which was only taken in, when occasion required. On the second story, the spare furniture dwindled down to a couple of old deal chairs, of which one, belonging to the back-room, was shorn of a leg, and bottomless. The story above, boasted no greater excess than a worm-eaten wash-tub; and the garret landing-place displayed no costlier articles than two crippled pitchers, and some ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... world is coy, must be approached cautiously, and with something substantial in the hand. The old bird will not be caught with chaff. He does not yet understand the process of accumulation and transmutation. The fate of the Danaides is his, and he draws long with a bottomless bucket. But at last his incompetency can no further be concealed. Then he either submits to the suggestions of despair and oblivion or bravely begins his work. The exhilaration and satisfaction which he felt at his first performances, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... the outlying forts, were falsely reported as consumed; on which he sold them to the King a second time. Not without reason does a writer of the time exclaim: "This is the land of abuses, ignorance, prejudice, and all that is monstrous in government. Peculation, monopoly, and plunder have become a bottomless abyss."[555] ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... slowly, "it would be better to wait and see who it is coming up behind. Our young friend there is safe. The current has him, and the tarn is bottomless." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... means; I perhaps better than you, because I've seen my father's experience. I don't often get bitter, but I come very near it when I look back and think how my mother had to plan and scrimp. I feel like condemning the whole University to the bottomless pit. I suppose Margery Randall would resent it if I told her so, but honestly I pity her; the more so because I've always envied her in a way. She's not used to denying herself anything, and there's bound to be a reckoning. It's inevitable, and then—I don't like to think of how ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... love? Ne'er shall mine eyes behold that dismal 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]
... the Eddas there was once no heaven above nor earth beneath, but only a bottomless deep, and a world of mist in which flowed a fountain. Twelve rivers issued from this fountain, and when they had flowed far from their source, they froze into ice, and one layer accumulating over another, the great deep was ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... below, and bound on a 'good time generally.' Two 'shining lights,' on either side of the pulpit, held aloft blazing torches of pine, which illuminated the sea of grinning darkness, and sent up a smoke like that arising from the pit which is said to be bottomless. About a hundred darkies were present; and the number of glossy coats, fancy turbans, gaudy bonnets, red shawls, and flaming dresses, which the light disclosed, was amazing. The poor worm that grubbed in the earth, had appeared ('for that occasion only') as a butterfly; and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Lightest thou him Through the fords when 'tis night, Over bottomless places On desert-like plains; With the thousand colours of morning Gladd'nest his bosom; With the fierce-biting storm Bearest him proudly on high; Winter torrents rush from the cliffs,— Blend with ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... more effectual service to me, their truth appears clearer than day. Rufinus, your cunning stands revealed, your fraud stares us in the face, your lies are laid bare; truth dethroned for a while rises once more and slander sinks[25] downward to the bottomless pit. ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... was vacant, as a man Walks near the battlements on narrow wall. For those on th' other part, who drop by drop Wring out their all-infecting malady, Too closely press the verge. Accurst be thou! Inveterate wolf! whose gorge ingluts more prey, Than every beast beside, yet is not fill'd! So bottomless thy maw!—Ye spheres of heaven! To whom there are, as seems, who attribute All change in mortal state, when is the day Of his appearing, for whom fate reserves To chase her hence?—With wary steps and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... murmured Philip, staring ruefully into the pipe-bowl, "the infernal thing is bottomless! Exit another can of tobacco. I'll have to ask Johnny to buy me a barrel." And Philip flung the empty can into the pool whence a frog leaped with ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... 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 ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... spirits reserved under chains to eternal darkness.... I boldly challenge thee with thy six-foot God and all the host of Luciferian spirits, with all your commissions, curses, and sentences, to touch and hurt me. And this know, O Muggleton: on you I trample, and to the bottomless pit are you sentenced, from whence you came, and where the endless worm shall gnaw and torture ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... that it was a glorious feast? As there were only two chairs, the table was lifted inside of the bottomless bed, and some of the young people sat down on the frame thereof on one side, and some on the other side, while Mrs Wilkin and her husband occupied the places of honour at the head and foot. There was not much conversation at first. Hunger was too exacting, ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... apparently, about murder and murderers and he had a bottomless bag of funny stories on the same topic and character vignettes—the murderers who were forever wanting their victims to understand and forgive them, the ones who thought of themselves as little kings with divine ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... 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 say that he would not bite. But wait. There ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... A most delicious salad. 'It would appear,' I thought aloud, 'that if these pewter dishes, Green hearts of lettuce, tarragon, slips of thyme, Slices of hard boiled egg, and grains of salt. With drops of water, vinegar and oil, Had in a bottomless gulf been flying about From all eternity, one sure certain day The sweet invisible hand of Happy Chance Would serve them as a salad.' 'Likely enough,' My wife replied, 'but not so good as mine, Nor so well dressed.'" They ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... argue with another coster in order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at 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 upper classes the "pub" is called the club, but that ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... August 12, 1877, 4 A.M. Called up by the Quartermaster. With Surgeon C. W. White, U.S.N., took (A) one five inch glass beaker, bottomless, (B) three clean glass slides, (C) chloride of calcium solution, [symbol: dra(ch)m] i to [symbol: ounce] i water. We went, as near as I could judge in the darkness, to about that portion of the wall that lies west of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... 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 new religions, conquered ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... time, my progress was stopped by an abrupt descent. I set down the advancing foot with caution, being aware that I might at the next step encounter a bottomless pit. To the brink of such a one I seemed now to have arrived. I stooped, and stretched my hand forward and downward, ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... the old Scotchman, "we gae doon an' doon till we come on what we ma ca' the primary rock, and under that there is nothin'—except," with a touch of religious enthusiasm, "maybe 'tis the bottomless pit, where auld Hornie dwells, as we are tauld in the Screepture; noo let us gae up again, an' I'll show ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... the loving Jesus grant me pardon and give my soul a soothing sleep? or will my warrior father greet me and receive me as his son? Will my spirit fly upward to a happy heaven? or shall I sink into the bottomless pit, an outcast from a ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... which might keep the evil spirits at a distance. He was led away to the shores of Dosmare Pool, on the desolate Bodmin Moors, and there set to drain the pool with a leaky limpet-shell. In those days Dosmare was supposed to be bottomless—a reputation which it has since destroyed by drying in hot summers. For long years Tregeagle toiled at his hopeless task. If he ceased from his labour for a moment he would be at the mercy ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... through, and then began piling down after him. Gloria could see their figures dimly; they went down and down along a long, steep, slanting passage-way; they had smoking torches and looked like so many fiends in the bottomless pit. She heard them calling back and forth excitedly; they went on, still downward; she heard their grinding boot-heels, but could no longer see them. Suddenly they were silent. Then there were swift mutterings. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... hopelessly—"the lust is insuperable." Tobacco was fulminated against with equal energy, but no decree of court could stamp out the beloved vice. Winthrop yielded to it, but afterward renounced it, and the ministers compared its smoke to the smoke ascending from the bottomless pit, but no denunciation could effectually bar it out, and tobacco and starch in the end asserted their right to existence and came into constant use. A miraculous amount of energy had been expended upon the heinousness of their use, and the very fury of protest ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... Tcukat'cvewata Dry earth covering the roof. "Tcuka," earth, "katuto," to sit, and "at'cvewata," one laid above another. Kiami An entire roof. Kwo'pku The fireplace. Kwi'tcki "Smoke-house," an inside chimney-hood. Sibvu'tuetuek'mula 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. Bok'ci Any small hole in a wall, or roof, smaller than a doorway. Hi'tci An opening, such as a doorway. This term is ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... she swallowed silently, looking out on the rain. The picture of herself and David, alone in a log cabin somewhere on the other side of the world, caused a sudden return of yesterday's dejection. It rushed back upon her in a flood under which her heart declined into bottomless depths. She felt as if actually sinking into some dark abyss of loneliness and that she must clutch at her father and Daddy ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... by wire or wireless. It seems as though the rest of the world had sunk into a bottomless pit. Not a single word has reached us from the outer world for ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... hoisting myself on a playfellow's shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless stagnant waters, covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. Today, I should call it a salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the serpent and the dragon, of whom we were ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... motley throng. But the sight of all that crowd was the 'prentices, who swarmed out into the road, and raised our shouts above the clanging of Saint Clement's bells and the trumpets of the Royal servants. 'Twas no pageant we had come out to see. Giants, and whales, and bottomless pits, and salvage men, and the like we could see to our hearts' content on Lord Mayor's Day; and the gilded barges and smoking cannon on the river's side. But it was not every day her Majesty ambled through the city on her hunting horse, and ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... purse is bottomless? We return as we came, with the Cardinal's horses. What signify a day or two, after all? Come—call the landlord to light me to ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... quarter of a mile or so, stumbling, stooping, climbing, and sliding down precipitous slopes. Far off in the darkness sounded the steady drip, drip, drip of water, and several times our progress was stopped by black lakes into which a tossed stone would tell of depths that might be almost bottomless. We fired our shotguns and the loosened dirt and rocks and the thunder of thousands of bats' wings were enough ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... 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 ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Controleur whose function was to fill the Court's bottomless purse. Under this strain and that of the American war, a man of {38} humble origin but of good repute as an economist and accountant was called to the office, the Geneva banker, Jacques Necker. For three years he attempted to carry the burden of the war by small ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... at whose creative smile, yon Heaven, In all the pomp of beauty, life, and light, Rose from the abyss; when dark Confusion, driven Down, down the bottomless profound of night, Fled, where he ever flies thy piercing sight! O glance on these sad shades one pitying ray, To blast the fury of oppressive might, Melt the hard heart to love and mercy's sway, And cheer the wandering soul, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... build themselves up again. That man, in some sense or other, worships Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings-down whatsoever;—the one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise as if bottomless and shoreless. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... run with his contemporaries he rode the smartest of ponies and drove clever little traps; if he might not join in the rough sports out of doors he had a houseful of brilliant mechanical toys; he lived like a little Prince—like a little American Prince with a magic bottomless purse at his command. But when he left his little boyhood behind she discovered her futility; she discovered the small, pitiful purchasing power of money, after all. She could not buy him bodily strength ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... adown; and twice so far it thrusteth under night As up unto the roof of heaven Olympus lifteth high: And there the ancient race of Earth, the Titan children, lie, 580 Cast down by thunder, wallowing in bottomless abode. There of the twin Aloidae the monstrous bodies' load I saw; who fell on mighty heaven to cleave it with their hands, That they might pluck the Father Jove from out his glorious lands; And Salmoneus I saw withal, paying the cruel pain That fire of Jove and heaven's own ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... purse: and, that failing, the honour and esteem of the world instantly fail also. O our Lord; Supreme Power, Supreme Goodness, Supreme Truth; Thy perfections are without beginning and without end. They are infinite and incomprehensible. They are a bottomless ocean of beauty. O my God, that I had the eloquence of an angel's speech to set forth Thy goodness and Thy truth, and to win all men ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... La Corne. "I grant he is a gay, jesting, drinking, and gambling fellow in company; but, trust me, he is deep and dark as the Devil's cave that I have seen in the Ottawa country. It goes story under story, deeper and deeper, until the imagination loses itself in contemplating the bottomless pit of it—that ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... francs.[13] His career was splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion, astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... species of atheist will rejoice, if evolution be accepted,-whether modernists, liberals, rationalists, or simple unbelievers on their way to the bottomless pit. If evolution wins, Christianity loses and ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... little the accumulation of experience brought to my mind the full and vivid horror of what the poor lad had suffered and was suffering. Why, when he had looked out of that window into the sky, he was looking down into a bottomless abyss, from which he was sustained only by the frail plaster and planking under his feet! The whole earth, with its trees and buildings, was suspended over his head, seemingly about to fall at any moment with him into the depths; the ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... for his untidy autograph upon a blue paper. As for me, I planted myself there at his back in an attitude of expectancy and determination to await his leisure. He was cramming the money into his trousers pocket as he turned round and beheld me. He was embarrassed. He, the universal debtor, the bottomless pit of loans and obligations, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... fermentary to the drying trays or floors. 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 ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... may need you," he said. "I am going to find the old statesman now, if I have to drag the bottomless pit. Wait here until ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... himself,' flashes out Luigi, which is the original egg of all other opinion. He a sceptic? He believes in the immortality of his own verses. He is such a logician as that preaching friar who described the pavement of the bottomless pit. Poor Luigi! his mind was like sharpest steel that ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that played with my misery. Sometimes I sat in the cellar itself; but it was rather dark, and one cherished a consciousness of mice. In the orchard, or the grove, one's brains fricasseed quickly; in fact, all out-of-doors was a scene of bottomless torment worthy of a theology older ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... the Vega of Puebla, is consecrated to their support, under the supervision of the bishop. That smoking mountain, that outlet to infernal fires, is so lose at hand as to suggest the idea that this whole mass of impurity and moral rottenness may have been vomited up from the bottomless pit, or that the fallen angels, in their way thitherward, tarried here to found a sacred city, see its Cathedral finished, and then led the way down the inclined plane to that brimstone convent ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. 'A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' do not sink yourselves in boundless, bottomless abysses of ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... indifferent as anything can be, yet they are not indifferent to be used and practised by us; and whosoever swalloweth this scandal of Christ's little ones, and repenteth not, the heavy millstone of God's dreadful wrath shall be hanged about his neck, to sink him down in the bottomless lake; and then shall he feel that which before ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... them out of sight,—storms where, out of the wilderness of waves that far and wide wasted white around, a single one came ploughing on straight to the mark, gathering its grinding masses mast-high, poising, plunging, and swamping and crashing them into bottomless pits of destruction,—storms where waves toss and breakers gore, where, hanging on crests that slip from under, reefs impale the hull, and drowning wretches cling to the crags with stiffening hands, and the sleet ices them, and the spray, and the sea lashes and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... 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
... watery mirror a representation of the burning city. And what are those fearful forms that feed the flames? Fiends, in our likeness—fiends! And see how wide and far the conflagration spreads. The whole city is swallowed up by an earthquake. It sinks to the bottomless pit—down—down!" ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... places where it might be death itself to any one who got off the trail, and became bewildered. The mud is deceptive, and once one gets fast in it an hour or two is apt to see him swallowed up; nor will his fate ever be known, for the bottomless mire of the bog never ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... reading, as one of the most characteristic specimens of his style, that he could have stepped into a higher style, and adorned his narrative more plentifully. But he dared not. "God did not play in convincing him. The devil did not play in tempting him. He himself did not play when he sunk as into a bottomless pit, and the pangs of hell caught hold on him. Nor could he play in relating them. He must be plain and simple and lay down the thing as it was. He that liked it might receive it. He that did not might produce a better." The remembrance of "his great sins, his great temptations, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... all want to go, if it was to jump into a bottomless pit. Many sheep are injured by overcrowding, so I have my gates and doors very wide. Now, let us call them up." There wasn't one in sight, but when Mr. Wood lifted up his voice and cried: "Ca nan, nan, nan!" ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... claim the child," he said. "I think that he will die. The man who shot him has gone—we shall not hear of him again, not for many years, if at all. He has gone like a stone dropped into a bottomless tarn. We shall not send the child back to the convent. She will ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... make earth a Paradise for the few; I something of that hideousness, poverty and despair that make it a Purgatory for the many. That world to which Sir Edwin belongs, and which he contemplates so approvingly, is but the gold-leaf on the graven image, the bright foam on the bosom of a bottomless sea, a verdant crust cast over a chaos of fierce despair,—which will some day rip it into a million ribbons, enact an all-embracing French Revolution that will sweep our boasted "Car of Progress" back a thousand years on the crimson crest of a wave of blood and fire! ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... be her Leila, the mother had wondered, with a sharp thrill of apprehension? If only they would mention surnames! But their talk leaped elliptically from allusion to allusion, their unfinished sentences dangled over bottomless pits of conjecture, and they gave their bewildered hearer the impression not so much of talking only of their intimates, as of being ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... acid fire of exhausted nerves, and were loud. Others, drained, mumbled in the background like a chorus of the stupid. Gesticulating, mumbling, shouting, shadowed, lumped into one knot of blackness lighted by a ruddy cheekbone here, a gleaming brow there above an eye socket as inky and blank as a bottomless pit, they were like something out of the wan and misty ages before the Earth had had time to ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... with a furious regret, not that he might ask pardon for them, but only to declare their enormity. When they would have spoken to him of God's infinite mercy, he broke out into a rage, and cried out as loud as he was able, "that there was no forgiveness for the damned, and no mercy in the bottomless pit." The sick man was told, that Father Francis was just arrived; and was asked if he should not be glad to see him? Martinez, who formerly had been very nearly acquainted with him, seemed to breathe anew at the hearing of that name, and suddenly began to raise himself, to go see, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... bowels of the mountain, winding with the swinging of the former ore vein. This alone was enough to get hopelessly lost in, even without its many blind-alley branches. Now and then we came upon another shaft-opening that seemed a bottomless hole a few feet in diameter in the solid rock, from far down which came up the falsetto voices and the stinking sweat of peons, and the rap, rap of heavy hammers on iron rock-bars. But we had only started. Far back in the gallery we took another hoist and descended some two hundred ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... cracked or bottomless, old novels, and to the evident dismay of John a favourite smoking jacket. Ann clapped her hands with delight as John shook at her a finger of reproach. Then came tied up in paper, which John unrolled, the long-forgotten cane of his youth, and how it got there the Squire or Billy ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... own 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 ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... on the East Coast. They come aboard in the nets, staring with black beady eyes from out the shapeless masses of their bodies, looking in the pale moonlight like the faces of lost souls, showing on the surface of the bottomless pit, casting despairing arms around their heads in impotent agony. The water which has sluiced over their slimy bodies is charged with irritating properties, such as drive a man to tear the very flesh from his bones in a fruitless attempt to allay the horrible itching. When the water dries, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... wish. You have passed beyond it; it ought to remain for ever behind you. The ladder that carried you having given way under your foot, the only thing for you to do is to seize again on the moral law freely, with a free consciousness, a free will, or else to roll down, hopeless of safety, into a bottomless abyss. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... women care for laws of righteousness? What do they care for justice? What for the everlasting sequences that govern the world? Would not they involve all other men, all earth and heaven, in bottomless chaos, to save one heart they loved? ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... can never take the place of an intellect, while such a combination cannot fail to destroy the blessed vis inertiae of the primitive fool, who only sees what is visible, instead of evolving the phantoms of an airy unreality from the bottomless abyss of his own so-called consciousness. Fortunately for humanity, the low-class unimaginative mind predominates in the world, as far as numbers are concerned; and there are enough true intellects among men to leaven the whole. The middle class ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... that his new home was only a rude mining-camp, raw and rugged; a few rows of frame houses, beginning to be supplanted by hasty brick structures, stretched up the hills on the sides of unpaved roads, dusty in dry weather and bottomless in wet. Yet it was, for its size, already one of the most cosmopolitan places in the country. Of course, the population was mainly American, and they were beginning to pour in—sharp-eyed men from the towns in black coats, and long-legged, quiet-looking and ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... incredulous. It was a little row of houses, with little squalid patches of ground before them, fenced off with old doors, barrel staves, scraps of tarpaulin, and dead bushes; with bottomless tin kettles and exhausted iron fenders, thrust into the gaps. Here, the Staggs's Gardeners trained scarlet beans, kept fowls and rabbits, erected rotten summer-houses (one was an old boat), dried clothes, and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... deficiency which was a matter of common jocular allusion between the two young men, each of whom kept a collection of acknowledged oddities as a playground for the other's wit. Bernard had often spoken of his comrade's want of imagination as a bottomless pit, into which Gordon was perpetually inviting him to lower himself. "My dear fellow," Bernard said, "you must really excuse me; I cannot take these subterranean excursions. I should lose my breath down there; I should never come ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... foot of Sheep-saddle rock the double arches of waters meet, and fall in one torrent into the bottomless pool below. But, some three fathoms from this point of the meeting waters, and beneath it, just where the curve is deepest, a single crag, as large as a drinking-table and no larger, juts through the foam, and, if a man could reach it, ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... mixed as much socially with the natives. Not in Java, where a native of position must dismount to salute the humblest Dutchman. Not in British India, where the Englishwoman has now made the gulf between British and native into a bottomless pit." The Inhabitants of the Philippines, New York, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... did acquaint Mrs. H. with the fact that her favourite preacher had been tried for forgery, she replied that she considered the story an atrocious calumny; and he answered by saying that Mary and I were in lamentable darkness, and that we should infallibly find the way to a certain bottomless pit, of which he seemed to know a great deal. Under the reverend gentleman's guidance and advice, she, after a time, separated from St. Pancras altogether—"sat under him," as the phrase is, regularly thrice a week—began to labour in the conversion of the poor of Bloomsbury ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... design to reclaim Jasper Losely, Arabella came at once to a ground in common with his father, with his child. Oh what, too, would the old man owe to her, what would be his gratitude, his joy, if she not only guarded his spotless Sophy, but saved from the bottomless abyss his guilty son! Thus when Arabella Crane had, nearly five years before, sought Waife's discovered hiding-place, near the old bloodstained Tower, mutual interests and sympathies had formed between them a bond of ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... astride of a long narrow stone. And now I found that it was an ancient 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 over ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... distance discouraged him. With a single daring companion—a man who said he could find the way—he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea (then in almost constant eruption), racing across the burning lava floor, jumping wide and bottomless crevices, when a misstep would have ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... water dashes down several fathoms over the rushing wheel, which threatens to seize our clothes and whirl us away into the circle. The steps on which we stand are slippery: the stone walls drip with water, and only a step beyond the depth appears bottomless! O, thou wilt love this mill as I love it! Again having reached the light of day, and under free heaven, one only perceives the quiet, friendly little house. Dost thou know, Otto, often as thou hast sat quiet and dreaming, silent as a statue, have I thought of ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen |
