|
|
|
More "Avalanche" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an avalanche on my mounting spirit, and cast me headlong down the imaginary ascent my busy ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... electricity is nothing in comparison to a shock from a pair of bright eyes—such eyes as hers. The truth of the case was here, of a sudden, apparently from out the clear sky, came down, with not a moment's warning, a perfect avalanche of rain-drops—all expressly got up, or down, for my benefit, else why did I happen to have an umbrella in my hand? "A Wise man—" you remember the rest. My beautiful incognito was away up those long stairs, and walking leisurely ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... of the power of speech when, on succeeding in this effort, he found that his feet came in contact with a perfect hillock of empty bottles, oyster-shells, and broken crockery, heaped under the table. "Good gracious me! I hope I'm doing no mischief!" exclaimed Valentine, as a miniature avalanche of oyster-shells clattered down on his intruding foot, and a plump bottle with a broken neck rolled lazily out from under the table-cloth, and courted observation ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... grudged McCan every munch of his jaws. Once, she distributed the ration. The first Smoke knew was a wild harangue of protest from McCan. Not to him alone, but to herself, had she given a smaller portion than to Smoke. After that, Smoke divided the meat himself. Caught in a small avalanche one morning after a night of snow, and swept a hundred yards down the mountain, they emerged half-stifled and unhurt, but McCan emerged without his pack in which was all the flour. A second and larger snow-slide buried ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... first projection of the Victoria Bridge, the difficulties of executing such a work across a wide river, down which an avalanche of ice rushes to the sea every spring, were pronounced almost insurmountable by those best acquainted with the locality. The ice of two thousand miles of inland lakes and upper rivers, besides their tributaries, is then poured down stream, and, in the neighbourhood ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... are three things that my notable sister holds in especial abhorrence,—untidy housekeeping, sentimental demonstrations between married people, and crying babies; and here they all were in an avalanche, overwhelming, not only herself, but a most prepossessing young man, who, for all I knew, was viewing me with a critic's eye, as a possible sister-in-law, and wondering how far certain traits are ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... to the types it would all be mighty agreeable; and the world would be very considerably more overwhelmed with authorship than it is. It is the "grey goose quill" work, the necessity for incarnating the creatures of the brain in black and white, that is the world's protection from this avalanche. And I for one do not understand how anybody who, eschewing the sunshine and the fields and the song of birds, or the enjoyment of other people's brain-work, has glued himself to his desk for long hours, can say or imagine ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... shovel, surveying with smiling complacency his accomplished task, the spite of the arch-fiend Gravitation was raised against him, and, finding the impish slates (hadn't Luther something to say about "as many devils as tiles"?) ready to cooeperate, an avalanche was the result, making the last state of that sidewalk worse than the first, and sending the divine into the house with a battered hat, and an article of faith supplementary to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... tremendous commotion between the pillars of the Brandenburg Gate, and the host of marshals and generals, resembling a star-spangled avalanche, entered the city. Nothing was to be seen but golden epaulettes, orders glittering with diamonds, embroidered uniforms, and long white ostrich-plumes. Not on them, however, were the eyes of the crowd fixed; they gazed only at that grave, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... of the cliff, of course. It must have made a big drift there and tumbled down—regular avalanche, you know—just as I tried to look out. Why! the place out there is filled up yards deep! We'd never be able to dig ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... first pebble of the avalanche, Malone knew suddenly—the avalanche that was somehow going to destroy him. "You forced your thoughts into my mind, then," he said as coolly as he could. "Just as you forced decision ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... about it something tragic and catastrophic. It means the plunging of one's hands into frozen snow or burning fire. It means the crossing of perilous glades in tropic jungles. It means the "sowing of the whirlwind" on the edge of the avalanche and the hunting of the mirage in the desert. The ecstasy brought by it is too blinding to serve as an illumination for our days; and for all the tremulous sweetness of its approach it leaves behind it the poison of disillusion and the scars of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... bare and black and threatening. He knows instinctively which of the ledges has a dangerous look—where such a bold mountaineer as John Lauener might slip on the polished surface, or be in danger of an avalanche from above. He sees the little shell-like swelling at the foot of the glacier crawling down the steep slope above, and knows that it means an almost inaccessible wall of ice; and the steep snowfields ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... like an avalanche, shouting his greetings to everybody on the way. But when he got near to the "Fairy" he wiped his steaming forehead and held his panting breath, and pretended not to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... pile, which sent back a roar, and the report seemed to have loosened one of the great needles of rock which had stood up for ages on the top of a loose ridge, and now came down, bringing with it quite an avalanche of stones, with such a thunderous crash that the blacks turned and fled, yelling with horror, while Mak and Pig, who were coming from where they had been sleeping in the sunshine, dropped upon their knees, the Pig following this up by creeping among the bushes that were left standing, and hiding ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... matters, and made the descent of the steep clay paths one of speed rather than elegance. Once started with so heavy a load, it was impossible to pull up. So the descent of his regiment that afternoon from the plateau above was a weird and wonderful sight, and resembled nothing more than a mixed avalanche of perspiring troopers, mud ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... into this solitary place, passing through the narrow, fissure-like opening in the rocky wall, a crack similar to, but larger, than the opening through which Bud had made his discovery. Then shale and dirt had been started, in a miniature avalanche, down the side of the slope, effectually hiding the means by which the cattle ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... Burton with plans for a bear raid. Watch him. Send word of his first move. The time is ripe for an avalanche." ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... under another's belly, as is their wont, when the four horsemen, headed by Jeff Creede himself, appeared suddenly on the distant mountain side, riding hard along the slope. Galloping ahead of them in an avalanche of rocks was the band of loose horses that Alvarez had seen in the redondo that morning, and with the instinct of their kind they were making for ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... Ramsay sent for me again, but this time it was business alone. I found him in a panic, like a man facing an avalanche and armed only with a shovel. Dunkirk, the senior United States senator for our state, lived at Fredonia. He had seen that, by tunneling the Mesaba Range, a profitable railroad between Fredonia and Chicago could be built that would shorten the time at least three ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... "spring-water pumped upon their nerves," she good-naturedly overlooked their grimances and groans, and continued the hydropathic treatment even in her second book, hoping some good effects from the shock. Of one intensely gratifying fact she could not fail to be thoroughly informed, by the avalanche of letters which almost daily covered her desk; she had at least ensconced herself securely in a citadel, whence she could smilingly defy all assaults—in the warm hearts of her noble countrywomen. Safely sheltered in their sincere and devoted love, she ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... clan-people were not Tribe-People, and thus could not know the meaning of Council, nor weigh consequence, nor realize in their new-found cleverness that a single arrogant act would trigger the first and final avalanche.... ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... found it impossible to escape the games. The potato and three-legged races brought the contestants to his side of the deck, and his reading was constantly interrupted by an avalanche of noisy spectators who rushed through the cross passages from one side of the boat to the other, exhibiting a ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... his hand casually as if dismissing once and for all an avalanche of contradictions. Dorn hesitated. It was one of his days of disquiet; and he had left a note with Rachel saying he would be home at ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... would return, and eat the evening meal. It would then be time to sleep. And with a gesture he indicated the rugs and cushions, under which the beetles were now buried like mountain-dwellers beneath an avalanche. ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... had so cruelly wronged him. Horror-struck, I saw him swing down from the bank, splash through the water with raised tomahawk, and gain the top of the run. In less time than it takes me to write these words he had dragged a hideous, naked warrior out of the brambles, and with an avalanche of crumbling earth they slid into the waters of the creek. Polly Ann and I stared transfixed at the fearful fight that followed, nor can I give any adequate description of it. Weldon had struck through ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fairly be called a constant play of countenance: first he smiled, then looked grave; now raised his eyebrows, till they rose like rainbows, to the horizon of his pale, straw-coloured hair; and next darted them down, like an avalanche, over the twinkling, restless, fluttering, little blue eyes, which then became almost invisible. Mr. Douce had, in fact, all the appearance of a painfully shy man, which was the more strange, as he had the reputation of enterprise, and even audacity, in the business of his profession, and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thunderstorm, and no negligence or dislike of divine threatenings will arrest the slow, solemn march, inevitable as destiny, of the consequences of our doings. Things will be as they will be. Believed or unbelieved, the avalanche ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... ascend, the grander and wilder the mountains become. Sometimes the road is blasted out of perpendicular walls of rock, and heavy masses of mountain hang like a vault above us. At dangerous slopes, where the road is exposed to avalanches in spring, it runs through tunnels of masonry. When an avalanche dashes furiously down the mountain it leaps over these tunnels and continues down on the other side without doing the road ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... is wonderful how easy the descent really is, when once the first false step is taken. As the avalanche, which at first becomes slowly loosened from its lofty position, gradually descends with greater and greater rapidity till it is dashed into the abyss, so does the frail mortal, who at first shudders at the bare thought ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... spluttered the victim, trying to dodge the avalanche. But instead of heeding his pleadings the other students proceeded to ram a quantity of the stuff into his ears and down his collar. Nat squirmed and yelled, but it did ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... sun was turned full on this sight of sights. It was at the end of the wet season and the flow was at maximum strength. The mist was so great that at first I could scarcely see the Falls. Slowly but defiantly the foaming face broke through the veil. Niagara gives you a thrill but this toppling avalanche awes ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... in such a hurry. Why, you come down on a man like an avalanche. You must give me time to think it over—till to-morrow at least. And the papers—at any rate, I must have ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... days before I can see him again, and I don't think it will be needful for you to confirm my statements. I fancy the fight is all out of him—it came upon him too suddenly—if he had known that I was here he might have braced himself up, but coming down like an avalanche upon him it stunned him. Now, Mr. Harford, you must permit me to draw a check for ten pounds for your expenses down here; when I come to my own again I shall be able properly to show my gratitude for the inestimable services ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... Rocke, I could not tell you the avalanche of abuse, insult and invective that he hurled upon my defenseless head. He accused me of more crimes than I had ever heard talk of. He told me that my condition was an impossible one unless I had been false to the ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... more than rescue a number of the unfortunates from jail, convoy, and handcuffs. But what can there be done when thousands of human nests, lived in for so many years, are suddenly destroyed, when the catastrophe comes with the force of an avalanche so that even the Jewish heart which is open to sorrow ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... boisterous seas From faithless France he danced his way Where Alban's thousand islands lay, The kelp-strown ridge of the lone Hebrides:— How down each strath they stream'd as springtide rills, When he to Finnan vale Came from Glenaladale, And that snow-handful grew an avalanche of the hills. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... difficult point in it, where there ought to be a quite imperceptible transition to something fresh, then a subdued gliding finale, a prolonged murmur, ending at last in a climax as bold and as startling as a shot, or the sound of a mountain avalanche—full stop. But the words would not come to me. I read over the whole piece from the commencement; read every sentence aloud, and yet failed absolutely to crystallize my thoughts, in order to produce this scintillating climax. And ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... up of these Theses that the history of the Great Reformation dates; for the hammer-strokes which fixed that parchment started the Alpine avalanche which overwhelmed the pride of Rome and broke the stubborn power which had reigned supreme ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... scouting forward in an open plain, rushed back to give warning of Indians everywhere. And they were everywhere—a thousand strong against a feeble hundred caught in their midst. They rode like centaurs, and their aim was deadly true as they poured down, a murderous avalanche, from every hillslope. Their ponies' tails, sweeping the ground, lengthened by long horse-hair braids, with sticks thrust through at intervals by way of ornament; their waving blankets, and streamered lances ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... to torture his mind long with efforts to seek the solution of this riddle. The old doctor came back with the lawyer, and for more than half an hour he had to answer an avalanche of questions. But the investigation had been carried on with such rare sagacity, that Daniel could furnish the prosecution only a single new fact,—the surrender of his entire fortune into the hands of M. ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... Agnes," was answered, in a slightly depressed voice; "yet the impulse to bear onward to the goal now in view is not the less ardent for the suggestion. I can no more pause than the avalanche once in motion. I must onward in the race I ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... pathway. Indeed this was quite necessary, for here a great pan of ice, thirty yards square and eight feet thick, glided upon another of the same tremendous proportions to rear into the air and crumble down, a ponderous avalanche of ice cakes and snow. He must leap nimbly from cake to cake. He must take advantage of every rise and fall of the heaving swells which disturbed the great blanket winter had cast upon the ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... slope below he thought the snow seemed broken—by footprints, was it? With the expectation of a discovery strong upon him, he crept along a wide ledge of the crag, now and then stumbling and sending an avalanche of snow and ice and stones thundering to the foot of the cliff..He missed his way more than once. Then he would turn about, laboriously retracing his steps, and try another level of the ledges. Suddenly before him was the dark opening he sought. No creature had lately ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... he knows. He has heard the foehn sweep down from the hills and spin the great stones off the house-roofs. And one may look and see nothing, yet the stones go. It is the wind that runs before the avalanche that snaps the pine trees; and the wind is the spirit that calls ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... situated among the Alps and containing about two thousand five hundred inhabitants, was overwhelmed in 1618 by the falling of Mount Conto. The avalanche occurred in the night, and no trace of the village or any of its inhabitants could ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... their bundles and scurried to one side, their eyes gleaming with fear. The canvas avalanche swept past them. They leaned, faint and dumb, against trees and listened, their blood stagnant. Below them it struck the base of a great pine tree, where it writhed and struggled. The three watched its convolutions a moment and then started terrifically for the top of the hill. As they disappeared, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... God! The Son of God! Set Him free! It is the Son of God who hangs on the cross!" The cry rolled through the crowd like the dull noise of an avalanche; like a shriek of terror, like the inward consciousness of a fearful mistake, the most fearful that had been made since the world began. He who hangs yonder on the cross is the Son of God. Far below in a cleft of the rock is a poor sinner. He struggles up to his feet, holding on with his ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... and Cassini held Hay in his. The Siberian Railway offered checkmate to all possible opposition. Japan must make the best terms she could; England must go on receding; America and Germany would look on at the avalanche. The wall of Russian inertia that barred Europe across the Baltic, would bar America across the Pacific; and Hay's policy of the open door would ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... which clutched him were the hands of murderers, and the lawyer's puny figure could not stand up against the avalanche of human terror, relentless fury, and mad vengeance which now rolled in upon it. As I bounded to his relief he turned his ghastly face upon me. But the way between us was blocked, and I was preparing myself to see him sink before ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... How could he answer the avalanche of questions? At fourteen one is not very wise, but Tom squeezed the rough hand still holding his, and answered hopefully, "Some day we will have some friends, Pussy. And some day when I get big and can work for you, we will settle down and live in one town, and people will come to see us, and ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... have thought more and accepted the responsibilities of voting to a greater extent than was ever expected of them. During the week I was accorded a welcome home in the old Academy of Music, Rundle street, where I listened with embarrassment to the avalanche of eulogium that overwhelmed me. "What a good thing it is, Miss Spence, that you have only one idea," a gentleman once said to me on my country tour. He wished thus to express his feeling concerning my singleness of purpose towards effective voting. But at this welcome home I felt ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... the owner, in perspective, of absolutely unlimited codfish, Miss Jelliffe," I told her. "Some day these people will bury me under an avalanche of quintals. Still, it is also possible that they may come on the installment plan. One hundred and twelve pounds of fish may seem an unusual fee for a rather protracted case, but consider how far it will go in the feeding of a lone ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... buffalo rent asunder in the terrible velocity of his course. His advance could only be compared to the galloping of several horses—to the rushing noise of some frightful monster—or, I might almost say, of some furious and diabolical being. Down he came like an avalanche; and at this moment, I confess, I experienced such lively emotions that my heart beat with extraordinary rapidity. Was it not death—aye, and frightful death—that was perhaps approaching me? Suddenly the buffalo made his appearance. He stopped for an instant; gazed, as if frightened, around ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... creature seems a Musidora of the water, and you almost blush with a sense of guilt, in gazing on that peerless privacy. As petal by petal slowly opens, there still stands the central cone of snow, a glacier, an alp, a jungfrau, while each avalanche of whiteness seems the last. Meanwhile, a strange rich odor fills the air, and Nature seems to concentrate all fascinations and claim all senses for this jubilee of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... fashion, and thus grew up immense legal departments. Instead of operating under the rules of common sense and according to circumstances, every railroad had to operate on the advice of counsel. Rules spread through every part of the organization. Then came the avalanche of state and federal regulations, until to-day we find the railways hog-tied in a mass of rules and regulations. With the lawyers and the financiers on the inside and various state commissions on the outside, the railway manager has little chance. That is the trouble with the railways. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... nothing lying around that Little Fuzzy could damage or on which he might hurt himself, took the manipulator up to the diggings. He worked all morning, cracking nearly a ton and a half of flint, and found nothing. Then he set off a string of shots, brought down an avalanche of sandstone and exposed more flint, and sat down under a pool-ball ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... of a plug. A pebble may block a log; a branch sometimes changes the course of an avalanche. The carronade stumbled, and the gunner, availing himself of the perilous opportunity, thrust his iron bar between the spokes of the back wheels. Pitching forward, the cannon stopped; and the man, using his bar for a lever, rocked it backward and forward. The ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... cube now be subservient to his will? He wondered. Everything depended upon that. If not, then he might as well try to stay the forces of a mighty avalanche with his breath, as halt the cube-army ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... its pride, By the wind in summer-tide Tossed and loosened from the branch, Showers its petals o'er the ground, From the distant mountain's side, Scattering all its snows around, With mysterious, muffled sound, Loosened, fell the avalanche. Voices, echoes far and near, Roar of winds and waters blending, Mists uprising, clouds impending, Filled them with a sense of fear, Formless, nameless, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... An avalanche of pretty girls in pink pajamas came tumbling down the bronze and marble staircase, smothering poet and son-in-law in happy embraces; and "Oh, George!" they cried, "how sunburned you are! So is Iole, but she is too sweet! Did you have a perfectly ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... mighty host was heard, which proved to be the approach of a tropical flood, heralded by drops as large as marbles. It churned the still waters into a phosphorescent foam which rendered the darkness only more oppressive. The rain came down as it can come only in the Bight of Benin. The avalanche cooled us, reducing the temperature ten or fifteen degrees, giving us new life, and relieving our fevered blood. I told Mr. Block to throw back the tarpaulin over the main hatch and let our dusky friends get some benefit of it. In half ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... back To their mysterious caverns,—mountains rear To heaven their bald and blackened cliffs, and bow Their tall heads to the plain,—new empires rise, Gathering the strength of hoary centuries, And rush down like the Alpine avalanche, Startling the nations,—and the very stars, Yon bright and burning blazonry of God, Glitter a while in their eternal depths, And, like the Pleiad, loveliest of their train, Shoot from their glorious spheres, and pass away [2] To darkle in the trackless void,—yet Time, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... order. At this critical moment, Gonsalvo, whose eagle eye took in the whole operations of the field, ordered a general charge along the line; and the Spaniards, leaping their intrenchments, descended with the fury of an avalanche on their foes, whose wavering columns, completely broken by the violence of the shock, were seized with a panic, and fled, scarcely offering any resistance. Louis d'Ars, at the head of such of the men-at-arms as could follow him, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... was regarded by a host of clever and unscrupulous persons with a bitterness of enmity almost amounting to ferocity. He seems to have made no attempt to conciliate his foes, but treated them with a sort of haughty contempt. In the year 1810 the weight of their anger descended upon him like an avalanche. He was then, and he for some years previously had been, Treasurer of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts. An accusation of a very serious nature was brought against him. He was charged with having applied the public funds to his own use, and with having ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... and others. The road, however, was very expensive, took years to build, and still requires frequent repair. In fact, even to-day travel over it is often suspended for several days or weeks at a time, following some tremendous avalanche. Yet it was this new road which had led Melchor Arteaga to build his hut near the arable land at Mandor Pampa, where he could raise food for his family and offer rough shelter to passing travelers. It was this new road which brought Richarte, Alvarez, and their ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... slip from its notch up on the side of the cliff, and come crashing down, loosening others on the way, until finally the rush and roar almost partook of the nature of a small avalanche. ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... possessed the field. The Yellow Book and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which the word Sex was strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life. It was odd how suddenly the sex note—(as I will call it for want of a better word)—disappeared ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... Ferdinand (aside) What an avalanche of reproach! (Aloud) Let us try, Gertrude, both of us, to behave wisely in this matter. Above all things, let us try to avoid base accusations. I shall never forget what you have been to me; I still entertain towards you a friendship which is sincere, ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... meant for defense. The cliff-dwellers, driven by dreaded enemies to this last stand, had cunningly cut the rock until it balanced perfectly, ready to be dislodged by strong hands. Just below it leaned a tottering crag that would have toppled, starting an avalanche on an acclivity where no sliding mass could stop. Crags and pinnacles, splintered cliffs, and leaning shafts and monuments, would have thundered down to block forever the ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... was to befall the palace and the people. The dweller amongst mountains must be always exposed to their dilapidation; and a season of unusual rain, continuing to a much later period than usual, produced an earth-avalanche. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... as if she must break in pieces. Sometimes the billows burst upon the deck with a thunder-crash, and, sweeping over it, poured in cataracts from her sides. Now a heavy cross-sea struck her beams with the jarring force of an avalanche of rocks, flinging more than one unlucky fellow clear from his berth. And now her bows went under, sunk by a weight of rolling water, from which it seemed for an instant impossible that she could ever emerge. But rise she did, ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... base for the remainder of the snow. It's practically all resting on the tracks; above, there's nothing for the snow to cling to. When we cut out the foundation—they're afraid that the vibration will loosen the rest and start an avalanche. It all depends whether it comes before—or after ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... a circle, one on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece of plank. Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to where there was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the dump; and down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they poured one avalanche of stones after another, waking the echoes of the glen. Meantime we elders sat together on the platform, Hanson and his friend smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson rattling on as usual with an adroit volubility, saying nothing, but keeping the party ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we little human animals are! An avalanche of love hadn't destroyed my hunger. A knife-thrust in my vanity killed it in an instant; and I can't believe this was simply because I'm female. I shouldn't be surprised if a man might feel exactly the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... heat fell upon the settlement, the clearings, and the river as if flung down by an angry hand. The land lay silent, still, and brilliant under the avalanche of burning rays that had destroyed all sound and all motion, had buried all shadows, had choked every breath. No living thing dared to affront the serenity of this cloudless sky, dared to revolt against the oppression of this glorious ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... movement, it seemed, Copley had risen and kicked his own chair away, seized Ruth about her waist as he did so, and so dragged her out from under the avalanche. ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... to be freed from a sentimental friendship not at all to his taste, prepared to carry out his long-contemplated design. In July of 1812, by way of Poland, he entered Russia with an army of over 678,000 souls. It was a human avalanche collected mainly from the people he had conquered, with which he intended to overwhelm the Russian Empire. It was of little consequence that thirty or forty thousand fell as this or that town was captured by the way. ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... that "Ursus Major" lay ill, perhaps mortally hurt, the trampled prices of securities began to revive like dusty blossoms under a shower. Day long came damp extras from the press heralding a bull day almost as wild and swift in its price recovery as yesterday's bear day had been terrific in its avalanche. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... heavy mist that covered the low country. The bombardment started at 5 p. m., the beginning of which was immediately followed by the explosion of two mines which were under a hillock that was a part of the British front at the southeast of St. Eloi. The artillery attack was followed by such an avalanche of German infantry that the British were driven from their trenches. This German success was followed up by the enfilading of the British lines to the right and left, with the result that that entire section of the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Union; nor in new compromises of any kind whatsoever; but in the absolute conquest of the whole North—not conquest even in any sense now understood among civilized people; but conquest with more than all the horrors which fourteen centuries ago were visited on Southern Europe by the overwhelming avalanche of Northern barbarian invasion?—that in that event, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of locomotion without question, freedom in any sense which makes life valuable to the man once educated into the conception of freedom, is lost?—that the whole ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the mountain. Every little while, for want of something to do, I charged it. Then I carried a pine, which I had torn up, on my tusks, until the butt struck a boulder which went down the hill with an avalanche of small stones that ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... high feather. While the Elevated train was carrying me up-town I visioned an avalanche of new orders for my shop and a spacious factory full of machines and men. I saw myself building up a great business. An ugly thought flashed through my mind: Why be saddled with a partner? Why not get rid ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... humaine! effort du captif! sainte rage! Effraction enfin plus forte que la cage! Que faut-il a cet etre, atome au large front, Pour vaincre ce qui n'a ni fin, ni bord, ni fond, Pour dompter le vent, trombe, et l'ecume, avalanche? Dans le ciel une toile ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... at a double. There was no water, no means whatever of extinguishing the flames, but the active little Frenchmen did not lose a minute. At the word of command, they broke their ranks, and swarmed into the houses, and in a minute a perfect avalanche of goods was thrown from the windows. Some stood along outside the houses, others climbed upon their shoulders, on these again others took their places, and so on until living ladders were formed, up which a score of men climbed the roofs. These set ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... to upset some of my arrangements," said Peter, "but in upsetting them, his own would be under the avalanche." ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... arrows and dumb and dead. But the chief with the flankers had gained the rear, And flew on the trail of the flying herd. The shouts of the riders rang loud and clear, As their frothing steeds to the chase they spurred. And now like the roar of an avalanche Rolls the sullen wrath of the maddened bulls. They charge on the riders and runners stanch, And a dying steed in the snow-drift rolls, While the rider, flung to the frozen ground Escapes the horns by a panther's bound. But the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... blinded by fear and delusion were no longer accessible. Even had the sound sense of a single individual attempted resistance, it would have been useless; the giant avalanche could not be stayed. A diabolical plot was concocted, and it was the Prefect, Count d'Estournel, who perfected it in such wise that it promised the best success. Toward one o'clock at night a carriage drove into the castle grounds; Clarissa was compelled ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... war was drawing to an end, and with it the American war, which was but its echo. An avalanche of defeat and disaster had fallen upon the old age of Louis XIV., and France was burdened with an insupportable load of debt. The political changes in England came to her relief. Fifty years later, when the elder Pitt went out of office and ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... men could ascend the shrouds the wind struck the vessel, like an avalanche, on her starboard broadside, heeling her over to port as if she had been canted by the caulkers in dock. Then, another following sea pooped her and cleared the decks fore and aft, sweeping everything loose overboard, the maintopsail being split to pieces at the same time; while the foretop-mast ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... for several minutes and then ceased abruptly. Evidently the warrior had realized the futility of his avalanche and must now be seeking some other mode of attack. It caused Will chagrin that he had not seen him once during all the long attack, but he noticed with relief that the sun would soon set beyond the great White Dome. The snow on the Dome itself was tinged now with fire, but it looked cool even at ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... his guide's example, he turned about and slid backward down the opposite slope very swiftly, amid a little avalanche of snow. While he was sliding he thought of what would happen if some broken gap should come in his way. At the edge he stumbled to his feet ankle deep in slush, thanking heaven for an opaque footing again. ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... on a slippery stair was hardly a safe pastime, and before Jasper had time to utter more than' Holloa there! take care!' there descended suddenly on him an avalanche of little girls, 'knocking him off his feet, so that all promiscuously rolled down two or three steps together. Fergus and Primrose, who had somehow been holding on behind,' remained upright, but nevertheless screaming. The shrieks of the fallen ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Posidon gathered the clouds, and stirred the depths with his trident, as with a ladle, and roused the whirlwind, and a good deal more (enough to raise a storm of itself),—when suddenly there came a black squall which nearly capsized the boat. The poet was extremely ill, and disgorged such an avalanche of minstrelsy (Scylla, Charybdis, the Cyclops, all came up bodily), that I had no difficulty in preserving a few snatches. I should like to ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... toward me, stampeding and bringing with them the numberless herds through which they passed, and pouring down on me, no longer separated but compacted into one immense mass of plunging animals, mad with fright, irresistible as an avalanche. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... home troubled the imaginative little man. Then, too, a great wind began to sweep over the hills and to shake the snow-laden pines. On its way, it carried anew from the ice of the river wild sounds of disturbance and at last, in the mid hours of night, an avalanche of snow slid from the roof. Hugh sat up; he realized well enough what had happened. But presently the quick ear of childhood was aware of other, and less familiar sounds. Was it Kris Kringle? Oh! if he could only see ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... he had wakened a sleeping hospital. He sank back ashamed of his own outburst. He rarely spoke of the few ailments he could afford. When he did it was like one of his new clerks pulling a bolt of goods from the shelf and bringing down a silken avalanche. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... entered the white room that afternoon, the small sister was ready with an avalanche of queries. "Why ain't the hospital big enough as 'tis? What do they need an edition for? Why won't Robinson Danbury give them any money, and why do they think he ought to? What's the matter with the churches and how ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... wants her!" broke from Christie like an involuntary cry of pain; then she hid her face by stooping to gather up the avalanche of hosiery which fell from her lap to ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... statistics corrected, wrote a book embodying the amendments needed. Modest as his criticisms were, they raised a STORM of protest and angry denunciation, which even led to his deposition for the time being from his bishopric! While at the same time an avalanche of books to oppose his heresy poured forth from the press. Lately I had the curiosity to look through the British Museum catalogue and found that in refutation of Colenso's Pentateuch Examined some ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... an entire caravan, disorganized, broken, and overthrown, was disappearing beneath an avalanche of sand. The camels, flung pell-mell together, were uttering dull and pitiful groans; cries and howls of despair were heard issuing from that dusty and stifling cloud, and, from time to time, a parti-colored garment cut the chaos of the scene ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... next morning the uproar began with the arrival of the actors and actresses, an avalanche of caps, chignons, high boots, short petticoats, affected screams, veils floating over the fresh coats of rouge; the women were in a large majority, Cardailhac having reflected that, where a bey was concerned, the performance was of little consequence, that ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the iron colossus came to a dead stop, the suddenness of which threw the carriages crashing on top of each other. This fearful havoc was not all. Through the breach which the great rock had made in the barricade, an incessant avalanche of stones, from the size of a cannon-ball to that of a wheelbarrow, descended upon the train, crushing everything beneath into fragments, pushing the unhappy train into the chasm below, into the valley of death and destruction. Like a huge serpent it slid down, the great glowing furnace with its ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... ran into them, but sent them sprawling on their backs right and left. Then it met a slight obstruction, and itself upset, sending Captain Vane and his companions, with its other contents, into the midst of the struggling dogs. With momentarily increasing speed this avalanche of mixed dead and living matter went sliding, hurtling, swinging, shouting, struggling, and yelling to the bottom. Fortunately, there was no obstruction there, else had destruction been inevitable. The slope merged ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... a crash, and the very house shook. There was a wheezy shout of alarm, the sound of another voice in wild laughter, and some heavy body slid down the long side of the roof with the noise of an avalanche. ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... distressed on this account. He declared that he was a poor man; that his vessel was all the property he had in the world; that one of the men lost overboard in the squall was his own brother, and the other his wife's brother; and misery had suddenly come upon him in an avalanche. By the exertions of Martyn and others from the Josephine, a portion of the sails and standing rigging of the galiot had been saved, so that only about one fourth of the value of the vessel had been sacrificed by the tempest. But now the skipper was in great trouble ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... roar of the avalanche was far more effective than a salvo of artillery, because, besides being tremendous, it was unceasing, and the result was that the vessel ran up a flag in reply to the strange salute. Then a white puff of smoke from her side preceded ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... under several of these criticisms there is a HATRED against me, against me personally, a deliberate slandering, the cause of which I am seeking. I do not feel hurt, but this avalanche of foolishness saddens me. One prefers inspiring good feelings to bad ones. As for the rest, I am not thinking any more about Saint-Antoine. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... rapid passage of air over taut membranes (vocal cords) stretched in the larynx. It is an interesting fact that for millions of years there was upon the earth no sound of life at all, only the noise of wind and wave, thunder and avalanche. Apart from the instrumental music of some insects, perhaps beginning in the Carboniferous, the first vital sounds were due to Amphibians, and theirs certainly was the first voice—surely one of the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... it!" Dropping Lone Wolf's chain, he ran forward, waving his arms and shouting angrily. But that red onrushing bulk was quite too dull-witted to understand that it ought to obey. It was in the mood to charge an avalanche. Deeply humiliated, Timmins hopped aside, and reluctantly ran for the woods, trusting to elude his ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... the Assembly, and the Machine now gave heed. The corporations saw that it would be suicidal to bring down on themselves the avalanche of fury which was accumulating. The bill passed. Roosevelt had set a ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... an ear-splitting roar, the shells exploded. The concussion was tremendous, and huge showers of shells, broken bits of wagons, gravel, and flaming wood fell heavily in all directions. Many of those looking on were killed outright by the avalanche of falling material, and the remainder fled in mad ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... trees, which stood out like sentinels, on a ridge of the mountain, in the very path of the storm, turn over like nine-pins, one after the other, and tearing up the soil with their roots, slip down the mountain-side, dragging with them an avalanche of earth. His eye darted to the cottage with a sudden fear. Even as he looked, the wind was lifting some of the slates on the roof, rattling them, loosening them, and in a few moments would scatter them around ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... me—the vast dipping plain with the ancient pyramid of Cholula, topped now by a white church with towers and dome, standing boldly forth across it, and beyond, yet seeming so close one half expected an avalanche of their snows to come down upon the town, towering Popocatepetl and her sister, every little vale and hollow of the "saddle" between clear as at a yard distance. Then to the left, Malinche and the rolling stony hills of Tlaxcala, along which the Spaniards ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... swifter pours the avalanche Adown the steep incline, That rises o'er the parent springs Of ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... was a sharp crack overhead, followed by a tremendous rattle and crash. Then down upon the buggy descended what, to Graves, appeared to be an avalanche of scratching, tearing twigs and branches. They ripped away the boot and laprobe and jammed him back against the seat, their sharp points against his breast. The buggy was jerked forward a ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... I leave the subject of Belgium, what have we done for Belgium? Have we saved her soil from invasion? Were we at her side with half a million men when the avalanche fell on her? Or were we safe in our own country praising her heroism in paragraphs which all contrived to convey an idea that the Belgian soldier is about four feet high, but immensely plucky for his size? Alas, when ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... numerous villages—Vauxbuin, Berzy-le-Sec, Villemontoire, Buzancy—are the more difficult to capture because the artillery can hardly see them, as they lie close against the hillside. It was on the Crise, in the latter part of May, that a handful of Frenchmen held up the German avalanche from the Chemin-des-Dames. ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... were rumours of strange plots and counter-plots, also of a new great army of invasion that was about to set sail from Kiel. Evidently the Germans must have more men if they were to ride safely on this furious American avalanche that they had set in motion, if they were to tame the fiery American volcano that was smouldering ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... to brute force. In our times there are other means; a people mobilizes its national spirit by means of the daily press; the promulgation of national propaganda has become a fine art; modern statesmen have learned that national feelings, rightly directed, have the force of an avalanche. The problems of Race and of Nationality, then, are by no means new, but in their modern form they are new. The far-flung lines of the British Empire and the mobilization of the popular spirit by means of the press and propaganda have compelled our statesmen, historians, publicists, psychologists, ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... out of Crawling Water, the cattleman thought of a short-cut, through a little used timber-trail, which would save him several miles; but it was crossed by a ravine cut by a winter avalanche like the slash of a gigantic knife. To descend into this ravine and ascend on the farther side would be a tortuous process, which would take more time than to continue by the longer route. But if the gelding could jump the narrow cleft in the trail, the distance saved might decide ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... lines is commonly spoken of as the Isonzo Front. It is not like the Front in the higher Alps, where, as on the Adamello, trenches are cut in the solid ice, where the firing of a single gun may precipitate an avalanche, where more Italians are killed by avalanches than by Austrians, where guns have to be dragged up precipices and perched on ledges fit only, one might think, for an eagle's nest, where food, ammunition, reinforcements, wounded and sick have ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... destroyed me like an avalanche; One night turned all my summer back to snow: Next morning not a bird upon my branch, Not ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... The southern body was small, not more than a score, compact, riding smartly but with military order and precision. The man at their head, the officer in command, no doubt, spurred on and began to shout at the oncoming northerners. He might as well have spoken fair words to an avalanche, and the men behind him began to waver and most of them pulled up. It was useless. The torrent swept into them and bore them backward, tumbling some of them over, men and horses together, but incorporating ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... glowing centre of the fire, had a desolate look; but it was so quick to pass away that one might have thought oneself the victim of a fancy. His was the next chuckle, and "Do you remember that day when——?" and so forth, Mr. Fullerton's healthy roar following, avalanche-like, upon the reminiscence. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Captain Nicholl, "on a flat ground, the projectile will remain motionless when it has once touched; whereas on a declivity it would roll like an avalanche, and not being squirrels we should not come out safe and sound. So it is all ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... burst upon the philosopher like an avalanche! He was so full of his subject that he could not let it out in prudent driblets. No, he went ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... this medium—their under parts dark and wild, the upper coloured with red tints, by that light which the reflecting powers of the waters doubled? We climbed rocks which fell directly after with gigantic bounds and the low growling of an avalanche. To right and left ran long, dark galleries, where sight was lost. Here opened vast glades which the hand of man seemed to have worked; and I sometimes asked myself if some inhabitant of these submarine regions would ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... underlies German movements. Luther, for good and for evil, is the most typical of Germans, and the Luther who made his mark in the world—the shrewd, coarse, superstitious peasant who blossomed into genius—was an avalanche of emotion, a great mass of natural human instincts irresistible in their impetuosity. When we bear in mind this general tendency to emotional expansiveness in the manifestations of the Teutonic soul we need feel no surprise that the present movement among German ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Stephens at his side, was standing at the edge of the stockade. Not a sound came from the plateau, and not a glimmer of light appeared in the darkness. Then the great, wide, black night suddenly opened its jaws and launched forth an avalanche of blinding, white light. The two men bounded in their places; then came a roll of mighty thunder, as if it were moving on tremendous wheels and ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... They say, Padre, that a pebble set in motion at the summit of a mountain may gather other pebbles and increase in bulk and speed until, in the form of an avalanche, it overwhelms ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... binds as with a chain of iron. The small events of life, taken singly, may seem exceedingly unimportant, like snow that falls silently, flake by flake; yet accumulated, these snow-flakes form the avalanche. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... thaw, he had hurled the work they had finished with so much toil, a snow man, down the slope, rejoicing with his playfellows over its swift descent towards the valley, until they noticed with what frightful speed its bulk increased as it sped over its snowy road, till at last, like a terrible avalanche, it swept away a herdsman's hut—fortunately an empty one. Now, also, his heedlessness had set in motion a mass which constantly rolled onward, and how terrible might be the harm it ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to bring an avalanche upon himself which, if it wounded, isolated, even marooned him, would certainly bury Athalie out ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... invader comes, he moves like an avalanche, carrying destruction in his path. The peasantry sink before him. The country, too, is too poor for plunder, and too rough for a valuable conquest. Nature presents her eternal barrier on every side, to check the wantonness of ambition. And Switzerland remains with her simple ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... upset some of my arrangements," said Peter, "but in upsetting them, his own would be under the avalanche." ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... insinuation of arguments which ran drop by drop, but a furious rain, which threw itself like an avalanche on his soul. The storm, of which the wave of scruples was only the prelude, burst in its fulness; and in the panic of the first moment, in the violence of the tempest, the enemy unmasked his batteries, and struck him ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... crossing their faces. Suddenly the old Indian sprang up. He thrust his arms out, and made, as if unconsciously, some fantastic yet solemn motions. The player smiled in a far-off fashion, and presently ran the bow upon the strings in an exquisite cry; and then a beautiful avalanche of sound slid from a distance, growing nearer and nearer, till it swept through the room, and imbedded ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... afternoon Jean heard a distant sound of musketry; then, all in a moment, the door of his cell opened and he saw an avalanche of prisoners roll from one end of the corridor to the other. The gaoler had unlocked all the cells and shouted the words, "Every man for himself; run for it!" Jean himself was carried along, down stairs and passages, out into the prison ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... inspired in the youth beside her, and also that it would be most unworthy on her part to encourage it. She therefore took occasion now and then to give him a few repressive glances, which fell upon his heart like an avalanche of snow. The unfortunate young fellow turned on Felicite a look in which she could read the tears he was suppressing by superhuman efforts. She asked him in a friendly tone why he was eating nothing. The question piqued him, and he began to force himself to ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... apathetic. He lay two days on a couch with his hands beneath his head gazing vacantly at the ceiling. He did not wonder that his sacred father passed his time at the altars of the gods, but he could not understand how Herhor was able to manage the avalanche of business, which, like a storm, not only surpassed the strength of a man, but might ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene, Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast,— Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou That, as I raise my head, awhile bowed low In adoration, upward from thy base Slow ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... busy at the moment to notice him. One of the men had thrust a short tent pole between the bars. Bengal was upon it like an avalanche. ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... thoughts and his words were one. His looks, and all the expressions of his face, were but images of the love within. His denunciations against Pharisaical hypocrisy, cloaked under the guise of outward rectitude, were like an avalanche of snow and ice, unlocked by the rays of the Sun ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... States, if permitted, without further molestation on the part of the Federal authorities, and many Virginians in the field might abandon the Confederate States army. The State would be lost, and North Carolina and Tennessee would have an inevitable avalanche of invasion precipitated upon them. The only hope would be civil war in the North, a not improbable event. What could they do with four millions of negroes ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... her way to the spot where the pathway was suddenly cut short by the avalanche of rock and rubble and soil. It happened to be the exact spot where Colonel Gilbert's heavy horse had stumbled months before, where the footpath crossed the bed of a small mountain torrent. A few loosened stones had come bowling down the slope, set free by the landslip. These had ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... seemed, Copley had risen and kicked his own chair away, seized Ruth about her waist as he did so, and so dragged her out from under the avalanche. ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... of love,—surely these prevent the passion from constituting a happy state of mind; to me one knowledge alone seems sufficient to embitter all its enjoyments,—the knowledge that the object beloved must die. What a perpetuity of fear that knowledge creates! The avalanche that may crush us ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had fallen upon the packing-case. This had been already seriously undermined by the operations of Gideon; a few well-directed blows, and it already quaked and gaped; yet a few more, and it fell about Morris in a shower of boards followed by an avalanche of straw. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hands, and, in spite of the fury into which he had lashed himself, a great pity took hold of him. He felt as if everything were slipping away from him, and he was trying to stand on an avalanche. But he told himself that he would not waver, that he would hold to his purpose, that he would stand firm as a rock. Heaving a deep sigh, he walked to ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the Pharmaceutical across the way the words "what price?" would have precipitated a ready avalanche of figures. ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... brain, whose story fills the centuries with its glory, Moulding Gaul and Carthaginian into one all-conquering band, With his tusked monsters grumbling, 'mid the alien snow-drifts stumbling, Then, an avalanche of ruin, thundering from that frozen land Into vales their sons declare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... things rather than in words, and so conditioned that no uncertain answer can be given. Nature says that all matter gravitates, not in words, but in the swing of planets around the sun, and in the leap of the avalanche. And men have devised ingenious machines through which Nature may tell us the invariable laws of gravitation, and give some hint as to why ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... truly a marvellous spectacle to observe the relentless stream of burning lava crushing irresistibly every opposing object in its fatal path. Onlookers at a distance could perceive the walls of houses bulging outward under pressure of the moving mass, until the roof collapsed in an avalanche of tiles upon the ground, whilst with a final crash the whole structure—cottage, farm, church or stately villa—succumbed to ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... what it was, but gazing at its surface more steadily, upon the face of a slope I caught sight of what seemed a larger stream than any of the rest; but it soon ceased to flow, and after came the thunder of its fall: it was a stream, but a solid one—an avalanche. Away up in the air the huge snow-summit glittered in the light of the Afternoon sun. I was gazing on the Maiden in one of her most savage moods—or to speak prose—I was regarding one of the wildest aspects of ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... and the sacrifices that she consented to make saved him from inevitable failure, but he had to endure an avalanche of reproaches. At the age of twenty-nine he withdrew from business, with debts amounting to ninety thousand francs, and how could he, rebellious son that he was, ever hope to clear himself, when he might by this time have been ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... Lady Swiggs!" exclaims a tall, well-proportioned and handsome-limbed man, to whose figure a fashionable claret-colored frock coat, white vest, neatly-fitting dark-brown trowsers, highly-polished boots, a cluster of diamonds set in an avalanche of corded shirt-bosom, and carelessly-tied green cravat, lend a respectability better imagined than described. A certain reckless dash about him, not common to a refined gentleman, forces us to set him down as one of ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... impressive and terrible about the strength of this beautiful, smiling creature's will, about its silence, its impassibility before obstacles, its persistency. It was as inevitable and unswervable as an avalanche or a cyclone. People might shriek out against it and struggle, but on it came, a mighty force, overwhelming petty things as well as great ones. It really seemed a pity, taking into consideration Ida's tremendous strength of character, that she had not some great national ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and pierced the bear's body just back of its powerful right shoulder. The great brute stopped dead in its tracks. It swayed for an instant, and then with a roar that drove the recoiling horse almost frantic with terror, it leaped sideways and plunged down the precipice, carrying with it a small avalanche of rocks, earth, and ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... to those who rushed towards the chance of salvation, not one among them could or would draw back. The overladen bridge gave way, and not only so, the impetus of the frantic living wave towards that fatal bank was such that a dense crowd of human beings was thrust into the water as if by an avalanche. The sound of a single human cry could not be distinguished; there was a dull crash as if an enormous stone had fallen into the water—and the Beresina was ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... creaked and groaned in every part, and it seemed as if she must break in pieces. Sometimes the billows burst upon the deck with a thunder-crash, and, sweeping over it, poured in cataracts from her sides. Now a heavy cross-sea struck her beams with the jarring force of an avalanche of rocks, flinging more than one unlucky fellow clear from his berth. And now her bows went under, sunk by a weight of rolling water, from which it seemed for an instant impossible that she could ever emerge. But rise she did, each time, slowly, ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... impossible must be accepted for the sole reason that it did happen. The vicissitudes of social or private life are brought about by a crowd of little causes derived from a thousand conditions. The man of science is forced to clear away the avalanche under which whole villages lie buried, to show you the pebbles brought down from the summit which alone can determine the formation of the mountain. If the historian of human life were simply telling you of a suicide, five hundred of ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... night. Here the god of erosion works incessantly and rapidly, dissecting the earth and the rocks. During a single storm a hilltop may dissolve, a mountain-side be fluted with slides, a grove be overturned and swept away by an avalanche, or a lake be buried forever. This rapid erosion of slopes and summits causes many changes and much upbuilding upon their bases. Gulches are filled, water-courses invaded, rivers bent far to one side, and groves ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... to climb. The state of the ice and crevasses is always shifting, so that the next person who makes the ascent may find a comparatively easy path. We had other dangers too, such as this: twice the guides said to me, "Ne parlez pas ici, Monsieur, et allez vite," the fear being of an ice avalanche falling on us, and we heard the rocks and ice which are detached by the wet falling all about. The view from the top, if the day is fine, is about the most magnificent in the Alps; and as in that case I should have descended easily on the other side, the excursion would ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... final victory. The encouragement of intense and boundless hatred, the increasing crude brutality of the world all tended to create a situation making each individual like a small stone which, breaking away from an avalanche of stones, hurls itself downwards without a leader and without goal, and is no longer capable of ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... least until next morning. In the cool of the day they would see the cemetery; they would return, and eat the evening meal. It would then be time to sleep. And with a gesture he indicated the rugs and cushions, under which the beetles were now buried like mountain-dwellers beneath an avalanche. ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and which, with a few ignoble exceptions, I doubt not they will emulate, if again the necessity should exist. Yes, sir, if ever they hear that the invader's foot has been pressed upon our soil, they will descend to the plain like an avalanche, rushing to ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... in a shady nook, just off Katahdin's reflection in the river, while Iglesias sketched him. Meanwhile I, analyzing my view, presently discovered a droll image in the track of a land-avalanche down the front. It was a comical fellow, a little giant, a colossal dwarf, six hundred feet high, and should have been thrice as tall, had it had any proper development,—for out of his head grew two misdirected skeleton legs, "hanging down and dangling." The countenance was long, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... as if forcibly detaching itself, flown off from the avalanche and buried itself in the ground only a few feet beyond Harry and Pearl, and more than one uprooted tree lay near them. Death had missed them ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... no further. Phil was on him quick as an avalanche. The Mayor, in his haste to get out of the way, toppled backward against the anvil. Phil's left arm shot out and finished the job. He caught Brenchfield straight on the point of the chin, sending him hurtling head first ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... assent, though Abud seemed startled. Many times had Keston and I speculated on the danger of an avalanche at this point, and wondered why the Station had been built in such an exposed place. Once indeed we had ventured to suggest to the aristo Council the advisability of removing the Central Control to some other point, but the cold silence that greeted our ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... screamed. She herself was tempted to scream first, so as to see what would happen. She thought that all work would be instantly thrown down, and that everybody would answer her cry, and then begin noisily to sob. Even miserable as she was, the thought of this avalanche of feminine excitability made Sally snuffle with amusement. She pictured Gaga running out of his room, distraught, looking yellow and bilious, his eyes staring wildly out of his head, as do the eyes of prawns. And then? And then Rose Anstey would ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... lines of the assailing army, which, with one impulse, now threw itself forward towards the foe. And, unmoved by the tremendous but hasty and misdirected fire that every where met them on the way, they swept onward like an avalanche to the very foot of the tory intrenchments; when, pausing only to pour in their devouring volleys, they mounted the works, and raising their clubbed muskets, dashed down, with shouts of defiance, upon the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... stark and dumb at the foot of the steps. The whole situation had rushed upon him like an avalanche. Harbert had filed his charges and the hasty visit of the reporter proved that David Cable was an instrument in them. The blood surged to his head; he staggered under the shock of ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... extreme. He was abandoned by the Protestant league, hemmed in on every side by the imperial troops, and his hereditary domains of the Palatinate were overrun by twenty thousand Spaniards. His subjects, alarmed at his utter inefficiency, and terrified by the calamities which were falling, like avalanche after avalanche upon them, became dissatisfied with him, and despairing respecting their own fate. He was a Calvinist, and the Lutherans had never warmly received him. The impotent monarch, instead of establishing himself in the affections of his subjects, by vigorously driving the invaders ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... avalanche of good fortune, and the little candy merchant could hardly believe her senses. At this rate she would soon become a wholesale ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... slanderous statements about Colorado, together with a note asking each president to send one copy to the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, in which Barry's article had appeared, with her own personal protest, and the other to the editor of some paper in her vicinity. The result was a perfect avalanche of protests to the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... of my one neck, when, goose as I was, I presented it where two seemed to be an essential by the sign of the habitation and the dangers of the gate,—I was aroused by a crash, something like the noise of the machine which accompanies the falling of an avalanche or a castle, or some such direful affair at "Astley's;" and starting up, I thought,—had the coach upset? but, much to my gratification, found myself a safe "inside." Still came crash after crash, until I thought it high time to see as well as ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... sober within three hours, but a punch or two would give a certain flaccidity to his legs, and when he reached his home the broad steps leading up to the vestibule seemed Alpine-like and perilous. He would almost say to himself, "Beware the pine-tree's withered branch, beware the awful avalanche." But after all it was not the danger of the ascent which really troubled him; it was what would assuredly happen after he had reached the summit. The disaster ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... as in ourselves, to the rapid passage of air over taut membranes (vocal cords) stretched in the larynx. It is an interesting fact that for millions of years there was upon the earth no sound of life at all, only the noise of wind and wave, thunder and avalanche. Apart from the instrumental music of some insects, perhaps beginning in the Carboniferous, the first vital sounds were due to Amphibians, and theirs certainly was the first voice—surely one of the great ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... columns tottering loosely on the brink of the precipice above our heads, threatening death and desolation at any moment. Mute and anxious, we crept along in breathless haste, scarcely venturing to raise our eyes, much less to give vent to the least expression of alarm, for fear of starting the avalanche of stone, of the impetuous force of which we could form some idea by the shattered rocks around us. The echo is very remarkable, and gives back the ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... even as they stood panting, the rent in the top of the embankment spread—deepened—yawned terrifically—and the pent-up lake plunged through, and sweeping away at once the center of the embankment, rushed, roaring and hissing, down the valley, an avalanche of water, whirling great trees up by the roots, and sweeping huge rocks away, and driving them, like corks, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... to the side of the ship, raised his hand to show that he wished to speak to the chief. But the island men rushed on like an avalanche and started to storm the ship. Snatching up arms, poles, rope-ends—whatever they could find—the men on board beat down upon the heads of the savages as they climbed up the ship's slippery side. One ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... was the scene at the front. There the third act of the drama was beginning. After half an hour of the heaviest cannonade ever known, Wellington's faithful troops were threatened by an avalanche of cavalry, and promptly fell into the "chequer" disposition previously arranged for the most exposed division, that of Alten. Napoleon certainly hoped either to crush Wellington outright by a mighty onset of horse, or to strip him bare for the coup de grace. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... we knew not. But we had not long to wait. Soon stragglers, few in numbers, began to appear, emerging from the woods into our clearing, and then more of them, these running, and then almost at once an avalanche of panic-stricken, flying men without arms, without knapsacks, many bareheaded, swearing, cursing, a wild, frenzied mob tearing to the rear. Instantly they began to appear, General Couch, commanding our corps, took in the situation ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... to this day the Icelanders designate their highest mountain peaks by the name of Jokul, a modification of the word "Joetun." In Switzerland, where the everlasting snows rest upon the lofty mountain tops, the people still relate old stories of the time when the giants roamed abroad; and when an avalanche came crashing down the mountain side, they say the giants have restlessly shaken off part of the icy burden ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... occurred a diversion. Virginia cast fifteen votes for Franklin Pierce. The schemers had launched their project. But it was not until the forty-ninth ballot that they started the avalanche. Pierce then received all but six votes. Two Ohio delegates clung to Douglas to the bitter end. With the frank manliness which made men forget his less admirable qualities, Douglas dictated this dispatch to ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... for the Imperial Shadow-huntings, and this rickety condition of the celestial Balance! Alas, the outer elements interfered with Queen Sophie in a singular manner. Huge foreign world-movements, springing from Vienna and a spectre-haunted Kaiser, and spreading like an avalanche over all the Earth, snatched up this little Double-Marriage question; tore it along with them, reeling over precipices, one knew not whitherward, at such a rate as was seldom seen before. Scarcely in the Minerva Press is there record of such surprising, infinite and inextricable ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... pistol shot. The wonder was that he had not loved her before; for he had known her since his father brought him home from Paris, a boy of eight, after his mother died there. The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... saw the traces of his fall. It seems impossible he could have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward towards the unknown side of the mountain; far below he had struck a steep slope of snow, and ploughed his way down it in the midst of a snow avalanche. His track went straight to the edge of a frightful precipice, and beyond that everything was hidden. Far, far below, and hazy with distance, they could see trees rising out of a narrow, shut-in valley—the lost Country of the Blind. ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... as it were, and impart something of their own vastness to it. You feel yourself carried into the very presence of that Power which sank the foundations of the mountains in the depths of the earth, and built up their giant masses above the clouds; which hung the avalanche on their brow, clove their unfathomable abysses, poured the river at their feet, and taught the forked lightning to play around their awful icy steeps. You seem to hear the sound of the Almighty's ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... their lower parts dark and sullen, their upper parts tinted red in this light whose intensity was doubled by the reflecting power of the waters! We scaled rocks that crumbled behind us, collapsing in enormous sections with the hollow rumble of an avalanche. To our right and left there were carved gloomy galleries where the eye lost its way. Huge glades opened up, seemingly cleared by the hand of man, and I sometimes wondered whether some residents of these underwater regions would ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Another avalanche of resolutions praising Gibson followed the publication of this statement. The mayor was hotly condemned for his failure to remove Chief Sweeney at Gibson's request and the commissioner was hailed as a man whose very name was enough to intimidate criminals and whose ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... crowd back under the bushes, and again Linda realized that she had no authority; as she had done from childhood when Katy was in earnest, Linda obeyed her. She had barely reached the overhanging bushes, crouched under them, and straightened herself, when a small avalanche came showering down, and a minute later a pair of feet were level with her head. Then screened by the bushes, she could have reached out and touched Oka Sayye. As his feet found a solid resting place on the ledge on which Linda and Katy stood, and while ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... hillsides deck themselves with grass, and the inaccessible ledges of black rock bear their tufts of crimson primroses and flaunting tiger-lilies? Why, morning after morning, does the red dawn flush the pinnacles of Monte Rosa above cloud and mist unheeded? Why does the torrent shout, the avalanche reply in thunder to the music of the sun, the trees and rocks and meadows cry their 'Holy, Holy, Holy'? Surely not for us. We are an accident here, and even the few men whose eyes are fixed habitually upon these things are dead to them—the peasants do not even know ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the general-secretary to get elected to the place, and the secret opposition of the minister to this wish of a man who was one of his firmest supporters and most zealous workers. This, of course, brought down an avalanche of suppositions, flooded with the sapient arguments of the two officials, who sent back and forth to each other a wearisome flood of nonsense. Elisabeth quietly ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... apparently simple thing as how one knows anything—or of simple consciousness? Every philosopher that has attempted to explain consciousness or how we know, takes refuge in assumptions. At any Philosophical Society, if you ask for the explanation of simple Consciousness, the avalanche of answers, each differing from the other, will bewilder you. We know the outward appearance of an object, of which we say that we know it, but what is it in itself? Of that we are as much in the dark as ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... trembling with a strange excitement. I took my drills and my gun under my arm and set off with slack knees down the hillside. I took the shortest way, marking the smoking track left by my avalanche. Asop followed me, shaking his head all the time and sneezing at ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... her slender hand and tapped the pavement with her umbrella point, passing from each phase of expression to the next with a rapidity truly wonderful. Occasionally she went through with these strange grimaces all at once. She was indeed a whirlwind of language, an avalanche of emotion. ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... and piercing cold. When half-way up the summit, a rumbling noise was heard among the cliffs. The guides looked at each other in alarm; for they knew well what it meant. It grew louder and louder. "An avalanche! an avalanche!" they shrieked, and the next moment a field of ice and snow came leaping down the mountain, striking the line of march, and sweeping thirty dragoons in a wild plunge below. The black forms of the horses and their riders were seen ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... Cayuga Lake, between Auburn and Ithaca, was under water for a distance of nine miles south of Kings Ferry. No trains were running on that branch. A small bridge at Farley's Point, near the lower end of Cayuga Lake, was washed away. An avalanche of mud and stones buried the ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... his boat-boys, and before their master could interfere, beat at the delirious wretch with their oars. He hung on tenaciously, enduring a perfect avalanche of blows. But mere flesh and bone had to wither under that onslaught, and at last, by sheer weight of battering, he was driven from his hold, and the beer-colored river covered him then and ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Then the "awful avalanche" has not yet been dealt with. A few helpful words on the direction this is likely to take and the safest rock to make for when it begins to move might be welcomed by the PREMIER'S followers. He may argue that it is folly to meet trouble half-way, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... times when the herdsman's calling May vibrate thro' alpine ranch Till the pendent drop, by its falling, Sweeps down in an avalanche, Till the mountain trembles and totters 'Neath the mighty force of snow, And the lives and homes of the cotters Are lost in ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... music breaks Against the mountain's base, While roars an avalanche and shakes The whole world ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... I saw the lady Aurelia lying among the smashed up gear to leeward. She had been lying down, reading in a sort of bunk which had been rigged up for her on the locker-top. The shock had flung her clean out of the bunk on to the deck. At the same moment an avalanche of gear had fetched to leeward. A cask had rolled on to her left hand, pinning her down to the deck, while a box of bottles had cut the back of her head. A more complete picture of misery you could not hope to see. There was all the ill-smelling jumble of ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... however, it was possible to cut off long corners by scrambling over the steep black rock and smooth ice, and all the while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out around me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the top of the Grimsel, but not before I had passed a place where an avalanche had destroyed the road and where planks were laid. Also before one got to the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible. The road ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... have burst upon us like an avalanche. All the reserved seats were sold last evening before the performance commenced; and the house was filled by a fashionable audience,—one rarely seen at a minstrel entertainment. The troupe have made a decided hit, and their performances ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the dam has given way! An avalanche of water God's hand alone can stay! Oh, leap, ye hills, before it and keep this torrent back, Or devastated towns and homes will ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... ceased, but had left a record of its intensity in nearly two feet of snow. For some moments the horses floundered and struggled on, in what the travelers believed to be some old forgotten drift or avalanche, until the extent and freshness of the fall became apparent. To add to their difficulties, the storm recommenced, and not comprehending its real character and limit, they did not dare to attempt to return the way they came. To go on, however, was impossible. In this quandary ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... normal average being 31.1) and with the left hand 28.0 (the normal being 30.0). There was, however, great variability in the individual pressures which sometimes equaled and even exceeded the subject's normal efforts. The voluntary muscles are thus in harmony with the approaching general sexual avalanche. (Vaschide and Vurpas, "Quelques Donnees Experimentales sur l'Influence de l'Excitation Sexuelle," Archivio di Psichiatria, 1903, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... smoke. As the air cleared, two thousand men were seen wading and fording below the falls. There was a rush of the tall grenadiers for the redoubt. The French retreated firing, and the cliff above poured down an avalanche of shots. At that moment Wolfe suffered a cruel and unforeseen check. A frightful thunderstorm burst on the river, lashing earth and air to darkness. It was impossible to see five paces ahead or to aim a shot. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... on the top of a bastion-like terrace, thrust avalanche-wise and immense between its pinnacled mountain walls; the site is not only of great beauty, but of great natural strength, like nearly all the other considerable settlements we saw on this journey. The ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... you are to the delicate shades of its meaning! How hidden is the song in the heart of the composer till he gives you the key! You hear as though you heard not. You hear the thunder, and the cataract, and the crash of the avalanche; but the song of the nightingale, the chirp of the katydid, the murmur of the waterfall never reach you. This cannot be the ultimatum. Music must hold in its own bosom its own interpretation, and man must have in his its ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... real hopper, for it kept constantly hopping to shake the corn down through a hole in the middle of the upper stone, which went round and round against the lower, so that between them they ground the corn to meal, which, in the story beneath, he saw pouring, a solid stream like an avalanche, from a wooden spout. But the best of it all was the wheel outside, and the busy rush of the water that made it go. So Willie would now ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... of ice-water had been thrown over Jean he could not have cooled off more suddenly. He was dazed. Another marquis? This was a complication he had never dreamed of. It overwhelmed him like an avalanche. He must have time to dig himself ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... steep face of the mountain, Barrent rolled boulders onto the machine, hoping he could start an avalanche. Max dodged most of the flying rocks, and let the rest bounce off him, with ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... the Alps, The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, And throned eternity in icy halls Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls The avalanche, the thunderbolt of snow! All that expands the spirit, yet appals, Gather around these summits, as to shew How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... parallels the story of the old campaigner, and may teach some of you caution in selecting your assistants. A chaplain told it to two of our officers personally known to myself. He overheard the examination of a man who wished to drive one of the "avalanche" wagons, as they call them. The man was asked if he knew how to deal with wounded men. "Oh yes," he answered; "if they're hit here," pointing to the abdomen, "knock 'em on the head,—they ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... had nearly fallen, and then the headlong pace again. And then, with the soft broad moon-light full upon his face, a man came darting round the corner of the lane. I strove to move aside, but before I could lift a foot he was upon me like an avalanche. I knew that we fell together, and that the man arose and resumed his headlong course. I tried to call after him, but found no voice. I tried to rise, but could not move a limb. Then a sickly shudder ran ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... shot from the crater of each volcano a thick and heavy cloud of incandescent ashes and steam, which rushed down the mountain side like an avalanche, red with glowing stones and scintillating with lightning flashes. Forests and buildings in its path were leveled as by a tornado, wood was charred and set on fire by the incandescent fragments, all vegetation was destroyed, and to breathe the steam and hot, suffocating dust ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... some cases nature does this on a large scale. Where mountains are sufficiently elevated to raise their heads above the snow line we know they are white all the year around with snow. What is not blown away, evaporated, or, as an avalanche, precipitated to lower heights, must accumulate from year to year. But the weight pressing on the lower portions of this snow-field must soon be considerable, and at length become so great, that the snow ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... their Western analogues, thanks to a continual struggle for existence against Nature and a tolerably frequent one against man. Against the latter foe they are at present guaranteed by the quiet of English rule, but the avalanche and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... bursting, and the spume towered on the gale like grey smoke. Out of the foam rose harsh rubble and screes to incline against broken precipices, and those stark walls were interrupted by mid-air slopes of grass which appeared ready to avalanche into the tumult below, but remained, livid areas of a dim mass which rose into dizzy pinnacles and domes, increasing the tumbling menace of the sky. A fleet of clouds of deep draught ran into Africa from the north; went aground on those ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... General is reported to have been overwhelmed by an avalanche of snow, and at Easter-time a number of patriotic English people were offering, in view of the usefulness of the stuff for military purposes, to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... from the left: Cavalry, Indian scouts, regular cavalry, cavalry militia, volunteer regiments, and behind them all the machine-guns and the field-artillery—a perfect avalanche of human beings and horses wrapped in thick clouds of smoke from which showers of ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... driving, stared fixedly over the wheel. The coach's voice was merely a series of profane roars. He had ample lungs, and the things he said seemed to echo far and wide. His stentorian anger afforded so material a contrast to the placid environment that Deacon stood dazed under the vocal avalanche, hearing but a blur ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... forming the Keene Pass. The views back over the Boquet Valley and toward the Green Mountains of Vermont are very lovely, and those obtained in descending the western slope of this, the Boquet range, are magnificent. Soon left behind are the high cliffs and the steep slide, where a gathering avalanche of rocks and earth swept through a forest, carrying off a great belt of timber, wherewith to strew the little valley, and block the road and stream below. The rugged mountains on either hand have been burnt ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... nature, elle devient un malheur reel quand ce plaisir se trouve remplace par des angoisses et de la frayeur. Un tableau d'un autre genre nouveau, et pour lequel les expressions manquent, est une foret rasee et abattue par une avalanche, il y a quelques annees, ces sapins de plus de cent pied de long, ont eu le tems de perdre leurs feuilles et de permettre a la vue de passer a travers cette enorme quantite de bois et de branches entre lacees de mille manieres bizarres, et d'apercevoir ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... rather difficult point in it, where there ought to be a quite imperceptible transition to something fresh, then a subdued gliding finale, a prolonged murmur, ending at last in a climax as bold and as startling as a shot, or the sound of a mountain avalanche—full stop. But the words would not come to me. I read over the whole piece from the commencement; read every sentence aloud, and yet failed absolutely to crystallize my thoughts, in order to produce this scintillating climax. And into the bargain, whilst I was standing labouring ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... it was coming, and he hardly felt able to go into the box himself to stem the rising tide; but anything was better than to have Frazer submerged under an avalanche of hits. "Big Ed" seemed to be getting better the longer he pitched, and just the reverse could be said of Frazer, who was on the verge of ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... overhead and entomb them forever. Great Britain, with her frightful debt, her terrible taxation, her dissatisfied, restless, beggared myriads of the lower working classes, her remorseless aristocracy, her bloated spirit of caste, her enforced but heartless religion, has hung a more terrible avalanche over her head than ever leaped down the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ghost that loved it would haunt the place! But he could not surely be permitted! for it might postpone a thousand years his discovery of the emptiness of a universe of such treasures. Now he was moldering into the world of spirits in the heart of an avalanche of the dust of ages, dust material from his hoards, dust moral and spiritual ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... king of souls, but his royal dignity is marred, and is brought sometimes within an inch of the ridiculous, by the prosaic nature of his modern surroundings. He is harsh and cruel; he is liable to fits of anger before which the whole world trembles; and it is by an avalanche, brought down upon him by his own wrath, that he is finally buried in the ruins ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... said the elder, "is more freezing to me than the bitterness of the cold. The very snow-flakes are dumb; nothing makes discord but the avalanche; it is always twilight; men lie down in the snows to die, but they are numb and ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... peaceful solution. The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies, the guerilla skirmishes become concentrated in more important battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in motion. Then, indeed, will the war-cry resound through the land: "War to the palaces, peace to the cottages!"—but then it will be too late for the ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... a coward, it was not for myself this time. The avalanche of ill-words I knew must fall—but it should not fall on him, if ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that he has it to hide.' Your first Military Escort has exploded self-destructive; and all Military Escorts, and a suspicious Country will now be up, explosive; comparable not to victorious thunder. Comparable, say rather, to the first stirring of an Alpine Avalanche; which, once stir it, as here at Sainte-Menehould, will spread,—all round, and on and on, as far as Stenai; thundering with wild ruin, till Patriot Villagers, Peasantry, Military Escorts, new Berline and Royalty are down,—jumbling in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... softly in his helplessness. To him came the last terrible cries of the perishing animals. He saw head after head go under. Out of the white spume of a great rock against which the flood split itself with the force of an avalanche he saw one horse pitched bodily, as if thrown from a huge catapault. The last animal had disappeared when chance turned his eyes upstream and close in to shore. Here flowed a steady current free of rock, and down this—head and shoulders still high out of the water—came the colt! What ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... raised the long rifle, but each time he lowered it. Gale divined that the ranger's restraint was not on account of the Mexican, but for that valiant and faithful horse. Up and up he went, and the yellow dust clouds rose, and an avalanche rolled rattling and cracking down the slope. It was beyond belief that a horse, burdened or unburdened, could find footing and hold it upon that wall of narrow ledges and inverted, slanting gullies. But he climbed ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... at last hurls itself upon the track. Even the echoes of the locomotive whistle will in some states of the atmosphere bring disaster. Tiny snow crystals are jarred by the sound-waves; these start on a downward career, gathering volume and speed until a mighty avalanche has been developed. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... drink-mixer, had a busy half-hour of it. It was now about seven o'clock and we were again overtaken by the storm, which hurled itself upon us, fairly rocking the car in its violence. The train, which had been proceeding slowly and jerkily, now came to a full stop. An avalanche of snow, earth, and loose stones had fallen at the end of a deep cut. Had we been going at any speed an awful catastrophe would have resulted. As it was we were barely moving when we ran into the obstruction. It would be hours ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... puzzled glance filled the poor cripple with joy unspeakable. "She is not in love!" he whispered to himself, rubbing his hands till the skin was nearly peeled off. At this moment Exupere tore through the garden and the house, plunged into the salon like an avalanche, and said to Dumay in an audible whisper, "The young man is here!" Dumay sprang for his ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... darn and do patch—and he made no doubt the stuffing was nothing better than brown wool; and with that coarse taunt the coarser broker dug his clasp-knife into the cushion against which grandfatherly backs had leaned in happier days, and lo! an avalanche of banknotes fell out of the much-maligned horse-hair, and the family was lifted from penury to wealth. Nothing more simple—or more natural. A prudent but eccentric ancestor had chosen this mode of putting by his savings, assured that, whenever ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... mantle, and Jean could admire, in all its exquisite perfection, a figure marvellous for suppleness and grace. Miss Percival then removed her hat, but with a little too much haste, for this was the signal for a charming catastrophe. A whole avalanche descended in torrents, in long cascades, over Bettina's shoulders. She was standing before a window flooded by the rays of the sun, and this golden light, falling full on this golden hair, formed a delicious frame for the sparkling beauty of the young girl. Confused and blushing, Bettina ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy
... "Ursus Major" lay ill, perhaps mortally hurt, the trampled prices of securities began to revive like dusty blossoms under a shower. Day long came damp extras from the press heralding a bull day almost as wild and swift in its price recovery as yesterday's bear day had been terrific in its avalanche. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... laboring classes to frenzy. Its inevitable effect will be to give them a false and exaggerated idea of their wrongs and their rights, and to stimulate them to revolution. Oh! these men have much to answer for. They are drawing down an avalanche." ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... evidence in the official publications of diplomatic documents that at the last moment, when the spectre of a general war definitely arose, Austria hesitated and entered upon a hopeful negotiation with Russia. It was Germany's criminal ultimatum to Russia which set the avalanche on its terrible path. Now Germany is notoriously a land of religious criticism and Rationalism. Church-going in Berlin is far lower even than in London, where six out of seven millions do not attend places of worship. It is almost as low as at Paris, where hardly a tenth of the population ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... incidents of the story are employed to emphasise the distinctive features of each land. The explorers are almost frozen on the heights of the Andes, and almost drowned in the floods of the Patagonian Pampas. An avalanche sweeps some of them away; a condor carries off a lad. In Australia they are stopped by jungles and by quagmires; they hunt kangaroos. In New Zealand they take refuge amid hot sulphur springs and in a house "tabooed"; they escape by ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Water, the cattleman thought of a short-cut, through a little used timber-trail, which would save him several miles; but it was crossed by a ravine cut by a winter avalanche like the slash of a gigantic knife. To descend into this ravine and ascend on the farther side would be a tortuous process, which would take more time than to continue by the longer route. But if the gelding could jump the narrow cleft in the trail, the distance ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... were told off for coke making, which, as we soon learned, was sheer unadulterated hell. I was selected for the coke mine and put in three days at it—three days of smarting eyes and burning lungs, of aching and weary muscles. Then my chum, Billy Flanagan, was buried under an avalanche of falling coal and killed. There were no safeguards in the mine and the same accident might occur again at ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... green baize cloth, that moved and floated at every motion of the air. I paid little attention to this, till suddenly turning my head, something gave way behind it. I felt myself struck upon the back of the neck, and fell forward into the room, covered by a perfect avalanche of fenders, fire-irons, frying-pans, and copper kettles, mingled with the lesser artillery of small nails, door keys, and holdfasts. There I lay amid the most vociferous mirth I ever listened to, under the confounded torrent ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... stocks and bonds he was as much of a novice in the presence of things electrical as were either his son or Walter King, and therefore to their avalanche of questions he added still others, gratefully accepting the information Bob offered with the eagerness of one who is not ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... Little Fuzzy could damage or on which he might hurt himself, took the manipulator up to the diggings. He worked all morning, cracking nearly a ton and a half of flint, and found nothing. Then he set off a string of shots, brought down an avalanche of sandstone and exposed more flint, and sat down under a pool-ball ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... over a flour bin nearly empty, slipped. Her feet flew up, her head went down, and she tripped the grocery clerk. His long pole crashed into the neat pile of boxes arranged on the shelves and a shower of oatmeal, cornstarch, macaroni and other cereals fell in an avalanche. ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley
... above my head to give the fatal blow, when I perceived the stern of the schooner swinging round. I dropped the axe, and called upon Bohun to lend me a hand to bear off. The schooner came down almost with the force of an avalanche, cleared the bowsprit, as I anticipated, but struck our larboard bow, swung alongside, caught by our chain-wale for a moment, was freed by a violent gust of wind, dropped astern, and was soon pounding upon ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... determine. It was not yet perceived that such clan-people were not Tribe-People, and thus could not know the meaning of Council, nor weigh consequence, nor realize in their new-found cleverness that a single arrogant act would trigger the first and final avalanche.... ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... syl.), sister of Gessler, the tyrannical governor of Switzerland, in love with Arnoldo, a Swiss, who saved her life when it was imperilled by an avalanche. After the death of Gessler she married the bold Swiss.—Rossini, Guglielmo ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... mustn't be in such a hurry. Why, you come down on a man like an avalanche. You must give me time to think it over—till to-morrow at least. And the papers—at any rate, I must have a ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... could hear; but until to-night it had always been like the fall of the snow flake. You could never be quite sure you heard, though there was no mistaking a mass of several million years of snow flakes when they thundered down in avalanche or broke a ledge with the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... whom it was inflicted merely grunted again and, under the avalanche of blows, managed to regain his balance and plunge back to the assault. A born fighter, he was now obsessed with but one idea, namely, to destroy this smaller and faster opponent who was hurting him so outrageously. As ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... High March after his gests of arms had been Goltres, for there he had believed to find Galors. But Galors was a man of affairs just now who had gone far since Isoult overheard his plans. His troop of some sixty spears had grown like the avalanche it resembled. For what the avalanche does not crush it turns to crushing. Galors harrying had won harriers. In fact, he headed within a fortnight of his coming into North Morgraunt a force which was the largest known since Earl Roger of Bellesme had made a quietness like death over those ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... weeks there had been accumulating evidence, which we could see pointed to a monumental success or an avalanche failure. The copper market was literally boiling, and investors from one end of America to the other and throughout Europe were on the qui vive for the anticipated announcement. At intervals in history ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the first pebble of the avalanche, Malone knew suddenly—the avalanche that was somehow going to destroy him. "You forced your thoughts into my mind, then," he said as coolly as he could. "Just as you forced decision ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... break came. The losing team, accompanied by its host of volunteers, was dragged in a rush over the ground and disappeared under the avalanche of battling ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... be freed from a sentimental friendship not at all to his taste, prepared to carry out his long-contemplated design. In July of 1812, by way of Poland, he entered Russia with an army of over 678,000 souls. It was a human avalanche collected mainly from the people he had conquered, with which he intended to overwhelm the Russian Empire. It was of little consequence that thirty or forty thousand fell as this or that town was captured by the way. He had expected victory to be costly, and on he pressed with diminished numbers ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... this sight of sights. It was at the end of the wet season and the flow was at maximum strength. The mist was so great that at first I could scarcely see the Falls. Slowly but defiantly the foaming face broke through the veil. Niagara gives you a thrill but this toppling avalanche awes you ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... boulder was upon him. He dodged it by a hair's breadth and fell flat on his face, just as a stream of loose stone which the first flying rock had dislodged sent him rolling and tumbling down the slope in an avalanche of flying debris. For a minute he lay breathless while the waste rattled past him, and then he looked up the hill. No movement of his had started those great boulders. They had been launched by someone from above, and as he raised his ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... towering high above the adjacent banks, was sweeping by and onward, like the serried lines of an army advancing to the charge; while the broad valley around even back to the summits of the far-off hills, was resounding with the deafening din that rose from the extended line of the booming avalanche, with the deep rumblings of an earthquake mingled with the tumultuous roar of ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... instantly formed up, such as were left of them, for out of two companies of the Black Watch only fifty men escaped. A more tragic scene than that at the onset of the battle cannot be conceived. From all directions came an avalanche of lead, sweeping south and east and west in the gloaming, and flecking the whole visible universe with red. Cries and groans and curses and shouts intermingled with orders innumerable. "Advance," shouted some one; ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... test, in his view, for half an hour afterwards, on crossing a steep-sided ravine, my horse slipped and fell, and carried me down the almost vertical cliff face for 50 feet or more. The sand and stones poured down in an avalanche, but I kept my horse's head up, and we landed on the sandy bottom below, unscratched, in a normal position! "The senor has been saved because of the cross!" Jose and the arriero both averred, after congratulating me upon the almost ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... off, for Wladek had finished his song and the applause came roaring like an avalanche, so she pulled him by the hand and they walked to the front of the stage ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... sup—dinner. And Dorothy and Miss Meechim wuz almost speechless with awe and admiration, they said "Oh, how sublime! Oh! how grand!" as they see the enormous body of water sweepin' down that immense distance. The hull waters of the hull chain of Lakes, or inland Seas, sweepin' down in one great avalanche of water. ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... entirely without warning or intention that I find it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Pat Doolan, on seeing that worthy shivering while trying to re-light the fire—which an avalanche of snow, descending from a precipitous rise above the site of our tent, had suddenly buried, along with the cook's pots and pans, just as he was preparing our morning meal, on the fourth day of the storm—"how about that Manilla guernsey o' yourn now, old ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... round the left of the enemy's position. The Arabs retreated, and some of our young soldiers began to anticipate an easy victory. But the enemy showed that they too could manoeuvre; suddenly wheeling to the left, they came down like an avalanche on the rear of the square, bearing back the men composing it, and breaking in at one ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... reached the pretty face it was intended to mar. But when the observer had studied the eyes sufficiently to notice this defect, he was generally incapacitated for criticism; and even the scar on her cheek was thought by some to add piquancy to her smile. The youthful editor of THE FIDDLETOWN AVALANCHE had said privately that it was "an exaggerated dimple." Colonel Starbottle was instantly "reminded of the beautifying patches of the days of Queen Anne, but more particularly, sir, of the blankest beautiful women that, blank you, you ever laid your two blank eyes upon—a Creole woman, sir, in ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... been fighting night and day," said a Sergeant. "For the whole of that time the only rest from fighting was when we were marching and retiring." He spoke of the German Army as an avalanche of armed men. "You can't mow that down," he said. "We kill them and kill them, and still they come on. They seem to have an inexhaustible supply of fresh troops. Directly we check them in one attack a fresh attack is developed. It is impossible to oppose such a ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... made the proper bow with deadly precision, there was not a smile or a sound. That ceremony over, they charged down upon me in an avalanche of gaiety. They waved their lanterns, they called banzai, they laughed and sung some of the old time foolish songs we used to sing. They promptly put to rout all legends of their excessive modesty and shyness. They were just young and girlish. Plain happy. Eager ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... years hustling to "make good" "over two thousand dollars." For the first time he questioned the wisdom of promoting himself. But he could n't back out now. He almost damned Honey's thrift. He would be piling up a debt which threatened to become an avalanche and swamp him, and for which he would get no equivalent but temporarily increased adulation. How could he nip this awful thing in the bud? He did n't see any way out of it unless it were to throw up ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... ghosts, as they might be sure apparitions were only in the imagination of nervous people'. He himself saw the phantasm seven or eight times in his bedroom, and twice in the library. On one occasion it lifted up the mosquito curtains and stared at Mr. Harry. As in the case of meeting an avalanche, 'a weak-minded man would pray, sir, would pray; a strong-minded man would swear, sir, would swear'. Mr. Harry was a strong-minded man, and behaved 'in a concatenation accordingly,' although Petrus Thyraeus says that there is no use in ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... corps were coming like some machine- controlled avalanche of armed men. Every report brought them a little nearer Paris. Ah, monsieur, they had numbers, those Germans! Every German mother has many sons; a French mother only one ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... punch made loquacious, or smash with lemon squeezer the obstreperous, or hurl gutterward the cantankerous without a wrinkle coming to his white lawn tie, when he stood before woman he was voiceless, incoherent, stuttering, buried beneath a hot avalanche of bashfulness and misery. What then was he before Katherine? A trembler, with no word to say for himself, a stone without blarney, the dumbest lover that ever babbled of the weather in the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... the latter, from the platter beside me, to my mouth, with great effort, but no farther. Could I have broken the fastenings above the elbow, I would have seized and attempted to arrest the pendulum. I might as well have attempted to arrest an avalanche! ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... majestic motion flowed like water over the edge of the precipice on either side, and fell with a thudding sound into the unmeasured depths beneath. And this was but a little thing, a mere forerunner, for after it, with a slow, serpentine movement, rolled the body of the avalanche. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... his distant camp, beheld with joy the intrigues and factions which deprived the emperor of his best and last defender, and prepared for a new invasion of Italy. He descended like an avalanche upon the plains of Italy, and captured the cities of Aquileia, Concordia, and Cremona. He then ravaged the coasts of the Adriatic, and following the Flaminian way, crossed the Appennines, devastated Umbria, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... from the nailing up of these Theses that the history of the Great Reformation dates; for the hammer-strokes which fixed that parchment started the Alpine avalanche which overwhelmed the pride of Rome and broke the stubborn power which had reigned supreme ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... Christian era dawned. From the latter end of the second century until the last of the Western Caesars, in A.D. 476, it is, with the exception of a short interval when the strong hand of the great Theodosius stayed the avalanche of Rome's invaders, one long story of the defeat and humiliation of the citizens of the greatest power the world has ever known. It is a vast drama that the genius and patience of a Gibbon has alone been able to deal with, defying almost by its ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... the mighty hills echoed with scornful laughter, yet the icy-hearted beauty took no heed. Lovely, serene, she smiled on all through the long summer's day; only once or twice from her snowy sides would rise a white puff of smoke, showing where some avalanche had swept ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... away. The wind was fair, almost dead astern, although the sea was high; and as the ship was rather light, she rocked and rolled considerably, the waves washing over her decks, and occasionally running over the poop in an avalanche of water, that swept right forward and made any one hold on that did not wish to be washed off their feet. The sea had a most winterly look. It appeared like a vast hilly country with winding valleys, all covered ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... satisfactory information. They were absent two months, and returned with some most marvellous stories about what they had seen and heard, and, as a proof of the existence of the animal, brought me the horn of a wild sheep they had picked up in one of the valleys in the snow, after an avalanche had melted. This physical fragment at once removed all my doubts, the horn being different from that of any tame sheep. I was now wound up to the highest pitch of excitement; my marching establishment was soon put in order, and we started on the following day. Fifteen forced ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... the gate itself, and Jaimihr on the other side. And, swooping—shooting—sliding down the trail like a storm-loosed avalanche, they could see the nine go, led by Alwa. No living creature could ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... illusion not unfrequent in mountains, seemed close to us, and yet how many weary hours it took to reach it! The stones, adhering by no soil or fibrous roots of vegetation, rolled away from under our feet, and rushed down the precipice below with the swiftness of an avalanche. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Luckily, the avalanche had missed the camp-fire and the supper table, and when they had extricated the professor, and brushed him off, the boys learned that he had almost missed his way, and being shortsighted, in the dark had walked right over the edge of the steepest ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... silent, listening to the dull voice of the avalanche. The great mass of snow which lay on the steep mountainside had begun to loosen at the rim-rock as the snow melted and began to trickle under the edges. Gradually the surface of the ground, moistened under the snow this way, began to offer less and less hold to the snow ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... was carried, for I believe that women have thought more and accepted the responsibilities of voting to a greater extent than was ever expected of them. During the week I was accorded a welcome home in the old Academy of Music, Rundle street, where I listened with embarrassment to the avalanche of eulogium that overwhelmed me. "What a good thing it is, Miss Spence, that you have only one idea," a gentleman once said to me on my country tour. He wished thus to express his feeling concerning my singleness of purpose towards effective voting. But ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... turn to offer suggestions. A stage-driver is always a person of importance, especially in California. For the past six days Mat had found his public importance rather embarrassing. Every trip past the robbers' hiding-place had brought an avalanche of questions from curious passengers. Probably Mat Bailey had been forced to think of the tragedy more constantly than had any other person. His opinion ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... caribou like a brigade of charging cavalry, tramping all before them. Forward they swept in blind panic, as relentlessly destructive as an avalanche, and no more easily stopped or ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... press changed the situation. With Platina, ca. 1474, an avalanche of cookery literature started. The secrets of Scappi, "cuoco secreto" to the pope, were "scooped" by an enterprising Venetian printer in 1570. The guilds of French mustard makers and sauce cooks (precursors of ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... with all the pure and quiet affection of an English fireside. His poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. Nooks and dells, beautiful as fairyland, are embosomed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations. The roses and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of the avalanche. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... negotiations with a wonderful skill and foresight. His whole object had been secrecy, and this had been difficult. To shout the wealth of the camp in Leeson Butte would have been to bring instantly an avalanche of adventurers and speculators to the banks of Yellow Creek. His capital was limited to the small amount he had secretly hoarded while his comrades were starving, and the gold he had taken from his claim. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... no debt whatever when Said Pasha signed the document. But when the work was completed, in 1869, the government of the ancient land of the Pharaohs was fairly tottering under its avalanche of obligations to European creditors, for every wile of the plausible De Lesseps had been employed to get money from simple Said, and later from Ismail Pasha, who succeeded him in the khedivate. For fully a decade the raising of money for the project was the momentous ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... she had never read "The Demon Lover," and didn't intend to until every one stopped talking about it. As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were pouring in—first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the bric-a-brac of forgotten family friends to the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of heaped snow that lay at the foot of most of them. Neither stones nor trees were carried down here, however, for the cliffs were nearly perpendicular, and the snow slipping over their edges had fallen on the grass below. Such an avalanche was now about to take place, and it was this that caused Joe to utter his ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... made the other night and what I did with it. Of course that finished me off. I was called before the board and put through a holy inquisition. Gee! They piled up not only the gambling business but all the other things I'd done and left undone for two years and a half and dumped the whole avalanche on my head at once. Whew! It was fierce. I am not saying I didn't deserve it. I did, if not for this particular thing for a million other times when I've ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... even the satisfaction of striking a blow in self-defense. A veritable avalanche of savage beasts rolled over him and threw him heavily to the ground. In falling his head struck the rocky surface of the ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... later Mme. Dawson and her daughters left, and the San Martinos and the Marchesa Sciacca; and an avalanche of English people and Germans, armed with their red Baedekers, took the hotel by storm. Susanna Marchmont had gone to spend ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... end to come. The afternoon passed and she did not leave the cabin. It was possible that he might come to and want water. She had once administered to a miner who had been fatally crushed in an avalanche; and never could forget his husky call for water and the gratitude in ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... of those woods and rocks in this medium—their under parts dark and wild, the upper coloured with red tints, by that light which the reflecting powers of the waters doubled? We climbed rocks which fell directly after with gigantic bounds and the low growling of an avalanche. To right and left ran long, dark galleries, where sight was lost. Here opened vast glades which the hand of man seemed to have worked; and I sometimes asked myself if some inhabitant of these submarine regions would not ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... the break came. The losing team, accompanied by its host of volunteers, was dragged in a rush over the ground and disappeared under the avalanche of battling forms of ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... those sorely imperilled beings, and the vessel itself seemed about to be overwhelmed by an avalanche of sand and dirt and mixed debris. Then came a dizzy, rocking lurch, followed by a shock which nearly cast uncle and nephews from their frantic holds, and the air-ship appeared to be whirled end for end, cast hither and yon, ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... 1755, twenty-two persons living in the Alpine village of Bergemoletto, in Piedmont, were buried in their houses by an avalanche or whirlwind of snow. The space covered was about two hundred and seventy feet in length, sixty in breadth, and the snow was over forty-two feet in depth. Notwithstanding all the efforts made by the survivors it was impossible to extricate the buried persons ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... meadows Pours its avalanche of Light And blazing flowers: the very shadows Translucent are and bright. It seems a glory that nought surpasses— Passion of angels in form and hue— When, lo! from the jewelled heaven of the grasses Leaps a lightning of sudden blue. Dimming the sun-drunk ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... undertakers. There was no more stain about that than about any other trade. And it was so as not to spoil his trade that the undertaker had enlisted, and to make the world safe for democracy, too. The phrase came to Andrews's mind amid an avalanche of popular tunes; of visions of patriotic numbers on the vaudeville stage. He remembered the great flags waving triumphantly over Fifth Avenue, and the crowds dutifully cheering. But those were valid ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... mountain walls, but had been swept, one and all, by the relentless forces of the ice and buried deep under mountains of moraine matter, but added to the present desolation. We could not enjoy; we could only endure. Death from overturning icebergs, from charging tides, from mountain avalanche, threatened us. ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... anything—or of simple consciousness? Every philosopher that has attempted to explain consciousness or how we know, takes refuge in assumptions. At any Philosophical Society, if you ask for the explanation of simple Consciousness, the avalanche of answers, each differing from the other, will bewilder you. We know the outward appearance of an object, of which we say that we know it, but what is it in itself? Of that we are as much in the dark as we are of the mind that knows. We say, each of ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... seeming to rise to his throat as if to choke him, while he listened intently for the sound of a falling body loosening a little avalanche ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... Tom and Mr. Damon took all this in at a glance, and then their gaze went forward to where the avalanche had torn away a great ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... was a white heavy rage, when his blue eyes shone unearthly, and his mouth opened with a curious drawn blindness of the old Furies. There was something of the cruelty of a falling mass of snow, heavy, horrible. Maria drew away, there was a silence. Then the avalanche was finished. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... of our hills, Signore," he said; "they savor of the imagination. Our pass is not as often troubled with the avalanche as some that are known, even in the melting snows. Had you looked at the peaks from the lake, you would have seen that, the hoary glaciers excepted, they are still all brown and naked. The snow must fall from the heavens before it can fall in the avalanche, and ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... thirty-fifth ballot occurred a diversion. Virginia cast fifteen votes for Franklin Pierce. The schemers had launched their project. But it was not until the forty-ninth ballot that they started the avalanche. Pierce then received all but six votes. Two Ohio delegates clung to Douglas to the bitter end. With the frank manliness which made men forget his less admirable qualities, Douglas dictated this dispatch to the ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... passed the thunder-peal, Came raindrops, falling near, A rain one could not feel, A rain that smote the ear. And we turned to look again Towards the mountain wall, When a deep tone shook the fane, Like the avalanche's fall. Loud piped the wind, fast poured the rain, The very earth seemed riven, And wildly flashed, and yet again, The smiting fires of heaven. And cheeks that wore the light of smiles When slowly rose the gale, ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... leaped at Wims with arms outthrust, intending to push him toward the door, but Wims had stepped aside in slight alarm and the avalanche of meat plunged past and into a bench on which rested a huge, multilevel glass maze which was a shopping-center model being tested to determine a design that would subliminally compel shoppers into bankruptcy. There was a sustained and magnificent ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... loneliness was not for long. An avalanche of Aunt Lydia entered the room, quite filling it with her fluttering presence. Tante Lydia's morning cap was quite as youthful as that of her niece, her flowered wrapper as belaced and befurbelowed as the lingiere could make it, and her high heeled mules were at least two sizes ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... called a constant play of countenance: first he smiled, then looked grave; now raised his eyebrows, till they rose like rainbows, to the horizon of his pale, straw-coloured hair; and next darted them down, like an avalanche, over the twinkling, restless, fluttering, little blue eyes, which then became almost invisible. Mr. Douce had, in fact, all the appearance of a painfully shy man, which was the more strange, as he had the reputation of enterprise, and even audacity, in the business of his profession, and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... subservient to his will? He wondered. Everything depended upon that. If not, then he might as well try to stay the forces of a mighty avalanche with his breath, as halt the cube-army with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... just time to shout the name of his companion when the avalanche struck him, and he was bowled over as neatly as ever a football tackle got ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... an uncomfortable feeling of excitement, as if he were participating in something active and swift, which he but partly understood. He was incapable of connected thought—everything was vague and shadowy before him. In a dim way he recognized that he was standing in the way of an approaching avalanche, and gradually he began to discern the nature of the impending catastrophe. Presently the vague uncertainty that hovered before his mind resolved itself into action, and his groping forefinger pressed ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... organisation of Clay clubs and in preparing the way for the Kentucky statesman in 1844, held mass-meetings and read letters from their great leader, New York again passed under the control of the Democrats by a majority of nearly twenty-two thousand.[321] It was not an ordinary defeat; it was an avalanche. Only one Whig senator, thirty Whig assemblymen, and nine or ten congressmen were saved in the wreck. "I fear the party must break up from its very foundations," Fillmore wrote Weed. "There is no cohesive ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Terror, France was plunged into a reckless round of unrestrained gayety that can come only from love of life and youth and laughter long pent-up. It was as though an avalanche of joy had been released; it was in reality the reaction from the terrors and nightmares of those two years of horror. The people were free, free to do as they pleased without the fear of the guillotine ever present; and all France went mad ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... heavy timbers and the dislodgment of those upper logs, which accounted for this havoc of death. There were dead there pierced by bullets and brained by rifle stocks, but the many had met their fate under the avalanche of logs, and amid the burning glare ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... enjoyment worked against the ideal that sprang and flowed forth from the sacred solitude of the forest. These poems contain the voice of warnings against the gorgeous unreality of that age, which, like a Himalayan avalanche, was slowly gliding down to an abyss of catastrophe. And from his seat beside all the glories of Vikramaditya's throne the poet's heart yearns for the purity and simplicity of India's past age of spiritual striving. And it was this yearning which impelled ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... another day long ago, when a lad had burst into the hotel at Zermatt and told with no more acceptance for his story of an avalanche which he had seen fall from the very summit of the Matterhorn. Chayne looked at his watch. It ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... the direction indicated, and what he saw by the dim twilight was frightful. A high iceberg, driven back north, was rushing on to the ship with the rapidity of an avalanche. ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... widens the horizon of life to him and gives him a deeper and closer sympathy with every form and manifestation of life. Every phase of life makes an appeal to him, from bird on the wing to rushing avalanche; from the blade of grass to the boundless plains; from the prattle of the child to the word miracles of Shakespeare; from the stable of Bethany to ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... o'clock. There was a commotion at the front door and Maxwell came in. He was followed by an avalanche of Smiths. There was our Smith, and a tall, lean Smith, and a Smith who waddled when he walked. They were all dirty and dusty; they all wore our pink-and-blue pledge ribbons on their coat lapels and when they got in the house ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... addresses urging the application of the same system to the entire alluvial basin of the river from the gulf to Cairo. People were in despair as to what to do to prevent the breaking of the levees (the results of which are as "terrible to the dwellers on those flats as the avalanche to people who live on the sides of steep mountains"), and the distress and prostration created by the awful spring floods. Most people thought there were two possible remedies,—to build more and higher levees, and to drain off some of the volume of the river ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... Minstrels have burst upon us like an avalanche. All the reserved seats were sold last evening before the performance commenced; and the house was filled by a fashionable audience,—one rarely seen at a minstrel entertainment. The troupe have made a decided hit, and their performances last night ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... of Zuerich were preceding the army as van-guard. They had just refreshed themselves with some wine, and were marching up the wild gorge, shouting and singing, in spite of the warnings of their guides. Then, in the heights above, an avalanche was suddenly loosened, which rushed down upon the road, and in its impetuous torrent buried sixty warriors far below in the Reuss, in ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... victims showed favorable signs. "Charge!" was the word. With the fury of unchained lions the impatient hoplites sprang forward, and like an avalanche the serried Spartan line fell ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... or drives through long lines of enthusiastically cheering crowds. He has to fight for his life every moment of its existence. He is climbing not a secure ladder on solid earth, but up a glacier with slipping steps, the abyss beneath, the avalanche above—watchful enemies all round—even among the guides he ought to be able to trust. Do you suppose that every member of the Liberal party loves Mr. Asquith, and is delighted when he displays his great talents? Do ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... came crashing through the roof of a house at the end of the alley and burst in the basement, showering the street with slate and plaster. A second struck a chimney and plunged into the garden, followed by an avalanche of bricks, and another exploded with a deafening report in ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... of Recalde, stung To fury it seemed, heeled like an avalanche To leeward, then reeled out beyond the rest Against the wind, alone, daring the foe To grapple her. At once the little Revenge With Drake's flag flying flashed at her throat, And hardly a cable's-length away out-belched Broadside on broadside, under those great cannon, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... millions of insane murderers and his heart is torn as He sees the avalanche of tears shed by bereaved wives ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... which underlies German movements. Luther, for good and for evil, is the most typical of Germans, and the Luther who made his mark in the world—the shrewd, coarse, superstitious peasant who blossomed into genius—was an avalanche of emotion, a great mass of natural human instincts irresistible in their impetuosity. When we bear in mind this general tendency to emotional expansiveness in the manifestations of the Teutonic soul we need feel no surprise ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... half recollection came on me, and that which I had put away from my mind and sworn to let alone, seized and convulsed me. Dreams, and sensations, and instincts massed and fell upon me in an avalanche of conviction. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... in describing Saul. In his agony he is like the king-serpent. His rage is like the earthquake that may tear open the rock but at the same time sets the gold free. His final release from the evil spirit is described by the sudden fall of the avalanche from the mountain summit. The look in his eyes as he comes back to life, yet seeing nothing in life to desire, is compared to pale autumn sunsets seen over the ocean, or to slow sunsets seen over a desolate hill country. All the figures contribute to our impression of Saul's power ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... momentary world, which started from the womb of night, and vanished again before one could say "It is there!" Then followed a long-drawn, intermittent rumble, as if the fragments of the spectre world were tumbling avalanche-wise ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... continent; while Switzerland presents, at every turn, a combination of the paradisaical and of terrific sterility. Smiling patriarchal pastures, walled in by granite mountains, frowning in eternal silence and solitude, save when thundering with the awful avalanche. I said that their piles of granite were barren; but what a moment is it to explore your way companionless, and find them to be the source and spring of richness and fertility to Europe, as the sun is of warmth and light to the world—to pick your doubtfully hazardous ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... of fate will be less by fully two-thirds. And the benefit to mankind would be far more considerable than if it lay in our power to guide the storm or govern the heat and the cold, to direct the course of disease or the avalanche, or contrive that the sea should display an intelligent regard to our virtues and secret intentions. For indeed the poor far exceed in number those who fall victims to shipwreck or material accident, just as far more disease is due ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... violently. The driver was lashing furiously and trying to turn the animal, which, frenzied by terror, and maddened by the stinging sleet, refused to obey, and would only rear and kick. Suddenly the ice under the sleigh sank down, and a flood of water rolled over it, followed by an avalanche of ice-blocks which had tumbled from the ridge. With a wild snort of terror, the horse turned, whirling round the sleigh, and with the speed of the wind dashed back toward the shore. As the sleigh came near, I saw the ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... if forcibly detaching itself, flown off from the avalanche and buried itself in the ground only a few feet beyond Harry and Pearl, and more than one uprooted tree lay near them. Death had missed them by only a ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... later there came another sharp report, followed by the same whining sound. This time a shell struck just behind the parados. There was an avalanche of shell fragments, but none flew into ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... us that a great avalanche of snow has fallen upon the Monastery of St. Bernard, and has destroyed the left wing of the building, though happily without ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... smudged cavities, through which you looked and saw square patches of the sky if your eyes inclined upward, or else blackened masses of ruination if you gazed straight in at the interiors. Once in a while one had been thrown flat. Probably big guns operated here. In such a case there was an avalanche of broken masonry cascading ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... slope; a trifling action, the slipping, indeed, of a single flake, may begin the movement, which at first is gradual and only involves a little of the snow. Gathering velocity, and with the materials heaped together from the junction of that already in motion with that about to be moved, the avalanche in sliding a few hundred feet down the slope may become a deep stream of snow-ice, moving with great celerity. At this stage it begins to break off masses of ice from the glaciers over which it may flow, or even to ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the kind we have described can provoke destructive eruptions of great masses of subterranean mud. (At such times access to the Solfatara is prohibited.) We shall understand such an eruption rightly if we picture it as the counter-pole of an avalanche. The latter may be brought about by a fragment of matter on a snow-covered mountain, perhaps a little stone, breaking loose and in its descent bringing ever-accumulating masses of snow down with it. ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... It isn't always considered patriotic when the people want war, for a Senator to want peace too hard. I shall strive to point that out to twenty million people or so tomorrow morning. Make your will, Senator. The avalanche is coming. You'll be the loneliest voice that ever came out of the wilderness. I ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... The method of Model I consists of overwhelming the enemy with an avalanche of examples. The method of Model II is to define the words used by an opponent and, by analyzing the meaning of what he asserts, to prove that he does not see his way through ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... explanation of the avalanche of bills, and never suspected Lady Kirkbank's influence in the matter. It happened, however, that the chaperon, having her own reasons for wishing to bring Mr. Smithson's suit to a successful issue, had told Seraphine and the other ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... dumb at the foot of the steps. The whole situation had rushed upon him like an avalanche. Harbert had filed his charges and the hasty visit of the reporter proved that David Cable was an instrument in them. The blood surged to his head; he staggered under the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... he would find waiting tedious, went back to the car for his small bag, after which he and Pete set off for the hotel. They had some trouble to cross the path of the avalanche and then spent some time getting past the men who were unloading a row of flat cars. The single-line track was cut out of the rock and one ran a risk of glissading down to the river by venturing outside its edge. Once, indeed, a heavy beam, ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... the ledge which did not appear to have much of a descent until they came to a place where a rocky slide had taken trail and all into the sea. The avalanche that had made it must have been a granddaddy of avalanches, for there was a steep slope of rocks and rubble from here to the water below. There, the stones had spilled out in all directions and the waves moiled over and about them for ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... household, brooding, sinister, like something created in a Bronte brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when the financial avalanche of '93 thundered across the continent sweeping Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the debris. Stocks and bonds and real estate became paper, with paper value. He clawed about with frantic, clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands more ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... scene. The vault of the sky emptying itself in an avalanche of flame, while from within the wide stream of projectiles, collisions caused by some accident of deflection originated interior spots of sudden blazing light. The irregular and separated shocks of sound from the falling city now ran together ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... to his hip. But he was given no time. Bat was on him like an avalanche, an avalanche of furious purpose. The fighting spirit in him yearned, and in a moment his victim was caught up in a crushing embrace. There was a short, fierce struggle. But Idepski was no match ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... body of horsemen, whom he at once recognised as those who had accompanied Captain Burnett, galloping down the ravine on the left. From the heights above, they had apparently observed the perilous position of their friends; and on they came like an avalanche, at headlong speed, throwing themselves impetuously on the mountaineers, who gave way as the surface of the ocean recedes before the bows of a gallant ship impelled by the gale. Before they could regain the heights, both parties of cavalry had united and ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... noted in this blizzard was the fact that huge ice-sheets as big as window-panes, and about a quarter of an inch thick, were being hurled about by the wind, making it as dangerous to walk about outside as if one were in an avalanche of splintered glass. Still, these winds from the south and south-west, though invariably accompanied by snow and low temperatures, were welcome in that they drove the pack-ice away from the immediate vicinity ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... of these things now that many days have passed between, for events followed each other with the swiftness of a mighty avalanche. ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... altered demeanour, embarrassed by an avalanche of words. A hundred questions were burning upon his lips. It was by a great effort of ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Simplon, and I have many times crossed the Bernina and all the other passes of the Orisons in the snow in mid-winter. For those who like, as I do, sharp cold, and ardent sunlight, there is nothing more delightful, and if as sometimes happens, one can see or hear an avalanche really close, without getting into it, a pleasant spice of danger is added. But I did not love the Alps merely in the winter. Though no expert climber, I was fond of the mountains to the point of fanaticism, and though I never got higher than 11,000 feet, or a little over, I had the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... and thrusting with sabre and lance. The onset was like a mighty avalanche, and our men were for the most part overwhelmed. A few of the strongest and best mounted cut their way through, but numbers were overthrown, and the rest came flying back, with the victorious Royalists slashing and cutting ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... with a strange excitement. I took my drills and my gun under my arm and set off with slack knees down the hillside. I took the shortest way, marking the smoking track left by my avalanche. Asop followed me, shaking his head all the time and sneezing at the ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... mountains Where the pines in proud procession Climb like a hardy host To halo-heights of sun. I'm listening for the sallies Of the avalanche's Hessian Hurl of ice and granite ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... at the other extremity, the ants who laboured at the thumb and its environs, continued with violent jerks to draw the glove towards its destination; and when it had come so near the sloping edge, that the locomotive power became its own, it slid, like an avalanche, to the bottom of the mound, drawing nearly the entire population along with it. Never were pismires so terrified before; nor did arrow ever swifter cleave the air, as these insects scrambled over the blades of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... to say right at this time that the idea that seems to be prevalent in the minds of many that the German is not a good fighting man is a lamentable mistake; he is a good fighter. He has not perhaps the initiative of the British, or the avalanche-like ardor in a charge of the French soldier, but with his officers pressing him behind and in mass formation, he is as formidable a foe as ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... top of the cliff, of course. It must have made a big drift there and tumbled down—regular avalanche, you know—just as I tried to look out. Why! the place out there is filled up yards deep! We'd never be able to ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... and true, the German arm is strong; The German foot goes seldom back where armed foemen throng. But never had they faced in field so stern a charge before, 95 And never had they felt the sweep of Scotland's broad claymore. Not fiercer pours the avalanche adown the steep incline, That rises o'er the parent springs of rough and rapid Rhine,— Scarce swifter shoots the bolt from heaven than came the Scottish band Right up against the guarded trench, and o'er it sword in hand. 100 In vain their leaders forward ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... their rifles, and, rushing out from behind their place of shelter, made straight for the animals, now less than two hundred yards away. An old bull that was standing guard gave the signal to charge, and in a minute the "black avalanche of thundering beasts" was bearing down ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... does this on a large scale. Where mountains are sufficiently elevated to raise their heads above the snow line we know they are white all the year around with snow. What is not blown away, evaporated, or, as an avalanche, precipitated to lower heights, must accumulate from year to year. But the weight pressing on the lower portions of this snow-field must soon be considerable, and at length become so great, that the snow changes to the form of ice. But as ice it is no longer fixed and immovable. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... and that with darkness, Tragedy would walk the streets of Nome. The thought of the wrong already done was lost in the lonely girl's terror of the crime about to happen, for it seemed to her she had been the instrument to set these forces in motion, that she had loosed this swift-speeding avalanche of greed, hatred, and brutality. And when the crash should come—the girl shuddered. It must not be. She would shriek a warning from the house-tops even at cost of her uncle, of McNamara, and of herself. And yet she had no proof that a crime existed. Although ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... her love no longer hiding, Waked by some chance word her father's jealousy; Slips her disdain—as an avalanche down gliding Sweeps flocks and kin away—to ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... without even a plea of extenuating circumstances. Voorhees was young, ambitious, and anxious to display his oratory. He arranged with his colleagues at the beginning that he should make a speech, and he spent several hours in his room at the hotel in the preparation of an oratorical avalanche. It became generally known that Dan was going to out-do himself, and the expectation of the community was at its highest tension. The little old court-house was crowded. The ladies were out in full force. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... has been idly amusing himself with rolling a snowball might start at finding he had set in motion an avalanche, so did Fancy start at these words from the vicar. And in the dead silence which followed them, the breathings of the man and of the woman could be distinctly and separately heard; and there was this difference between them—his respirations gradually ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... doctrines, translated into international politics (in the Fourteen Points) were roughly handled in Paris. The country rejected his leadership in the decisive Congressional elections of 1918, and he and his party went out of power in the avalanche of 1920, when Harding received a plurality nearly three times as great as the highest one ever before given a presidential candidate (Roosevelt, in 1904). Every state north of the Mason and Dixon Line went Republican. Tennessee left the Solid South and ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... Madge, whose pink cheeks showed what she had faced. 'I left a whole avalanche in the hall. The streets are a foot deep already. Not a cab to be got. We had to fight our way from the theatre arm in arm; the wind and snow were like to lift us off our feet altogether. Frank said it reminded him of Canada. All the gentlemen are below; ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... radiant creature seems a Musidora of the water, and you almost blush with a sense of guilt, in gazing on that peerless privacy. As petal by petal slowly opens, there still stands the central cone of snow, a glacier, an alp, a jungfrau, while each avalanche of whiteness seems the last. Meanwhile, a strange rich odor fills the air, and Nature seems to concentrate all fascinations and claim all senses for this jubilee ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... consider the futility of the action—nay, the direct confession implied thereby—he instinctively grabbed at the pipe, and rammed it back into his pocket; and then an avalanche of mingled understanding and bewilderment, fear and joy, swept Mivanway's brain before it. She felt she must do one of two things, laugh or scream and go on screaming, and she laughed. Peal after peal of laughter she sent echoing among the rocks, and Charles springing to his feet was just ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... manage some little, patient self-improvement; gradually, inch by inch and bit by bit, we may be growing better, and then there comes some gust and outburst of temptation; and the whole painfully reclaimed soil gets covered up by an avalanche of mud and stones, that we have to remove slowly, barrow-load by barrow-load. And then we feel that it is all of no use to strive, and we let circumstances shape us, and give up all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... caught in another avalanche of telegrams and had to spend a couple of hours at the Consulate-General polishing off and finishing business. Stopped in at the palace on the way back and saw General Jungbluth, who showed me the latest telegrams. I gathered up what newspapers I could beg or buy and stuffed ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... whimpered his boat-boys, and before their master could interfere, beat at the delirious wretch with their oars. He hung on tenaciously, enduring a perfect avalanche of blows. But mere flesh and bone had to wither under that onslaught, and at last, by sheer weight of battering, he was driven from his hold, and the beer-colored river covered him then and ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... a shady nook, just off Katahdin's reflection in the river, while Iglesias sketched him. Meanwhile I, analyzing my view, presently discovered a droll image in the track of a land-avalanche down the front. It was a comical fellow, a little giant, a colossal dwarf, six hundred feet high, and should have been thrice as tall, had it had any proper development,—for out of his head grew two misdirected skeleton legs, "hanging down and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... rings loud and mirthful as a boy's,— That lusty laugh the Puritan forgot,— What ear has heard it and remembers not? How often, halting at some wide crevasse Amid the windings of his Alpine pass, High up the cliffs, the climbing mountaineer, Listening the far-off avalanche to hear, Silent, and leaning on his steel-shod staff, Has heard that cheery voice, that ringing laugh, From the rude cabin whose nomadic walls Creep with the moving glacier as it crawls How does vast Nature lead her living train In ordered sequence ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a certain listener treasured up all this ingratitude in his heart; and the following Sunday at both Masses, the walls of Kilronan chapel echoed to a torrent of vituperation, an avalanche of anger, sarcasm, and reproach, that made the faces of the congregation redden with shame and whiten with fear, and made the ladies of the fringes and the cuffs wish to call unto the hills to cover them and the mountains ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... their shallow trenches leaped the Army Boys, the light of battle in their eyes, and fell like an avalanche upon the advancing hosts. ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... for the woman who had so suddenly entered his life was merely the opening of vials of emotion hitherto held sealed. It was no radical transformation. All that had been his before still remained, buried perhaps for the moment under the avalanche of feeling, but nevertheless still occupying its place. These things could not be swept away. They could not be destroyed. They would remain when the passionate fires had ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... mountain ranges, Where nothing haps save vast AEonian changes, The slow moraine, the avalanche's wings, Summer and Sun,—the elemental things, Pulses of Awe,—Winter and Night and the lightnings. Land of the pines that rear their dusky spars A ready midnight for the earliest stars. The land of rivers, rivulets, and rills, ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... out of the way of the miniature avalanche that followed, and for some minutes stood reviewing with a truculent eye the face of the hillside. But nothing moved thereon, it was quite bare of good cover, little more than a slant of naked earth and shale, dotted manywhere with boulders, cousins to that which sought ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... is there beneath his civic crown; He speaks in words that thunder as they flow, And as he speaks his thunder-tones bring down An avalanche below! ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... philosopher like an avalanche! He was so full of his subject that he could not let it out in prudent driblets. No, he went souse upon ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the other animals disconcerted the good-natured hippopotamus to such an extent that she lost control of herself and sailed through the forest like an avalanche on a bender. Down went the trees and crack went the branches, while horror-stricken beasts with bristling hair split the ...
— Fables For The Times • H. W. Phillips
... saw the first signs of danger, and signalled for their withdrawal. But the lust of blood was awake in them, and they were drunk with the joy of fighting. They followed and followed till the Turks, out of that awful avalanche of death, became conscious that a thousand Thetian horsemen were not an invincible force. Their fight was checked, they were almost immediately surrounded, their leader fell shot through the heart, and a miracle was required to save the flower ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... and dumb and dead. But the chief with the flankers had gained the rear, And flew on the trail of the flying herd. The shouts of the riders rang loud and clear, As their foaming steeds to the chase they spurred. And now like the roar of an avalanche Rolls the bellowing wrath of the maddened bulls They charge on the riders and runners stanch, And a dying steed in the snow drift rolls, While the rider, flung to the frozen ground, Escapes the horns ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... departure which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, of a storm, of a revolution. From one insignificant misunderstanding hatred and separation may finally issue. An enormous avalanche begins by the displacement of one atom, and the conflagration of a town by the fall of a match. Almost everything comes from almost nothing, one might think. It is only the first crystallization which is the affair of mind; the ultimate aggregation is the affair of mass, of attraction, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sat wrapped in reflection, the early morning mail was brought in. He glanced up, and then started to his feet. The letters spread over his desk like an avalanche of snow; and the puffing mail carrier declared that he had made a special trip with them alone. Haynerd began to tear them open, one after another. Then he called the office boy, and set him at the task. There were more than five hundred of them, and each contained ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... rock seemed to slip from its notch up on the side of the cliff, and come crashing down, loosening others on the way, until finally the rush and roar almost partook of the nature of a small avalanche. ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... Like an avalanche, the "Mountain" swept down from benches to hall and on, on toward the judges. Murder was in their eyes. A word from the Thunderer ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... scorpion-wise over his head the length of his armoured tail. All this the eye perceived in the hilt of Sacnoth, who smote suddenly sideways. Not with the edge smote Sacnoth, for, had he done so, the severed end of the tail had still come hurtling on, as some pine tree that the avalanche has hurled point foremost from the cliff right through the broad breast of some mountaineer. So had Leothric been transfixed; but Sacnoth smote sideways with the flat of his blade, and sent the tail whizzing ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... him of the French army, and the consequent dethronement of Louis XVIII. The Congress at once dispersed, forgetting all its differences, while the great monarchs united once more in pouring such an avalanche of troops into France and Belgium that Napoleon stood no chance of retaining his throne, whatever military genius he might display. After his defeat at Waterloo the allies occupied Paris, and this time exacted a large war indemnity of L40,000,000, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... which were at all flattering either to his intelligence or to his sobriety, and the victim, after one or two futile attempts at contradiction, sat in helpless wrath as he saw the infatuation of the widow. They were barely clear of the house before his pent-up emotions fell in an avalanche of words on the ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... whole regiment entered upon its first charge with a will, a charge which continued for several miles with wild excitement. Picket reliefs and reserves were swept away like forest trees before the avalanche, and we fell upon their encampment before time had been afforded them for escape. Here we captured several men and horses, with large quantities of stores, and then rested our tired steeds and fed them ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... soon break; and the spectator loves him and is sorry for him and would avert the destiny of woe that is darkly foreshadowed in his condition. McCullough gave the invectives—as they ought to be given—with the impetuous rush and wild fury of the avalanche; and yet they were felt to come out of agony as well as out of passion. The pathos of those tremendous passages is in their chaotic disproportion; in their lawlessness and lack of government; in the evident helplessness of the poor old man who hurls them forth from a breaking ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... For that, with nearer vision it discerns What in the distance like ripe roses seemed Crimsoning with odorous beauty the gray rocks Are the red lights of wreckers! Just as well The obstinate traveler might in pride oppose His puny shoulder to the icy slip Of the blind avalanche, and hope for life; Or Beauty press her forehead in the grave, And think to rise as from the bridal bed. But let the soul resolve its course shall be Onward and upward, and the walls of pain May build themselves about it as they will, Yet leave it all-sufficient to itself. How ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... a strange dullness of comprehension with regard to our position and purpose. What! Is it to forsake the slave when I cease to be the aider and abettor of his master? What! When the North is pressing down upon four millions of slaves like an avalanche, and we say to her, 'Take off that pressure—stand aside—give the slave a chance to regain his feet and assert his freedom!' is that turning our backs upon him? Here, for example, is a man engaged in highway robbery, and another ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... encountered severe storms and piercing cold. When half-way up the summit, a rumbling noise was heard among the cliffs. The guides looked at each other in alarm; for they knew well what it meant. It grew louder and louder. "An avalanche! an avalanche!" they shrieked, and the next moment a field of ice and snow came leaping down the mountain, striking the line of march, and sweeping thirty dragoons in a wild plunge below. The black forms of the horses and their riders were seen for an instant ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... seen, they were saved, and a wild cheer arose from the breathless multitude. Just at that instant, with his foot on the threshold, an avalanche of fire seemed to fall on his head ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... sides for weeks there had been accumulating evidence, which we could see pointed to a monumental success or an avalanche failure. The copper market was literally boiling, and investors from one end of America to the other and throughout Europe were on the qui vive for the anticipated announcement. At intervals in history great "booms" are started, which bloom into iridescent bubbles, and for a moment dazzle ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... was the onslaught of the enemy or the firing of our troops, we knew not. But we had not long to wait. Soon stragglers, few in numbers, began to appear, emerging from the woods into our clearing, and then more of them, these running, and then almost at once an avalanche of panic-stricken, flying men without arms, without knapsacks, many bareheaded, swearing, cursing, a wild, frenzied mob tearing to the rear. Instantly they began to appear, General Couch, commanding our corps, took in the situation and deployed two divisions to ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... taffrail, leaned far out and called to the boats. But the roar of the flames drowned his cries, and the boats, which had moved out to windward, could not see him. Foot by foot crept the fire; but the stiff wind which finally came over the stern did its work well, and the red avalanche began to slant toward the bow. This meant respite. But he knew that at the very best it could be only a ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... 28.0 (the normal being 30.0). There was, however, great variability in the individual pressures which sometimes equaled and even exceeded the subject's normal efforts. The voluntary muscles are thus in harmony with the approaching general sexual avalanche. (Vaschide and Vurpas, "Quelques Donnees Experimentales sur l'Influence de l'Excitation Sexuelle," Archivio ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in Egypt. "I took good care that an occasional missent ball should bowl off the hat of M. Bouer, and whenever any particularly aristocratic aristocrat's head showed itself above the ramparts, an avalanche fell upon his facade with a dull, sickening thud. I have never seen an American college football game, but from all I can learn from accounts in the Paris editions of the American newspapers the effects physical in our fight and that game ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... a bewildering number of books and school paraphernalia, as well as additions to her dolls' paraphernalia; but it was Dot who sat down breathlessly in the middle of the floor under a perfect avalanche of treasures, all connected with her "children's" comfort and her personal ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... popular writer. The criticisms cut him like a whip. He wondered why he had rebelled at the previous silence. He felt like a man who had heedlessly hurled a stone at a snow mountain and had been buried by the resulting avalanche. ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... savagely. "You'd go down the Devil's Slide—what's left of you, I mean—deep into that prospect hole. The timberings are rotted and the whole top of the working ready to cave in. When your body hits it there will be an avalanche—with Mr. Former-sheriff Cullison at the bottom of it. You'll be buried without any funeral expenses, and I reckon your friends will never know where to ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... as were one or two about him. Portman looked grave, and so did Breen. Nothing of that kind had ever soiled their hands; everything with them was open and above-board. They might start a rumor that the Lode had petered out, throw an avalanche of stock on the market, knock it down ten points, freezing out the helpless (poor Gilbert had been one of them), buy in what was offered and then declare an extra dividend, sending the stock skyward, but anything so low as—"Oh, very ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... another direction. After completing my examinations I returned, Copenhagen having made the other half of what I am. In 1880 I was appointed auditor of the Official Accounts of Iceland, and got married. During the ten ensuing years I was buried under an avalanche of accounts and official documents and could hardly hold my head up above the waters. The wings of my soul drooped with exhaustion. My dramatic muse awakened several times, but I could not receive her visits. At last, in 1890, I began to write "Skipit sekkur" [The Ship is Sinking,—a naturalistic ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... lay in all directions, which had fallen from the impending heights. I examined these, and found some that were comparatively recent; I had also observed upon our entrance to the valley that a great portion of the cliff face had lately fallen, forming an avalanche of rocks that would have destroyed a village: this my guide informed me was the result of last year's excessive rain. I examined the heights above us with my glass, and observed some crags that Polyphemus would have delighted to hurl ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... where I had left my cousin talking with Uncle Mo and Aunt Maria was all but darkened, and the place was a cloud of dust. I could see that Uncle Mo was wrenching open the street-door, which seemed to have stuck, and then that it opened, letting in an avalanche of rubbish, and some light. Cries came from outside, and Aunt Maria called out that it was Mrs. Burr. Thereon Uncle Mo, crying 'Stand clear, all!' began flinging the rubbish back into the room with marvellous alacrity for a man of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... consequence of leading a wild life and sacrificing himself for his party, he had spent his entire fortune, and was overwhelmed with debts. The lawyer Vanier, who was entrusted with the management of his business affairs, lost his head at the avalanche of bills, protests and notes of hand which poured into his office, and which it was impossible to meet. The lawyer Lefebre, a fat and sensual free-liver, was equally low in funds, and laid on the government the blame of the confusion ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... frightened by such a tremendous sight, shied and jumped, but the boy had a sure seat and brought him around again. Dick himself was somewhat daunted by the aspect of the herd. If he and his hose got in the way, they would go down forever, as surely as if engulfed by an avalanche. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... which open into it, numerous villages—Vauxbuin, Berzy-le-Sec, Villemontoire, Buzancy—are the more difficult to capture because the artillery can hardly see them, as they lie close against the hillside. It was on the Crise, in the latter part of May, that a handful of Frenchmen held up the German avalanche from the Chemin-des-Dames. ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... their stiffened limbs, cry out and leap into the open air, as of right—right, do I say? it is now their duty to press forward all together like a falling mass. The isolated snow-flakes turned avalanche. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... accepted for the sole reason that it did happen. The vicissitudes of social or private life are brought about by a crowd of little causes derived from a thousand conditions. The man of science is forced to clear away the avalanche under which whole villages lie buried, to show you the pebbles brought down from the summit which alone can determine the formation of the mountain. If the historian of human life were simply telling you of a suicide, five hundred ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
