"Stalactites" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gone around back, and you'd have been disappointed. I couldn't stand for your being disappointed. Say——" The man paused. His eyes were searching the sunlit avenue ahead, where the drooping willow branches hung like floral stalactites in a cavern of ripe foliage. "It's queer how folks'll cut out the things they're yearning for because other folks are yearning to hand ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... just your way. The place will be wonderful. There are sure to be plenty of crystals and stalactites and wonderful caverns and places. Oh, I do ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... and runners. After listening a moment, he nodded to himself, like a figure in a pantomime, ran into the kitchen, did something to the stove, then lighted a lantern and pattered out along the tunnel dodging the icicle stalactites. Between the firs he stopped and held his lantern high so that it touched a moving radius of flakes to silver stars. Back of him through the open door streamed the glow of lamp and fire filling the icicles with blood and flushing the walls and the ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Troie, the last scene with Aeneas in Les Troyens a Carthage.[64] The empty pomposities of Spontini mingle with the loftiest conceptions. One might say that his genius became a stranger to him: it was the mechanical work of an unconscious force, like "stalactites in a dripping grotto." He had no impetus. It was only a matter of time before the roof of the grotto would give way. One is struck with the mournful despair with which he works; it is his last will and testament that he is making. And when he has finished ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... conditions. All sorts of limestones are composed of more or less pure carbonate of lime. The crust which is often deposited by waters which have drained through limestone rocks, in the form of what are called stalagmites and stalactites, is carbonate of lime. Or to take a more familiar example, the fur on the inside of a tea-kettle is carbonate of lime; and for anything chemistry tells us to the contrary, the chalk might be a kind of gigantic fur upon the bottom of the earth-kettle, which ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... speaks, if at all, in whispers. It is too much for your imagination to grasp at once and you are overwhelmed as much as you were on first seeing Niagara. Here is silence such as never came to the outer world, darkness that far exceeds the blackest midnight; glittering stalactites that gleam like diamonds from the ceiling above; massive artistic drapery which falls in graceful folds; cascades of rarest beauty formed by stone of marble whiteness, in place of falling water; tinted walls like evening ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... so many modifications of form, color, and condition that one might speedily form a cabinet of these, if they were taken when met with, and imagine it to be of great value. The first of these is calcite. It occurs as marble, limestone; calcspar, dogtooth spar, nail head spar, stalactites, and a number of other forms, which are only valuable when occurring in perfect crystals or uniquely set upon the rock holding it. The calcspar is extremely abundant at Bergen Hill, where it might be mistaken for many of the other minerals which I describe ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... was. Estelle uttered a cry of delight as its beauties broke upon her. The roof was white with stalactites of the strangest and weirdest shapes, which reflected the light of the candle from their wet surfaces. A stream of water was flowing silently down one side of the sandy floor and into the pool they had crossed, which Jack told ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... which made the two Moslems quail, the pirate's daughter hastily entered the cavern with a blazing torch, the flashes of which awakened from slumber into life and glow the various tints of mosses, lichens, and stalactites innumerable that studded the ample vault. In this flitting and singular illumination, the appearance of the Uzcoque maiden was awful. Above the common stature of woman, and finely formed, she was attired in a white woollen garment, carelessly adjusted and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... the ventilators and chimneys, had fairly bathed the vessel. It was cold, too, and the Roland was continuing its obstinate, praiseworthy trip under a crust of ice and snow. Icicles were hanging from the rigging. Glassy stalactites formed about the chart-room and everywhere on the railings and edges of things. The deck was slippery, and it was a perilous venture to attempt to make one's way forward. But when Ingigerd's cabin door opened and her long light hair rumpled by the wind ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... granite, laid one upon the other, of whimsical shape. Across them huge roots had glided, like monstrous serpents, seeking from afar the juicy nourishment enjoyed by a few beeches. The two sides of the road resembled the subterranean grottos that are famous for stalactites. Immense festoons of stone, where the darkling verdure of ivy and holly allied itself to the green-gray patches of the moss and lichen, hid the precipices and the openings into several caves. When the three travellers had gone a few steps through a very narrow path a most surprising spectacle ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... place, for example, rise pulpits finer than those of Pisa or Siena. Their edges seem to be of purest jasper. They are upheld by tapering shafts resembling richly decorated organ-pipes. From parapets of porphyry hang gold stalactites, side by side with icicles of silver. Moreover, all its marvelous fretwork is distinctly visible, for the light film of water pulsates over it so delicately that it can no more hide the filigree beneath than a ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... known as argentine and aphrite (German Schaumspath); soft, earthy and dull white varieties as agaric mineral, rock-milk, rock-meal, &c.—these form a transition to marls, chalk, &c. Of the granular and compact forms numerous varieties are distinguished (see LIMESTONE and MARBLE). In the form of stalactites calcite is of extremely common occurrence. Each stalactite usually consists of an aggregate of radially arranged crystalline individuals, though sometimes it may consist of a single individual with crystal faces developed at the free end. Onyx-marbles or Oriental alabaster ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... like a greyhound. When he reached the corner and looked cautiously round, he saw them again at some distance down another long passage. None of the galleries he saw that night bore signs of the work of man—or of goblin either. Stalactites, far older than the mines, hung from their roofs; and their floors were rough with boulders and large round stones, showing that there water must have once run. He waited again at this corner till they had disappeared round the next, and so followed them a long way through one passage after another. ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... asserted itself. Pale green ferns seemed to hold out beseeching arms toward the light; moss crept upward hopefully, softening the rough ledges with its velvet touch. Great stalagmites and stalactites, smothered in the embrace of lichen and creepers, accepted the homage of the plant life indifferently. Piang was blind to the sublimity of his surroundings, as he hurried on. Carefully he stepped on the ledge; warily he held out his ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... deposits. In old auriferous workings which have been under water for years, in many parts of the world, formations of iron and silica have been found on the walls and roof, while in mining tunnels which have been long unused stalactites composed of silica and calcite have formed. Then, again, experiments made by the late Professor Cosmo Newbery, in Victoria, showed that a distinctly appreciable amount of gold, iron, and silica (the latter in granular form) could be extracted from solid mine timber; which had been ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... the cave at an early hour, provided with guides, candles and rockets. We explored to a distance of about three miles from the entrance, and found a succession of chambers of great dimensions and of great beauty when lit up with our rockets. Stalactites and stalagmites of all sizes were discovered. Some of the former were many feet in diameter and extended from ceiling to floor; some of the latter were but a few feet high from the floor; but the formation is going on constantly, and many centuries ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... formations of the peculiar rocks present bewildering combinations of galleries, columns and frescoes. Here is to be seen the wonderful stalactite organ. This, according to many, is one of the wonders of the world. It consists of a number of thin stalactites of varying powers of reverberation, and these play delightful tunes or ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... right round the palace. It was full of hurrying people and of grooms who stood in knots beside doorways. They flattened themselves against the walls before the Lord Privy Seal's procession of gentlemen in black with white staves, and the ceilings seemed to send down moulded and gilded stalactites to touch his head. The beefeater before the door of the Lady Mary's lodgings spat upon the ground when he had passed. His hard glance travelled along the wall like a palpable ray, about the height of a man's head. It passed over faces and slipped back to the gilded wainscoting; tiring-women ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... we ventured into the ruins of the Cloth Hall itself. The roof is gone, of course. The building took fire from the bombardment, and what the shells did not destroy the fire did. Melted lead from ancient gutters hung in stalactites. In one place a wall was still standing, with a bit of its mural decoration. I picked up a bit of fallen gargoyle from under the fallen tower and brought it away. It ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... here on the grandest scale, columns, arched roof, organ-pipes, trees, altars, and squatting monsters ranged in long lines like idols in a temple. There may very well be some truth in the notion that the origin of Gothic architecture was in stalactites of a limestone cavern, so numerous and perfect are the long slender columns crowned with ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... not erupted for many years, but in former times it threw its ashes a distance of sixty miles. One can descend into its depths fully 1,000 feet, and view its sulphur walls, hung with stalactites of ice, or see its columns of vapor spouting here and there through crevices that extend down into the interior of the earth. In the ancient Aztec and Toltec mythology of Mexico, this was the Hell ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... that bears the Fiddle shape, from a Double-Bass to a dancing-master's pocketable Kit. His house is one vast warehouse, with Fiddles on the walls, Fiddles on the staircases, and Fiddles hanging like stalactites from the ceilings. To him the tyros resort when they first begin to scrape; he will set them up for ten shillings, and swop them up afterwards, step by step, to ten or twenty guineas, and to ten times that amount if they are rich ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... something watery and oceanic in its aspect. Under the hands of Palladio, the Grecian orders seemed to borrow the lightness and airiness of the Gothic. As you look at the numerous windows and the multitude of columns which give a striated appearance to the fronts of the palaces, you think of stalactites and icicles, such as you might imagine to ornament the abodes of the water-gods and sea-nymphs. The only thing needed to complete the poetic illusion is transparency or brilliancy of color, and this is wholly wanting; for at Venice ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... into the land. As soon as their eyes got accustomed to the subdued light which existed at a distance of thirty or forty feet from the entrance, the beauties of the grotto began to dawn on their sight. Glittering stalactites, of a thousand fantastic forms, hung down from the high and vaulted roof, while at either side appeared columns and arches like those of some ancient temple, tinted with numberless delicate hues, the extreme points of the stalactites glittering like bright ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... lava which almost divided the lakes rose considerably, owing to the cooling of the spray as it dashed over it, and a cavern of considerable size was formed within it, the roof of which was hung with fiery stalactites, more than a foot long. Nearly the whole time the surges of the further lake taking a southerly direction, broke with a tremendous noise on the bold craggy cliffs which are its southern boundary, throwing their gory spray to a height of fully forty feet. At times an overhanging crag fell in, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the street by a pair of folding-gates; on the left of the coach-house, occupying its width, any large London tailor's or linendraper's plate-glass window reaching to the ground; within the window, on two rows of inclined plane, what the coach-house has to show; hanging above, like irregular stalactites from the roof of a cave, a quantity of clothes—the clothes of the dead and buried ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... in her eyes, in robe of trailing, snowy, sun-shot mist, with water lilies dropping from her hair, and the cave—Will could have provided for her such a cave, the water tinkling and trickling from the walls hung with silver spray, stalactites of purest barley sugar glittering, pillars of creamiest cream candy shimmering; and, to crown all and above all, the fairy would have had a daily diet of cream cakes ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... closed; a hard frost of many days' duration had almost hermetically sealed them, and the drip of Thames water through the sluices formed immediately into long, fantastic stalactites of clear ice. Rainham found it difficult to believe, at times, that the bustle of the wharves, the roar of maritime London, still went on at his elbows, the deserted yard cast such a panoply of silence round him. It was as though he had fallen suddenly ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... the grub asserts itself on the very day whereon these preparations are made. The undersurface, originally a bright red, turns brown and runs in every direction into a mass of dark stalactites. Soon, the flesh of the cap is attacked and, in a few days, becomes a gruel similar to liquid asphalt. It is almost as fluid as water. In this broth the maggots wallow, wriggling their bodies and, from time to time, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the open door, and soon found himself in a wonderful jewelled cave hung with stalactites, in the centre of which stood a beautiful woman, clad in silvery robes, and attended by a host of lovely maidens crowned with Alpine roses. In his surprise, the shepherd sank to his knees, and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... One of these latter is a work of some art—a long sunken vault, with a pointed arch projecting a few feet above the surface of the ground; outside it is of rough stone, the interior is carefully coated with fine lime, and from the roof long stalactites depend. Near it is a cemetery: the graves are, for the most part, provided with large slabs of close black basalt, planted in the ground edgeways, and in the shape of a small oblong. The material was most probably brought from the mountains near Tajurrah: at another part of the island I found ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance from the ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... began to draw her silver feather down the cascade, and immediately the same effect was produced which I had observed upon the water. The noise of the waterfall was immediately hushed. Beautiful stalactites and icicles were formed in the place of the pouring and foaming water. I should have thought that the cascade had been wholly congealed were it not that I could see in some places by the moonlight that ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... was reading Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy." On reaching Llandudno, S——- waited at the hotel, while O'Sullivan, U——, and I ascended the Great Orme's Head. There are copper-mines here, and we heard of a large cave, with stalactites, but did not go so far as that. We found the old shaft of a mine, however, and threw stones down it, and counted twenty before we heard them strike the bottom. At the base of the Head, on the side opposite the village, we saw a small church with a broken roof, and horizontal gravestones of slate ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... they tell me, there was a butcher in Bond Street. Perhaps you dealt there. For my part I was not eating much meat in those days. But I can imagine his window—a perfect little grotto of jasper and onyx, with stalactites of pure gold, and in the middle, resting on a genuine block of Arctic ice, an exquisite beef-sausage. I wish he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... half-hour's drive we reached the famous cave, Laura and I were supplied with garments looking like mackintoshes, and, provided with torches, we began to descend. We first came to a large, vaulted hall, where miles of stalactites in every form and shape twinkled in ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... penetrated some little distance with every precaution, we turned round to look back at the entrance, to see as pretty a picture as ever I gazed upon in my life. We could now see plainly the nature of the roof, hung with beautiful stalactites of many graceful forms, giving to the great arch the appearance of some grand specimen of Gothic tracery, through which we looked upon the ravine lit up by the outer sunshine, with its green, and gold, and blushing floral hues. It was ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... from the roof charged with bicarbonate of lime. Exposed to the air, the carbonic acid partially escapes, and the simple carbonate of lime, which is hardly at all soluble in water, deposits itself as a solid, forming stalactites and stalagmites. Even the exposure of chalk or limestone water to the open air partially softens it. A specimen of the Redbourne water exposed by Professors Graham, Miller, and Hofmann, in a shallow basin, fell from eighteen degrees to nine degrees of hardness. The softening process of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... slippers hang in long threads of red, festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of passers-by with dripping colour, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the sleet, plopping their little round maroon ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... jolly, rollicking Italian, led us into the heart of the hill, up and down, right and left, from chamber to chamber more and more magnificent, all a-glitter like a glacier cave with icicle-like stalactites and stalagmites combined in forms of indescribable beauty. We were shown one large room that was occasionally used as a dancing-hall; another that was used as a chapel, with natural pulpit and crosses and pews, sermons in every stone, where ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... old man, marvelously well preserved, straight, slim, supple as a spring, spruce and shining as a new sabre. His long white moustachios hung under his chin like two marble stalactites. The rest of his face was carefully shaved, the skull bare even to the occiput, where a long tress of white hair was rolled up under his hat. The expression of his features appeared to me calm and thoughtful. A pair of small, clear blue eyes and a square chin announced an indomitable will. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... opened out until he could scarcely see them with his flashlight. Playing it upward he could only get a faint reflection from the stalactites hundreds of feet away. ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... abundance of his mane, were widely spread apart, like a bird's wings in flight; under the tightly drawn skin, his ribs severally protruded and his hind legs were nailed together, but were slightly drawn up; black blood had trickled through the hairs, and collected in stalactites at the end of his tail, which hung straight down the length of the cross. The soldiers crowded around the beast, diverting themselves by calling him 'Consul!' and 'Citizen of Rome!' and threw pebbles into his eyes to ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and wavered in a flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping from the groin of the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though it were along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I was following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books clasped in their hands; a moment later the little lozenge windows had put on the deep transparence, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on some enormous ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... which I penetrated, did not present anything particular to my observation; they differed little from caves of a similar description into which I had penetrated in Europe. Large masses of stalactites hung from their roofs, and a corresponding formation encrusted their floors. They comprised various chambers or compartments, the most remote of which terminated at a deep chasm that was full of water. A close examination of these caves has led to the ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... us move off eastwards to the Little Pyrenees to see another cave, Niaux, high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the top by former glaciers. This cave is about a mile deep; and it will take you half a mile of awkward groping amongst boulders and stalactites, not to mention a choke in one part of the passage such as must puzzle a fat man, before the cavern becomes spacious, and you find yourself in the vast underground cathedral that pre-historic man has chosen for his picture-gallery. This was a later ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... proportions of peach and common brandy, so as to fill up one third, or, perhaps, a little less; then take rasped or pounded ice, and fill up the tumbler. Epicures rub the lips of the tumbler with a piece of fresh pineapple; and the tumbler itself is very often encrusted outside with stalactites of ice. As the ice melts, you drink." The Virginians, say Captain Marryat, claim the merit of having invented this superb compound; but, from a passage in the "Comus" of Milton, he claims ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... had not been idle, any more than those left at the Hutted Knoll. They had built three or four skiffs, one small batteau, and a couple of canoes. These were all in the water, in waiting for the disappearance of the ice; which was now reduced to a mass of stalactites in form, greenish and sombre in hue, as they floated in a body, but clear and bright when separated and exposed to the sun. The south winds began to prevail, and the shore was glittering with the fast-melting piles of the frozen fluid, though it would have been vain ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... drainage diverted to the new channel gradually increased. But it is not so easy to offer a reason for the varied forms with which the caves are afterwards decorated. Why is it the charmed waters do not leave the evidence of their slow passage only in plain surfaces of varying widths, and the stalactites and stalagmites whose formation we can readily account for? And why do not the deposits take the same forms in all caves with only such variations as would naturally result from differences in topography? The ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... climbed strongly upward, the footing grew firmer, and the walls and ceiling drier; as they went on, the passage, too, grew wider and higher, until they found themselves in a large underground hallway that echoed loudly as they walked. Overhead, pure white stalactites and frost-like formations glittered in the light, and the walls were broken by dark nooks and shelf-like ledges with here and there openings ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... sitting in the kitchen with Mis' Persis, by the side of a caldron of melted tallow, kept in a fluid state by the heat of a portable furnace on which it stood. A long train of half-dipped candles hung like so many stalactites from the frames on which the rods rested, and the two were patiently dipping set after set and replacing ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... Cravanch, about two miles northwest of Belfort, France. Some workmen, excavating in a quarry of Jurassic limestone, found the opening to the cave, the bottom of which was covered with stalagmites, while there were no corresponding stalactites hanging from the roof. Some of these calcareous columns appear to be artificial piles covered with the limestone sheeting. Between them, and also covered with stalagmite, were a quantity of human skeletons, with the skulls raised ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... brilliant with little shining stars of gold. And deep down in the shaft of this lode has been found a spacious cave full of stones of a metallic lustre, sending out all the tints of the rainbow, and many-colored translucent crystallizations, varying from the large stalactites to the fragile glass-work that crumbles at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... romantic scenes are to be found among the high crags on the Bakewell road, overhanging the river Wye. Among the natural curiosities is a cave called Poole's Hole, five hundred and sixty yards in length, with a ceiling in one part very lofty, and adorned with stalactites, which have a beautiful appearance when lighted up by Roman candles or other fireworks. As Buxton is only twenty-two miles from Manchester, travellers who have the time to spare should on no account omit to visit one of the most romantic ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... idea of the height of one of the chambers, we may add that the rocks from above have fallen, and a hill has been formed one hundred feet in elevation. Many of the halls are ornamented with the most magnificent stalactites. One of them is appropriately called Martha's Vineyard, in consequence of having its tops and sides covered with stalactites which ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... always seeing slights and insults. I tell you he's taken a shine to Phemie; and he's as good as four seats and a bouquet to that child next Wednesday evening, to say nothing of the eclat of getting this St. Simeon—what do you call him?—Stalactites?" ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... gratify their vanity or their acquisitiveness, had cast stones into the midst of the fairy handicraft of the wizard water for the sake of a fragment; nor had the village boys amused themselves here at the expense of the stalactites, for happily they had been well trained in the horror of the supernatural. The cavern ran for a certain distance south-west; then the gallery turned at a sharp angle north-north-west, and continued in this direction. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... enough at best, was growing bitter cold. The strange subterranean beauty of the surroundings, the limestone wall and arches, scintillating wherever they caught the light; the shadowy, mysterious vaulted roof; the white stalactites that hung down thence to touch the stalagmites as they rose up from the floor, and formed with them endless vistas of stately colonnades, all were oddly incongruous with the drunken, bloated faces of the distillers. ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... used to be, but I've been so frozen by years of her silence that now I might better be classed among her stalactites. She has a number. I've been trying to get Judge Trent to send me to Boston on business to-morrow and to call on her. He wishes to ask ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... this news from a distant world, told of himself, of his family, of his native land, of the curiosities of the island, of the cavern of Arta, tragically grand, chaotic as an ante-chamber of the inferno; of the Dragon's caves with their forests of stalactites, glistening like an ice palace, of its thousand placid lakes, from the deep crystal depths of which it seemed as if nude sirens would arise like those Rhine maidens who guarded the treasure of the Niebelungs. Mary listened to him, entranced. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Trans." 1st series volume 4 page 225) a trap rock, with cavities filled up horizontally with quartz and chalcedony. The upper halves of these cavities are often filled by layers, which follow each irregularity of the surface, and by little depending stalactites of the ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... bare—a long mirror between two of the windows, half a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano. There were no rugs—the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners and was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... little shops with small purchases in their hands; not so many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of the beer saloons. The butchers' windows were painted with patterns of frost, through which I could dimly see the frozen meats hanging like hideous stalactites from the roof. When I came to the river, I ached in sympathy with the shipping painfully atilt on the rocklike surface of the brine, which broke against the piers, and sprayed itself over them like showers ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... A boundless cave of stalactites, it seemed; the cloud-born vapors downward spiraling, till they met the whirlpool-column from the sea; then, uniting, over the waters stalked, like ghosts of gods. Or midway sundered—down, sullen, sunk the watery half; and far up into heaven, was drawn the vapory. As, at death, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... south extremity of Corsica), 2 miles S.E. from Bonifacio, is a lighthouse of the first order, 325 feet above the sea. The southern promontory is pierced by a cavern hung with stalactites. ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... but the mind's first chamber, Round which its young fancies clamber, Like weak insects in a cave, 30 Lighted up by stalactites; But the portal of the grave, Where a world of new delights Will make thy best glories seem But a dim and noonday gleam 35 From ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... boiling water from numerous springs. The most abundant of those sources was situated at the height of about 100 feet above the level of the lake. It kept continually filled an oval basin about 250 feet in circumference—the margins of which were fringed all round with beautiful pure white stalactites, formed by deposits of silica, with which the hot water was strongly impregnated. At various stages below the principal spring were several others, that contributed to feed the lake at the bottom, in the centre of which was a small island. Minute bubbles continually escaped ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... in delicious keeping with all of what the imagination in love with the fantastic, attracted by their more distant forms, could dream. Valleys, gorges, somber gaps, walls cut perpendicularly, rough or polished by water, cavities festooned with hanging stalactites and notched like Gothic sculptures—all make up a strange sight which ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... steps under our feet became stalactites overhead. The lava, which was porous in many places, had formed a surface covered with small rounded blisters; crystals of opaque quartz, set with limpid tears of glass, and hanging like clustered chandeliers from the vaulted roof, seemed as it were to ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... in the intensity of its own power, or in the nature of the materials submitted to it;—so that, at one time, gravity acts upon them, and disposes them in horizontal layers, or causes them to droop in stalactites; and at another, gravity is entirely defied, and the substances in solution are crystallized in bands of equal thickness on every side of the cell. It would require a course of lectures longer than these (I have a great mind,—you have behaved so saucily—to stay and give them) to describe ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... marble courts and tried vainly to pierce the botanic chaos that crowded close up to the palace grounds. Banian and sacred waringhan trees covered great stretches of ground, and dropped their fantastic roots into the steaming earth like living stalactites. The fan-shaped, water-hoarding traveller's palm formed a background for the brilliant magenta-colored bougainvillea. The dim, translucent depths of an orchid-house lured us on, or a great pond covered with the sacred ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... a winding path, about half-way up toward the top, we arrived at the entrance of a cave, into which we descended through a hole. It is fifty or sixty feet long, and the far end is supported on a colonnade of stalactites, and opens on a sheer precipice of 100 or 150 feet. Hence the spectator can overlook the distant scene; the forest lies at his feet, and only a few trees growing from the rock reach nearly to the level of the grotto. The effect is striking ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... seven of them rooms. Two men of Deadwood of Dakota wuz over a year a-gittin' specimens of the stalactites and stalagmites which they have ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... stealing slow, The drooping white stalactites grow; From noiseless drops stalagmites rise, Silent they ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... the side of the canyon had a width of ten or twelve feet, was of the same height, and extended back for more than double the distance. Side, floor and roof were of irregular formation, and the craggy stones rough and wet. Had there been any gleaming stalactites or stalagmites in sight, the cause of the legend attaching to the place would have been understood, but there was nothing of that nature. The cavern was simply a rent in the side of the canyon wall, created ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... great subterranean reservoir who shall tell? What craft will ever float on its dark surface, under domes of pendant stalactites, rippling for the first time the ice-cold waters, and disturbing the eyeless fish in their shadowy haunts? Only when here and there we tap it, and the mighty pressure sends up a thin column of water hundreds of feet in answer. Or when we notice the strong, constant springs that at intervals break ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... all sides by steep walls of rock, covered with clinging ivy in a most picturesque manner. On the left we find a little grotto containing an altar. In the foreground, on the right, a lofty gate, formed by nature and beautified by art, leads into a chapel wonderfully formed of pieces of rock and stalactites. A feeling of astonishment and admiration almost amounting to awe came upon me as I entered. The walls near the chief altar are overgrown with a kind of delicate moss of an emerald-green colour, with the white rock shining through here and there; and in the midst rises ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... among fairy halls, glistering with stalactites or paved with silver sand, and finally pushing our way through a concealed crevice down dank and narrow passages in the rock. The darkness increased; the pavement plashed beneath our feet, and the drip, drip of water was incessant. "We are under the river-bed," said Moore, "in a kind ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... and through large rooms for about two hundred yards, part of the distance being under the road we had just walked over. We had never been in a cave like this before. The stalactites which hung from the roof of the cavern, and which at first we thought were long icicles, were formed by the rain-water as it slowly filtered through the limestone rock above, all that could not be retained by the stalactite dropping from the end of it to the floor beneath. Here it ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... along the low-lying valley, the heat was unbearable, although the sun was near the horizon. We came upon a waterfall falling from a great height over a series of umbrella-like stalactites covered with moss. The last rays of the sun shone on the dropping water, brilliant and sparkling as a shower of diamonds. Several small rainbows added to the beauty of the scene. I rested some time in this cool and beautiful retreat. There were birds singing and monkeys playing among ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... regular steps, made the descent less perilous. Drops, still hanging from the rocks, shone here and there under the light of the torches, and the explorers guessed that the sides were clothed with innumerable stalactites. The engineer examined this black granite. There was not a stratum, not a break in it. The mass was compact, and of an extremely close grain. The passage dated, then, from the very origin of the island. It was not the water which little by little ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... concentrated, till at the present day it is extremely saline. Professor Geikie (to whose works the present paper is much indebted) found that he floated on the water in spite of himself; and the under sides of the steps at the bathing-places are all encrusted with short stalactites of salt, produced from the drip of the bathers as they leave the water. The mineral constituents, however, differ considerably in their proportions from those found in true salt lakes of marine origin; and the point at which the salt is thrown down is still far from having been reached. Great Salt ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... contained fragments of stalactites apparently from the Grand canyon of the Colorado or from some other locality where water ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... in the innumerable caves found along the Canyon. In these were to be seen flowers fashioned out of the limestone, possessing wonderful colors, scintillating in the light of the torches, reds that glowed like points of fire, stalactites that glistened like the long, pointed icicles they had seen hanging from the eaves of their homes in Chillicothe. They discovered lace-work in most delicate tints, masses and masses of coral and festoons of stone sponges in all the caves they visited. There were ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... long queue, according to the fashion of the day, he wore his own short grey locks; his address was plain, frank, and hearty, but by no means coarse or vulgar. He was of an ancient family, but of a moderate fortune.' Here Edgeworth adds a long description of the grotto and its stalactites. They returned to dine with the old officer ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... between the strata and Dolores' kodak, how even his photography could not spoil Aunt Alda; how charming a group of sisters Dolores contrived to produce; how Adrian was the proud pioneer into a coach adorned with stalactites and antediluvian bones; how Anna collected milkwort and violets for Aunt Cherry; how a sly push sent little Joan in a headlong career down a slope that might have resulted in a terrible fall, but did only cause a tumble and great fright, and a severe reprimand from the elder sisters; ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Crete blessed the cavern, and the bones of the victims of Turkish barbarity were collected and buried in the outer hall, which has in its centre a lofty stalagmite reaching to the summit, and the walls on all sides are draped with stalactites. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... his hands folded behind him, and as he noted the splendour of the spectacle presented by the risen sun shining upon temples and palaces of ice, prism-tinting domes and minarets, and burnishing after the similitude of silver stalactites and arcades which had built themselves into crystal campaniles, more glorious than Giotto's,—the pastor said: "The physical world, just as God left it,—how pure, how lovely, how entirely good;—how sacred from His hallowing touch! Oh that the world of men and women ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Lake. That was the place where the coat had been left, and we could at least find out if either the Colonel or Mose had returned for it. We set out in single file along the damp clay path, the light from our few candles only serving to intensify the blackness around us. The huge white forms of the stalactites seemed to follow us like ghosts in the gloom; every now and then a bat flapped past our faces, and I wondered with a shiver how anyone could get up courage to go alone into such ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... first things I undertook, in company with Herview, was a representation of the infernal regions after Dante's description. Behind a grating I made certain dark grottoes, full of stalactites and stalagmites, with shadowy ghosts and pitchforked figures, all calculated to work on the easily-excited imaginations of a Western audience, as the West then was. I found it very popular and attractive, but occasionally some countryman would suggest to his fellow spectator that ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... and the branches of the brush took the place of the wire, and in their meshes the snow had been pressed through by its own weight, but held together by its curious ductility or tensile strength of which I was to find further evidence soon enough. It thus formed innumerable, blunted little stalactites, but without the corresponding stalagmites which you find in limestone caves or on the north side of buildings when the snow from the roof thaws and forms icicles and slender cones of ice growing ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... the marbles out of which they were wrought; its columns and pillars were of inconceivable costliness; its pavement was a mosaic of wonderful beauty, and there were four twisted pillars made out of stalactites. Perhaps the best way to form some dim conception of it is to fancy a little casket, inlaid inside with precious stones, so that there shall not a hair's-breadth be left unprecious-stoned, and then to conceive this little bit of a casket iucreased to the magnitude of a great church, without losing ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... having the appearance of concretions rising irregularly about a foot above the general surface, without any distinct ramifications. The specimens from this place have evidently the structure of stalactites, which seem to have been formed in sand; and the reddish carbonate of lime, by which the sand has been agglutinated, is of the same character with that of the west coast, where a similar concreted limestone ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... grandeur, one could almost fancy, as that of St. Peter's; how it is that the nave should stretch away in such solemn vastness, the shallow transepts emphasise the grand impression and the apse of the choir hollow itself out like a dusky cavern fretted with golden stalactites, is all matter for exposition by a keener architectural analyst than I. To sit somewhere against a pillar where the vista is large and the incidents cluster richly, and vaguely revolve these mysteries without answering ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... himself obliged either to utter a harsh and unreasonable refusal, or to organise an expedition which he personally disliked extremely, and moreover distrusted, for he did not in the least believe that Queen Mary would be so set upon gratifying her curiosity about stalactites without some ulterior motive. He tried to set on Dr. Jones to persuade Messieurs Gorion and Bourgoin, her medical attendants, that the cave would be fatal to her rheumatism, but it so happened that the Peak Cavern was ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... extended visit. The first cave is some three hundred feet long, and varies in height from ten to eighty or ninety feet. The second cave has about the same length, but is much higher and contains a far more diversified collection of stalactites, stalagmites and sheets of calcareous deposits, that hang like curtains before the more solid side walls. While appearing in the red-wall limestone, the rock of these caves is all of a creamy white, thus demonstrating that the formation itself is white, but that the exposed walls are ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... from the ground to the top of one knee is nearly twenty feet. The limbs are formed of pieces of stone, joined together, and the body of stone and brick. His rough hair and eyebrows, and the beard, which reached nearly to the ground, are formed of stalactites, taken from caves, and fastened together in a dripping and crusted mass. These hung also from his limbs and body, and gave him the appearance of Winter in his mail of icicles. By climbing up the rocks at his back, we entered his body, which contains a small-sized room; it was even possible to ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... as suddenly. It was so hot, that we had to cover our faces or turn away. There were several red-hot fountains in various parts of the lake, throwing up jets of lava. One was near a shallow cave, from the edges of which, the lava hung in beautiful flame-colored stalactites. ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... the Queen ever realized the full size of those tanks, or even saw the lids which Mr. Phillips had mentioned. The light was very dim. The situation, in spite of the grotesque appearance of the tanks, was exceedingly romantic. Long stalactites hung, faintly gleaming, from the roof. The water, strangely blue, mourned against the stones of the beach, sighed through the deep recesses of the cave. The world and all common things seemed ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... roof, glowing with golden and scarlet tints, is highly carved in the manner of the Saracens, such as we may observe in the palaces of Moorish Spain and in the Necropolis of the Mamlouk Sultans at Cairo, deep recesses of honeycomb work, with every now and then pendants of daring grace hanging like stalactites from some sparry cavern. This roof is supported by columns of white marble, fashioned in the shape of palm trees, the work of Italian artists, and which forms arcades around the chamber. Beneath these arcades runs a noble divan of green and silver silk, and the silken ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... "All those stalactites," said he, as the two torches were held towards the roof, "are of the most beautiful crystalline structure; and the spaces between are all studded with brilliant spars. The first time I was here, it was April; the mountain springs were ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... cheer within. The stillness of the morning is impressive. The floor creaks under our feet as we move toward the window to look abroad through some clear space over the fields. We see the roofs stand under their snow burden. From the eaves and fences hang stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites covering some concealed core. The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see fantastic forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Now of this grand saloon I must try to give you a conception. It was, I should think, from seventy- five to one hundred feet in length. The ceiling overhead was very rich with hanging corbels, like stalactites, and the entire walls were panelled, with a full-length family portrait in each panel, which was arched at the top, so that the whole wall was composed of these round-topped pictures with rich gilding between. Notwithstanding its vast size, the sofas and tables were so disposed ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... fermenting under the putrefactive influences, the gas which they formed blow up the yielding lime and mud around them into a long narrow cave, just as a glass-blower blows up a bottle, or as a little yeast blows up into similar but greatly smaller cavities a bit of leaven. And the stalactites and stalagmites which encrust the Kirkdale Cave are, Mr. Penn holds, simply the last runnings of the lime that exuded after the general mass had begun to set. Certainly any one disposed to take such liberties with the Bible on the one hand, and with geologic science on the other, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... nearer approach. Now and then a shaft of sunlight fell on some glittering point of felspar or green patch of verdure.—and Valdemar Svensen stated that he knew of a sandy creek where, if the party chose, they could land and see a small cave of exquisite beauty, literally hung all over with stalactites. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... evidently a huge cavity out of which the calcareous sand had been washed or dissolved, and whose walls, still to a certain extent permeable, had been hardened and petrified by the constant percolation of water charged with carbonate of lime. From the roof innumerable stalactites, perfectly white, often several yards long and coming down to the delicacy of knitting-needles, hung in clusters; and wherever there was any continuous crack in the roof or wall, a graceful, soft-looking curtain of white stalactite fell, and often ended, much to our surprise. Deep in the water ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... without eyes, several of which are always to be seen. Like all similar places, it varies in size in the most arbitrary manner. At one minute you are struggling for space, and suddenly you emerge upon a Gothic-looking hall, full of gracefully pendent stalactites. Again you proceed along corridors, at one time lofty, at another threatening your head, if pride do not give way to humility. Then you come to rivers, of which there are two. At one time you are ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... magnificent cup of gold with a row each of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls running along its breadth. It contained a dark red liquid, which appeared to be boiling, and the man was holding it out to a fierce lion whose shoulders were four feet across and whose mouth was like a cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites of the most terrifying nature. With an evil glare in its eyes toward the man, the lion drank thirstily from the cup. Around the man and the lion there was a ring of blazing fire, leaping out of the dome like great pillars of flame, ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... said to Mr. Ware and Mr. Upton, and other heads of the settlement, "that some of our hunters have reported the existence of great caves to the southwestward and that they have brought back from them wonderful stalactites and stalagmites and also dust from the cave floors. I find that this dust is strongly impregnated with niter; from niter we obtain saltpeter and from saltpeter we make gunpowder. We need not send to Virginia for our powder, we can make it here ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of sunshine found its way within, illumining the great vaulted roof and the dripping stalactites, that looked like giant icicles hanging above us. We were able to walk or scramble over the rocks and shingle ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... country. In fact, the attentive eye can in such a district find here and there evidences of this progressive destruction. Not only do the caves wear out from above, but their roofs are constantly falling to their floors, a process which is greatly aided by the growth of stalactites. Forming in the crevices or joints between the stones, these rock growths sometimes prize off great blocks. In other cases the weight of the pendent stalactite drags the ill-supported masses of the roof to the floor. In this way a gallery originally a hundred feet below the surface ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... bring forward into light. If he can convince you or himself of the principle a priori, he generally leaves the facts to take care of themselves. He leads us into the laboratories of art or nature as a showman guides you through a caravan crusted with spar and stalactites, all cold, and dim, and motionless, till he lifts his torch aloft, and on a sudden you gaze in admiration on walls and roof of flaming crystals and stars ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... front of a wall of rock. I then perceived by the aid of a few fitful rays of suppressed light, which at intervals struggled successfully through a black bank of clouds, the yawning mouth of a big cavern, from the roof of which hung innumerable stalactites. I now suddenly realized that I was in a very lonely, isolated spot, and became immeasurably perturbed. The Unknown Something in the atmosphere which had inspired me with so much fear was here conglomerated—it was no longer the mere essence—it was the whole Thing. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... more beautiful, when illuminated, than a roof of stalactites, with ascending pillars of stalagmite often meeting and forming pillars, like those which will be later on described in the Mammoth Cave and others. The building of these fairy grottoes is really a simple matter, but one only possible to the Great Architect to whom ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... went on towards the light, and found himself in another cavern reaching far up to a roof, from which hung long stalactites glistening white. There was light enough reflected from these hanging pillars to see, and he looked anxiously into Venning's face. ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... church, with a full arch, adorned with verdant festoons, composed of creeping plants and bind-weeds. When the visitor has once passed under the portico he enters into a large and spacious hall, studded with stalactites of a very yellowish colour, and there a dense crowd of bats, frightened by the light of the torches, fly out with great noise and precipitation. For about a hundred paces, in advancing towards the interior, the vault continues to be very lofty, and the gallery is spacious; but suddenly the former ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... winter nights beside the nursery fire We read the fairy tale, while glowing coals Builded its pictures. There before our eyes We saw the vaulted hall of traceried stone Uprear itself, the distant ceiling hung With pendent stalactites like frozen vines; And all along the walls at intervals, Curled upwards into pillars, roses climbed, And ramped and were confined, and clustered leaves Divided where there peered a laughing face. The foliage seemed to rustle in the ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... large and small halls, and is traversed by a stream. In these caverns there are numerous stalactite structures, which, from their curious and fantastic shapes, have received such names as the Image of the Virgin, the Mosaic Altar, &c. The principal parts are the Paradies with the finest stalactites, the Astronomical Tower and the Beinhaus. Rats, frogs and bats form actually the only animal life in the caves, but a great number of antediluvian animal bones have been found here, as well as human bones and numerous remains of prehistoric human ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... natural and others artificial. We enter the largest of these natural caves, St. Michael's, and as we stand in the main hall, a spacious chamber two hundred feet in length and seventy feet in height, we are amazed at its beauty and grandeur. Colossal columns of stalactites seem to support its ornamental roof and all around are fantastic figures—foliage of many forms, beautiful statuettes, pillars, pendants, and shapes of picturesque beauty rivalling those of Mammoth Cave. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... misunderstood, and his friends lowered him into the ice-cold gulf instead of raising him. The second cry was effectual, and he was drawn up, though not without great difficulty, from a depth of one hundred and twenty-five feet. The most serious peril of the ascent was caused by the huge stalactites of ice, between the points of which he had to steer his way. Any one of them, if detached by the friction of the rope, might have caused his death. He afterward said: "Had I known all its dangers, perhaps I should not have ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... shearing. Into that dim, beautiful home of age, with its great rafters and mellow stone archways, the June sunlight shone through loopholes and chinks, in thin glamour, powdering with its very strangeness the dark cathedraled air, where, high up, clung a fog of old grey cobwebs so thick as ever were the stalactites of a huge cave. At this end the scent of sheep and wool and men had not yet routed that home essence of the barn, like the savour of acorns and withering ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to shade her large, clear, blue eyes, her open sleeve fell back, disclosing an arm dazzlingly white and exquisitely moulded. As Mr. Hammond introduced his pupil to his guests, Mrs. Powell smiled pleasantly, and pressed the offered hand; but the eyes, blue and cold as the stalactites of Capri, scanned the orphan's countenance, and when Edna had seen fully into their depths, she could not avoid ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... marbles; there is no end to them; the walls and floor of the great, many-arched, thousand-pillared, sky-lifted cavern are crusted all over with them, like stalactites and stalagmites. The vast temple is alive with the images of the dead. Kings and queens, nobles, statesmen, soldiers, admirals, the great men whose deeds we all know, the great writers whose words are in all our memories, the brave and the beautiful ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... the human voice, but in perfect harmony, and although painful in some degree, yet very fine. In winter an immense accumulation of ice takes place at the foot of the Fall, sometimes as much as three hundred feet broad, with two enormous icy stalactites hanging down over it. When heat returns, the falling waters hollow out cavernous channels through the mass, the effect of which is said to be very fine; this, no doubt, is the proper season to see the Staubbach to most advantage." Six or eight miles further, the valley ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... distance from the entrance light is admitted by two openings in the roof, the only ones throughout the whole extent of the cave, and when these are passed the full beauty of the scene breaks upon the view of the visitor. Stalactites of every form, hang like icicles from the roof; some presenting the appearance of inverted cones, others that of glistening semi-transparent tubes, about the thickness of a pipe stem, and several yards in length. In some parts, the stalactites, meeting with their opposite stalagmites, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... place for deeds of darkness, councils of desperation, such as they held, who met within its gloomy precincts. The moisture, which dripped constantly from its groined roof of stone, had formed stalactites of dingy spar, whence the large gouts plashed heavily on the damp pavement; the walls were covered with green slimy mould; the atmosphere was close and foetid, and so heavy that the huge waxen torches, four of which stood in rusty iron candelabra, on a large slab of granite, burned dim and ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... glorious stalactites reaching to the bottom and forming fluted pillars. In one of those caves where the water runs, the admiral floored over the bottom and gave a ball in it, and it was the most Arabian Night's entertainment kind of thing that I ever saw. It looked like a diamond hall, and didn't it show off the ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... look at the boxes and piles of dishes outside. Here I found other funny little people, busily at work with picks and shovels, taking out wooden dishes from the bottom of the cave, and china and glass from the top and sides, for the dishes hung down just like stalactites ...
— Lill's Travels in Santa Claus Land and other Stories • Ellis Towne, Sophie May and Ella Farman
... excel in beauty. They are about three miles in extent, and their lower levels are said to be about five hundred feet from the surface. The rock is white limestone, in which are chambers and passage-ways, stalactites and stalagmites innumerable. These have their somewhat fantastic but not unfitting names, such as the Gothic Temple, the Altar, the Guardian Spirit, the Fountain of Snow, and Columbus' Mantle. The place has been called "a dream of fairyland," a fairly appropriate description. The colors are ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... yourself in great caverns, which wind down into the bowels of the earth. I have a small bicycle lamp, and it is a perpetual joy to me to carry it into these weird solitudes, and to see the wonderful silver and black effect when I throw its light upon the stalactites which drape the lofty roofs. Shut off the lamp, and you are in the blackest darkness. Turn it on, and it is a scene ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... however, we suddenly entered a great cavern, quite dry. From its roof hung great stalactites that glittered and sparkled in the torch's uncertain light, while around the rough walls of this natural chamber were heaped in profusion great heavy ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... very inartificially made, and occasion needless annoyance. They are rarely made with bottoms, or with stuffing boxes, and are consequently, for the most part, adorned with stalactites of salt after a short period of service. The water discharged from them, too, from the want of a proper conduit, disfigures the front of the boiler, and adds to the corrosion in the ash pits. It would be preferable ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... and the spray of cascades below, offered a shelter from the storm. I entered,—scaring innumerable flocks of bats striking against me, blinded by the glare of the lightning that followed me into the cavern, and hastening to resettle themselves on the pendants of stalactites, or the jagged buttresses of ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by the erosive action of the water wearing out the softer portions of the rock beneath a harder roof or wall. This action is brought about by carbonic acid acting on the rock and producing what is called carbonate of lime, and the stalactites and stalagmites found in all these caverns are ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... with wooden panelling, painted with arabesque devices in the gayest colors, and along the top there is a series of Arabic inscriptions in gold. There are a number of niches or open closets in the walls, whose arched tops are adorned with pendent wooden ornaments, resembling stalactites, and at the corners of the room the heavy gilded and painted cornice drops into similar grotesque incrustations. A space of bare white wall intervenes between this cornice and the ceiling, which is formed ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... St. Martin to visit the caves of St. Marcel, 4 m. up the river, or 3m. W. from the village of St. Marcel. The price depends upon the time the visitors make the boat wait. The cave consists of a tunnel, 4m. long, which here and there widens out into spacious lofty caverns hung with stalactites. Some parts are very steep, slippery, and fatiguing. The visit requires from 6 to 7 hours, and certainly none but ardent lovers of walking in dark caverns should undertake the labour. The sail, however, is pleasant. The ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... fortification, an earthy cylinder, wrought in open work, like that of the Odynerus,[2] and curved like it, but of the width and length of a man's finger. When the community is a populous one, we stand amazed at the rustic ornamentation formed by all these stalactites of clay hanging from the facade. The other, A. pilipes, who is very much more frequent, leaves the opening of her corridor bare. The chinks between the stones in old walls and abandoned hovels, the surfaces of excavations in soft sandstone or marl, are found suitable for her labours; but ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... handbill, in a warped frame, announcing that "the Next Annual N. H. Agricultural Fair" would take place on the 10th of September, 1841. There was no other furniture or decoration in this dismal apartment, except the cobwebs which festooned the ceiling, hanging down here and there like stalactites. ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... as a small world. The sides of this cavern were made of pure gold, and the roof—far above his head—was spangled all over with glittering points, like a starry sky. The ground, too, and, in short, everything within the cave, was made of the same precious metal. Thousands of stalactites hung from the roof like golden icicles. Millions of delicate threads of the same material also depended from the star-spangled vault, each thread having a golden ball at the end of it, which, strange to say, was transparent, and permitted a bright flame within ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... they passed, they glided by little restaurants where the Venetians, in olden days, talked liberty for themselves and death to the Austrians, and at length they came out upon the Grand Canal where the Rialto curves its ancient blocks of marble and stalactites ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... inflammable materia, all the medical uses of which, as applied to the nerves of organic life, modern science has not yet perhaps explored. Yet more often would he pass his hours in a cavern, by the loneliest part of the beach, where the stalactites seem almost arranged by the hand of art, and which the superstition of the peasants associates, in some ancient legends, with the numerous and almost incessant earthquakes to which the island is ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the sea in the chalk cliffs, which front its surges. Some of these are exceedingly picturesque. Their entrances festooned with hanging boughs, they penetrate far into the interior of the rocks, and the water percolating through their vaulted roofs, has formed stalactites of fantastic shapes. The boat glides through the arched entrance, and we find ourselves in the cool and grateful shade of these marine grottoes. Fishes are flitting in the clear water; limpid streams oozing through the rocks form fresh-water basins, with pebbly bottoms; ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... summer-house beyond a big black spot, for they had burned its straw roof to make it more poetic. The yew trees, shaped like stags or armchairs, succeeded to the tree that seemed thunder-stricken, extending transversely from the elm row to the arbour, where tomatoes hung like stalactites. Here and there a sunflower showed its yellow disk. The Chinese pagoda, painted red, seemed a lighthouse on the hillock. The peacocks' beaks, struck by the sun, reflected back the rays, and behind the railed gate, now freed from its boards, a perfectly ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... the rugged mound, they again embarked, encountering a couple of reefs. They then proceeded on between steep walls with a free navigation, for upwards of four miles. In many places the roof was adorned with draperies formed of snow-white stalactites, but generally the black walls alone appeared. In some parts the roof descended so low that they were compelled to lie down, and shove the boat along by holding to the roof above their heads, until at length they found that they ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... external parts became solid, and forming an arch prevented the internal parts from approaching each other so near as to become solid, and thus chalk was produced. I have specimens of chalk formed at the root of several stalactites, and in their central parts; and of other stalactites which are hollow like quills from a similar cause, viz. from the external part of the stalactite hardening first by its evaporation, and thus either attracting the internal dissolved ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... cloth, stood out like cliffs; the pit, with its seats under a gray drugget, because of the dust, lifted toward the stage its rows of motionless waves. The stage itself was strange: a sort of huge cave, with strips of scenery hanging like stalactites; near the wall, a metal pedestal, with a red velvet platform, looked like a blood-stained scaffold; one suspected the presence of properties: wheels, iron implements, tangled ropes, like so many instruments of torture. At the New Zealanders' ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... and the rock shook. They deployed to left and right into a space so vast that the eye at first refused to try to measure it. It was the hollow core of a mountain, filled by the sea-sound of a human crowd and hung with huge stalactites that danced and shifted and flung back a thousand colors at the flickering ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy |
