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More "Perpendicular" Quotes from Famous Books



... to leap across to the other train, stirred all my bile. It was on this current of thought that the nobleman who had been hung and the cardinal who had pined in a cage were borne upon my memory. "Small choice," said I, "whether the bars are perpendicular or horizontal. You lose your independence about equally ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... batteries, Stuart's Hill was strongly occupied by Longstreet, with Anderson's division as general reserve; and this wing of the Confederate army was gradually wheeled up, but always under cover, until it was almost perpendicular to the line of the unfinished railroad. The strength of Lee's army at the battle of Manassas was hardly more than 50,000 of all arms. Jackson's command had been reduced by battle and forced marches to 17,000 men. Longstreet mustered 30,000, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... rule, the grammar was leaky and the construction more or less lame; but I did not much mind these things. They are common defects of my own, and one mustn't criticise other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... scenes of terrifying magnificence when she followed Mat over the trail cut along the perpendicular walls of the canon five miles down to the floor of the Valley. One who has not passed over that trail can scarcely conceive of it; and one who has, brings away a sense of the sublime and the beautiful mingled with terror. There against the blue sky stands the perpendicular wall ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall

... now necessary to find new cover. For long distances the banks of the Pecos are nearly perpendicular, and ten to twenty feet high. At flood the swift current cuts deep holes and recesses in these banks. Prowling along the margin of the stream, Jim found one of these recesses wide enough to hold them both, and ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... to be seen that would have revived one of the Seven Sleepers. Now, on the great-granddaddy-longlegs of all the spidery trestles that ever were built, we would go roaring across a mighty gorge, its sides clothed with perpendicular gardens and vineyards, and with little gray towns clustering under the ledges on its sheer walls like mud-daubers' nests beneath an eave. Now, perched on a ridgy outcrop of rock like a single tooth in a snaggled reptilian jaw, would be a ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... box-cars. On the contrary, they were very narrow—not more than an inch and a half in breadth. I couldn't get half of the width of my sole on them. Then there was nothing to which to hold with my hands. True, there were the ends of the two box-cars; but those ends were flat, perpendicular surfaces. There were no grips. I could only press the flats of my palms against the car-ends for support. But that would have been all right if the cleats for my feet had been ...
— The Road • Jack London

... progress across cracked rocks and bogs, past abysses of unsoundable depths—on the very edges of which my mule maliciously walked as though to mark them out with her shoes—we arrived, by an almost perpendicular descent, at the end of our journey. It was a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... the floor levels, partly by exterior batter, the interior wall surface being approximately vertical. Some writers, noting the inclination of the outer wall surface, and not seeing the interior, have inferred that the walls leaned considerably away from the perpendicular. This inference has been strengthened, in some cases, by an examination of the interior, for the inner wall surface, while finely finished, is not by any means a plane surface, being generally concave in each room; yet a line drawn from floor level to floor level would be very nearly vertical. The ...
— Casa Grande Ruin • Cosmos Mindeleff

... though not seemingly ill adapted to give a great heat with but very little fuel. This they made by digging a round hole in the ground, about 20 inches wide and full 3 feet deep, cutting an opening in the front sloping down to the bottom, perpendicular at the sides, about 9 inches wide and about 15 inches long, reckoning from the edge of the circle: this is to serve to throw in the wood and to allow a passage for the air; at the other side a small opening about 4 inches by 3 inches ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear

... are regulated by the moon, it is high-water by the shore at this place on the days of the new and full moon, about four o'clock. The perpendicular rise and fall is very inconsiderable, not exceeding four feet at most. In Christmas Sound it is high-water at half past two o'clock on the days of the full and change, and Mr Wales observed it to rise and fall on a perpendicular three feet six inches; but this was during the neap tides, consequently ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... at any angle to the plane of cleavage. We may sometimes see the lines of the true bedding—the lines which were actually horizontal when the mud was laid down—in bits of slate, and find them sometimes perpendicular to, sometimes inclined to, and sometimes again coinciding with the plane of cleavage, which they have ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley

... dropping from the gray walls of her home, with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the olives and grapevines of the Campagna came to meet them, setting here and there a precarious little garden half-way up the steep. Just under her window an almost perpendicular path came up, crept round the walls and entered the town. But no one ever used this road now, for a far wider and better one had been constructed at the other side of the mountain, and all the people came up that way when the day's work ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various

... young people, and penetrated the recesses of the secret trees. Several little tongues of flame clipped sensitive and ruddy on the naked air, sending a faint glow over the needle foliage. They gave a strange, perpendicular aspiration in the night. Julia waved slowly in her tree dance. Jim stood apart, with his legs straddled, a ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... winnowing the wind, was heard the sough and whizz of those mighty vans, as the Royal Bird, himself an army, performed his majestic evolutions with all the calm confidence of a master in the art of aerial war, now shooting up half-a-thousand feet perpendicular, and now suddenly plump-down into the rear of the croaking, cawing, and chattering battalions, cutting off their retreat to the earth. Then the rout became general, the missing, however, far outnumbering the dead. ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... brown, all except the square portion over the fire-place, which was once adorned with a gay paper, but whose brilliancy has long been defaced by smoke and grease. A broken pipe or two, a couple of irons, and a brass candlestick whose shaft leans considerably out of the perpendicular, occupy the mantelpiece. An old rocking-chair and two or three common ones extremely infirm on their legs, complete the furniture. The walls are nearly bare of ornament; the exceptions being a highly-coloured print of a horse-race, and a sampler worked ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson

... that period being those at Flamstead, Hatfield, North Mimms, Standon, and Ware. Early Decorated portions are noticeable among Norman surroundings at Hemel Hempstead, and among Early English at Wheathampstead; Late Decorated is found with Perpendicular at Hitchin. Standon is the only W. porch in the county. Flamstead and Wheathampstead are the only churches in the county that have retained their original ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins

... where the visual ray passes through it. If now we trace on the floor a line AB from the nail to the spot B, just under the eye, and from the point o, where this line passes through or under the glass, we raise a perpendicular oS, that perpendicular passes through the precise point that the visual ray passes through. The line AB traced on the floor is the horizontal trace of the visual ray, and it will be seen that the point a is situated on the vertical raised ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey

... foot of two steep hills, one of which is crowned with the woods of Blaise Castle, and the other with a group of buildings consisting of the parish church, a charming little Gothic structure known as "The Hall," and the national schoolhouse. The church is a fine perpendicular edifice of considerable antiquity, with a square tower surmounted, in true West of England style, by a small turret, having a tiny Gothic spire at one corner. The parishioners are proud of their church, and with justice. It contains ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... and strove barehanded with joy and vigor, which was delightful; yet so systematic, that it was anything rather than romance. It might have been geometry, in that a foe is safer horizontal than perpendicular, and the theorem he applied industriously, with simple ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... perpendicular church standing back from the road, with its churchyard about it; and just beyond it, he turned, his pace involuntarily slackening, to look at a small gabled house, surrounded by a garden, and overhung by a splendid lime tree. Suddenly, as he approached it, the night burst into fragrance, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... and cheerful aspect presenting a striking contrast with the gloom of its immediate environs. By a serpentine road cut through the rock, we climbed an ascent, by nature inaccessible; this path, in some parts not three fathoms in breadth, is bounded on one side by the perpendicular rock, and on the other overlooks an abrupt precipice, from which however it is defended by a strong stone balustrade, so that however fearful in appearance, its only real danger lies in an accident which sometimes happens, that large ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... sunbow's rays still arch The torrent with the many hues of heaven, And roll the sheeted silver's waving column O'er the crag's headlong perpendicular, And fling its lines of foaming light along, And to and fro, like the pale coursers tail, The Giant steed, to be bestrode by Death As told ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... dialogues, are in strict keeping with each other. But the speeches of Thucydides are neither preceded nor followed by anything with which they harmonise. They give to the whole book something of the grotesque character of those Chinese pleasure-grounds in which perpendicular rocks of granite start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Invention is shocking where truth is in ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Michael Angelo's let into the wall,—and then to the back of it, where he opened a small cloth-covered door, when there yawned before me, below me, and above me, a great wide lofty room. Down into it led an almost perpendicular stair. ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... appertaining to the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, and about three miles, a furlong, and few odd yards from that oft-recorded good town, a dry stone wall, some thirty inches in height, runs from the lofty and perpendicular sea-banks, over a portion of what may be termed the fag-end of Lammermoor, and now forming a separation between the laws of Scotland and the jurisdiction of the said good town; and on crossing to the northern side of this humble but important stone wall, you stand on the lands of Lamberton. Rather ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... down the basement steps through the cellar into the area, and with clenched teeth was looking up the monstrous sheer of red-brick wall cut into long strips by the lessening perspective of perpendicular iron ladders. Under each window each ladder opened out into a little, a very little, balcony. The rest was straighter than ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... vestry, putting on his surplice, and relapsed into a contemplative cheek-scratching that was manifestly habitual. Before the bride arrived Mr. Polly's sense of the church found an outlet in whispered criticisms of ecclesiastical architecture with Johnson. "Early Norman arches, eh?" he said, "or Perpendicular." ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... stayed at school at least during that first day of his trousered life. For when the Maestro, later in the forenoon paid a visit to the annex, he found the Assistant in charge standing disconcerted before the urchin who, with eyes indignant and hair perpendicular upon the top of his head, was evidently holding to his side of the argument with his ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... and during the fine weather it makes a collection of honey intended to be absorbed by its own larvae, if it had not the misfortune to be watched by one of these intriguing Coleoptera. Wherever in Provence there is a perpendicular wall, natural or artificial, a little cliff, a sloping ditch, or the wall of one of those caves which the people of the country use for putting their tools in, the Anthophora hollows out galleries, at the bottom of which he builds a certain number of chambers. He fills each of them with honey, ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... it make a nice contrast to the humming-bird's? Over the bed, shall I? But then, if it should drop down on your nose, you know! I think the corner over the fireplace will be best. Yes, we'll have it right up perpendicular, in the angle. The branch twists a little, you see, and the nest will run out with its odds and ends like an old banner. Might I push up the washstand ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... application of joined hands to the forehead. To the Acharyas or superiors the other members of the sect perform the Ashtanga or prostration of the body with eight parts touching the ground. The tilak or sect-mark of the Ramanujis consists of two perpendicular white lines from the roots of the hair to the top of the eyebrows, with a connecting white line at the base, and a third central line either of red or yellow. The Ramanujis do not recognise the worship of Radha, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... snow-covered swamps. We had to walk over pointed and loose rocks which, sliding from under our feet, made our path dangerous and often threw us down several feet on sharp-edged stones lying beneath the snow. Once we had to climb a towering and almost perpendicular rock which not only detained us but was the cause of great anxiety for the safety of the women who, being heavily laden with furs and one of them with a child at her back, could not exert themselves with the activity which such a task required. Fortunately nothing ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin

... breeze and becomes quite uncontrollable. The amount of spring that must be given the cross-piece is in proportion to its length, Mr. Eddy's rule being to spring the cross-stick, by means of a cord joining the two ends like a bow, until the perpendicular between the point of juncture of the two sticks and the centre of the cord is equal to one-tenth of the length of the cross-stick, or a little more than one-tenth, if the kite is to be flown in very ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various

... brought us to a hilltop overlooking the entire lake, with the villages on its edge, and range after range of the mountains of Jalisco and Michoacan. Our animals were more than an hour picking their way down the stony trails between all but perpendicular cornfields, the leaves of which had been stripped off to permit the huge ear at the top the more fully to ripen. A boulder set in motion at the top of a field would have been sure death to the man or horse it ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... man after one of the girls had left him to purify herself, and herself to lave his prick from mere love and excitement of handling a prick, and from long practice she had an art of doing it in a way to raise another perpendicular, which led to its being allayed in the full-blown charms ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous

... struggled through it. They explored for some little distance up and down to see if an easier point for crossing could be discovered, but came to the conclusion that the spot at which the tracks crossed it was the easiest, as in most places the bank had been eaten away by winter rains and was almost perpendicular. They had reached this spot late in the evening, and prepared to cross soon after daybreak "You will have to fix up three teams to each waggon," Abe had said, "and take one over at a time. We will be out early scouting—for, ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... excitement. He whimpered, he grunted, he wallowed as he fed. He had no time to look where he was going. So, all of a sudden, he fell straight through a thick fringe of blue-berry bushes and went sprawling and clawing down the face of an almost perpendicular steep. ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts

... realized that a physical change had marched alongside the fluctuations of our temper. The circumference of the bowl was the same as at first, but imperceptibly yet swiftly the hollow had deepened, sunk farther from the sky, the walls had become almost perpendicular and to my terror I found myself looking upward from the bottom of a pit at the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... the six weeks' bombardment of the city—May 8 to July 4, 1863. They were used by the non-combatants—mainly by the women and children; not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps—but wait; here are some materials out of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... one of the most strenuous days I ever had in the islands, as the road—and what a road!—constantly led up and down the steepest slopes. It seemed to me we were climbing perpendicular mountains all day long, and I had many an opportunity of admiring the agility of my companions. I am a fair walker myself, but I had to crawl on my hands and knees in many spots where they jumped from a stone to a root, taking firm hold with their toes, never using their hands, never slipping, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... lead at command, and heard the man on the quarter-deck, catching the line when it swung into a perpendicular position, report twenty-five fathoms. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... be baked in tin or earthen pans with straight sides, that are as nearly perpendicular as possible. They cut into handsomer slices, and if they are to be iced, it will be found very inconvenient to put on the icing, if the cake slopes in towards ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie

... ingenious suggestion appears in the 3rd Number of the Journal of the Photographic Society, and deserves to be widely circulated. "My plan is to place a T-square on the bottom of the camera, and draw one perpendicular line on each side (exactly opposite to each other), either with paint or pencil; or the ends of the camera itself will do if perpendicular to the base. Then, having two musket bullets attached to a silk thread, simply ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various

... him, as his biographer says, with feelings of excusable pride. Another patent in the steam-engine series, taken out in 1784, contained, besides other methods of converting a circular or angular motion into a perpendicular or rectilineal motion, the well-known and much-admired parallel motion, and the application of the steam-engine to give motion to wheel-carriages for carrying persons and goods. To ascertain the exact number of strokes made by an engine during a given time, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... mores. It is not conceivable that the Lysistrata of Aristophanes could be presented on any public stage in Christendom. The whole play is beyond the toleration of modern mores. We meet with jugglers in Homer,[1994] also mountebanks and tumblers.[1995] The kubisteteres spun around on the perpendicular axis of the body, and are compared to the wheel of the potter. Then they pitched down head-foremost, like plungers or tumblers turning somersaults. Some archaeologs have thought that the play of these persons had some analogy with that of the cubic stones which were so prominent in the cult of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... remind her that 'Here was the home of Nausicaa in the Odyssey.' Elsie failed to respond; she was otherwise occupied. At last, I succumbed and gave it up. I remember nothing further till a day and a half later, when we got under lee of Crete, and the ship showed a tendency to resume the perpendicular. Then I began once more to take a languid ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... unfrequently dipping into the water. In some instances they grew out in nearly horizontal lines, for thirty or forty feet. The water being uniformly deepest near the shores, where the banks were highest and the nearest to a perpendicular, Hutter had found no difficulty in letting the ark drop under one of these covers, where it had been anchored with a view to conceal its position; security requiring some such precautions, in his view of the case. Once beneath the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... a perfectly straight-stemmed cocoa-palm; they all have an inclination from the perpendicular more or less; perhaps that is why a cyclone has more effect on them than on ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... amount of lift is of less relative importance than the ratio of lift to drift, as this alone decides the angle of gliding descent. In a plane the pressure is always perpendicular to the surface, and the ratio of lift to drift is therefore the same as that of the cosine to the sine of the angle of incidence. But in curved surfaces a very remarkable situation is found. The pressure, instead of being uniformly normal to the chord of the arc, is usually inclined ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... the sun should be, and a scrap of clear azure is almost visible through the grayish-white edges of the cloud. A moment more, and a timid ray of sunlight gleams in the pools along the road, upon the sheets of fine, perpendicular rain which fall as if through a sieve, and upon the shining, newly washed verdure of ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... the useful product of a rich soil and fine climate; the whole bounded by lofty mountains, clothed with rich and almost impervious forests of evergreens, occasionally intermixed with high and nearly perpendicular rocks, whose summits are, for a great part of the year, covered with snow;—the whole forming one of the most agreeable, picturesque, and romantic scenes that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various

... on Kennedy, "is the perpendicular position of the letter in relation to the line. That is of great value in individualizing a machine. It is very seldom that machines, even when they are new, are perfect in this particular. It does not seem much until you magnify it. Then anyone can see it, and it is a characteristic that ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... rings or stories of various heights, rising to the top of the tower. Each of these stories or galleries has four windows, facing directly to the points of the compass, and rising of course regularly above each other. These four perpendicular ranges of windows admitted air, and, the fire being kindled, heat, or smoke at least, to each of the galleries. The access from gallery to gallery is equally primitive. A path, on the principle of an inclined plane, turns round and round the building like a screw, and gives access to the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... chimneys of this part of the lower town, and upon the great river sweeping by northeastward like another Amazon. The heel of our misshapen foot extends indefinitely toward Montreal. Upon it, on a level with the citadel, are the Plains of Abraham. It was up its high, almost perpendicular, sides that Wolfe clambered with his army, and stood in the rear of his enemy one pleasant September morning over a hundred ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... of the 'Buckras;' but for the most part their demeanor was civil and pleasant. Most of them had the headloads without which a negro woman seems hardly complete in the road, varying in dimensions from a huge basket of yams or bananas to an ounce vial. How such a slight thing manages to keep its perpendicular with their careless, swinging gait, is something marvellous, but they manage it to perfection. Almost every group, in addition, had a well-laden donkey—comical little creatures, looking hardly bigger ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... a steep and rugged path, now crossing a narrow bridge, spanning a fathomless abyss, again creeping along the edge of a precipice, where the eagle soared and screamed over the fir tops in the abyss below, and where a perpendicular wall rose to giddy heights in the clouds above. The path at times was so narrow, that it seemed that the mountain goat could with difficulty find a foothold for its slender hoof. A false step, or a slip upon the icy rocks would precipitate the traveler, a mangled corpse, a thousand feet upon the ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott

... come down bodily with a crash, partly uprooted, though even then they may be resuscitated for a time. We had a powerful set of pulley tackle by which, when made fast to a neighbouring tree, they could be restored to the perpendicular, after enlarging the hole left by the roots, making the ground firm again round the tree, and placing a strong sloping prop to take the weight on the weak side; good yields would then often ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... fleet, followed them nearly to the pickets. Checking his useless pursuit, he rounded a bush, dropped his whip and stood, voiceless, motionless, the capacity of his powers consumed by the act of breathing and preserving the perpendicular. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... by those Official people. M. de Voltaire knows well enough how he failed to get his moneys, and quitted Frankfurt in a hurry! Here, inexorably certain from the Documents, and testimonies on both parts, is that final Passage of the long Fire-work: last crackle of the rocket before it dropped perpendicular:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... branches of the royal family of Abyssinia were imprisoned in early times, is a little to the north of Lake Haik, and beyond the Mille. It runs north and south, in length about twelve or thirteen miles, and is exceedingly high and steep, the sides thereof being almost perpendicular. Mr Krapf, amongst the most considerable rivers which he passed in this quarter, mentions the Ala, which he states runs to, and is lost in, the deserts of the country of Adel. This is important, and this river is no doubt the Wali of Bruce, which he mentions (vol. iii. p. 248) as the scene ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... turn to the left, the trees suddenly came to an end, and in their place were large piles of mossy, ragged boulders. The canyon ended in a perpendicular, moss-covered wall, hundreds of feet high, and from the top of this wrinkled old cliff leaped the stream into the canyon below. On an old tin sign, fastened to the stump of an immense tree, were the words, ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley

... sound: a clarion call that tore the veil lying over my mental vision: the sharp, repeated whistle of the whip-poor-will. And with my mind's eye I saw the dusky bird: shooting slantways upward in its low flight which ends in a nearly perpendicular slide down to within ten or twelve feet from the ground, the bird being closely followed by a second one pursuing. In reality I did not see the birds, but I heard the fast whir of ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... were heated and expanded, and the nuts screwed up as before. The lamps being again withdrawn, they contracted in cooling, and the walls were further drawn together. This process was continually repeated, until at length the walls were restored to their perpendicular position. The gallery may still be seen with the bars extending across it, and binding together ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... same room next morning, I stared. The blue had changed to yellow. The life of the water was gone. Nothing met my eyes but a wide expanse of dead sand. You could walk straight across the bay to the hills opposite. From the look of the rocks, from the perpendicular cliffs on the coast, I had almost, without thinking, concluded that we were on the shore of a deep-water bay. It was high-water, or nearly so, then; and now, when I looked westward, it was over a long reach of sands, on the far border of which the white fringe ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald

... to Slanes Castle, built upon the margin of the sea, so that the walls of one of the towers seem only a continuation of a perpendicular rock, the foot of which is beaten by the waves. To walk round the house seemed impracticable. From the windows the eye wanders over the sea that separates Scotland from Norway, and when the winds beat with violence ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... touched the American shore, the question arose as to which method would be the best to adopt in ascending the giddy height. A covered way leads to the top of the bank, which is more than two hundred feet in perpendicular height. Up this steep our ingenious neighbours have constructed on an inclined plane of boards a railway, on which two cars run in such a manner that the weight of the descending car draws up the other to the top of the bank. Both are secured ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... tower near, and high green mountains rise up around. After leaving it, we had a beautiful panoramic view of the northern coast. Many of the precipices are of the same formation as the Causeway; Fairhead, a promontory of this kind, is grand in the extreme. The perpendicular face of fluted rock is about three hundred feet in height, and towering up sublimely from the water, seemed almost to ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... government, it was," he continued, "what often happened in great revolutions, where extreme measures are adopted in the fury of the moment, and the State resembles an agitated pendulum which swings from side to side for some time ere it can acquire its due and perpendicular station. Or it might be likened to a storm or hurricane, which, passing over a region, does great damage in its passage, yet sweeps away stagnant and unwholesome vapours, and repays, in future health and fertility, its immediate ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... the width of the stream is still narrowed to about forty yards, and then, as if mustering its whole force previous to its final descent, is precipitated, in one vast, continuous sheet of water, almost perpendicular for ninety feet more. The dashing of the water from such a height produced the usual accompaniment of a cloud of spray broad columns of which were constantly forced up like the successive rushes ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... temple are those of an oblong rectangular block surmounted by a triangular roof. With a qualification to be explained presently, all the lines of the building, except those of the roof, are either horizontal or perpendicular. The most complicated Greek columnar buildings known, the Erechtheum and the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis, are simplicity itself when compared to a Gothic cathedral, with its irregular plan, its towers, its wheel windows, ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... lines of batteries were vomiting fire and brimstone; when all those dark guns that you see poking their grim heads out of every imaginable cleft and zigzag should salute you with shot, both hot and cold; and when, after tugging up the hideous perpendicular place, you were to find regiments of British grenadiers ready to plunge bayonets into your poor panting stomach, and let out artificially the little breath left there? It is a marvel to think that soldiers will mount such places for a shilling—ensigns for five and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... view, a few moments earlier, Maggie had uttered a little cry of surprise, and had then remained silent. Etta looked out of the window and said nothing. It was a most singular out-look—weird, uncouth, prehistoric, as some parts of the earth still are. The castle was built on the edge of a perpendicular cliff. On this side it was impregnable. Any object dropped from the breakfast-room window would fall a clear two hundred feet to the brawling Oster River. The rock was black, and shining like the topmost crags of an Alpine mountain where snow and ice have ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... this method of etheric telegraphy, due to Marconi himself, is the suspension of a perpendicular wire at each terminus, its length twenty feet for stations a mile apart, forty feet for four miles, and so on, the telegraphic distance increasing as the square of the length of suspended wire. In the Kingstown regatta, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... instant death is their portion, though I recall an instance, while on an expedition against the hostile Indians thirty years ago, where a number of mules of our pack-train, loaded with ammunition, tumbled nearly five hundred feet down an almost perpendicular chasm, and yet some of them got on their feet again, and soon rejoined their companions, without having ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... you will come in due time to the telephone over there on that desk. I shall not be far behind you. Sit down. Now unfold your arms and lean both elbows on the desk. That's the idea. You might keep your right hand exposed,—sort of perpendicular from the elbow up. Take the ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon

... defies all my efforts to dislodge it. The worst work I had was when David (MacDonald's eldest) and I took the charge ourselves. He remained in the lighter to tighten or slacken the guys as we raised the pole towards the perpendicular, with two men. I was with four men in the boat. We dropped an anchor out a good bit, then tied a cord to the pole, took a turn round the sternmost thwart with it, and pulled on the anchor line. As the great, big, wet hawser came in it soaked you to the skin: I was the sternest ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... prayer is to be repeated between daybreak and sunrise; 2nd. The prayer of noon, when the sun shows a sensible declination from the meridian; 3rd. The afternoon prayer, when the sun is near the horizon that the shadow of a perpendicular object is twice it's length; 4th. The evening prayer, between sunset and close of twilight; 5th. The prayer of night, any time during the darkness. The inhabitants of Iceland and Greenland would find themselves sadly embarrassed in complying with these pious precepts, ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli

... so that the foot should not come between and get crushed; and then one must remember that there is no railing or balustrade here, and directly outside these stairs there is the deep abyss into which one may fall headlong. The deepest shaft has a perpendicular depth of more than a hundred and ninety fathoms, but for this there is no danger, they say, only one must not be dizzy, nor get alarmed. One of the workmen, who had come up, descended with a lighted pine-branch as a torch: the flame illumined the dark rocky wall, and by degrees ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... was sent to hasten the arrival of Desaix's guns. His troops were advancing rapidly, and were scarcely half a mile from the field of battle. Their line of approach seemed formed for the purpose at hand; on the left of the road was a gigantic perpendicular hedge protected by a bank. The infantry was made to file in a narrow line along it, and it even hid the cavalry ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... Enimie wedged between the congregated escarpments far below, the little town lying immediately under our feet, as the streets around St. Paul's when viewed from the dome. We say to ourselves we can never get there. The feat of descending those perpendicular cliffs seems impossible. It does not do to contemplate the road we have to take, winding like a ribbon round the upright shafts of the Causse. Follow it we must. We are high above the inhabited world, up in cloudland; there is nothing to do but descend as best we can; so ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... to me that the insensibility which came upon Glaisher, and in a lesser degree upon Coxwell, when, in 1862, they ascended in a balloon to the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to the extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made. Doing it at an easy gradient and accustoming oneself to the lessened barometric pressure by slow degrees, there are no such dreadful symptoms. At the same great height I found that even without my oxygen inhaler I could breathe without undue ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... were necessary accommodations, there always had been; Nick in old times, had been the first to own it.... How they had laughed at the Perpendicular People, the people who went by on the other side (since you couldn't be a good Samaritan without stooping over and poking into heaps of you didn't know what)! And now Nick ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... of central tower of the cathedral were blown down by a violent gale of wind, and the presbytery was greatly damaged by the falling material. This bishop rebuilt the present clerestory, designed in the transitional style between Decorated and Perpendicular; the vault is later. It is also probable that he repaired ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell

... a moment a large portion of the vines, which had been clinging to the rock, fell upon the ground in a burning mass. A cloud of smoke and dust arose, and when it had cleared away the captain and his party saw upon the perpendicular side of the rock, which was now revealed to them as if a veil had been torn away from in front of it, an enormous face cut out of the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton

... qualification. In the case just imagined for the earth, supposing it to retain the present inclination of its axis while parting with its differential rotation, there would be an interchange of day and night once a year in the polar regions. On Mercury, whose axis appears to be perpendicular, a similar phenomenon, affecting not the polar regions but the eastern and western sides of the planet, is produced by the extraordinary eccentricity of its orbit. As the planet alternately approaches and recedes from the sun its orbital velocity, ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

... 1361-69. John Froissart in England. His picture of the life of court and people. The national spirit in English literature. Gower and Minot. Geoffrey Chaucer. The standard English language. Lowland Scottish. The national spirit in art. "Flowing decorated" and "perpendicular" architecture. Contrast between England and Scotland. The national spirit in popular English literature. William Langland. His picture of the condition of the poor. The national spirit and the universities. Early career of John Wycliffe. Spread of cultivation among the laity. The national ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... that we may also say as truly that, from the human side, the one thing needful is, more prayer, more believing, persevering prayer. In speaking of lack of the Spirit's power, and the condition for receiving it, someone used the expression—the block is not on the perpendicular, but on the horizontal line. It is to be feared that it is on both. There is much to be confessed and taken away in us if the Spirit is to work freely. But it is specially on the perpendicular line that the block is—the upward look, and the deep dependence, ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray

... while talking kindly to the wife, and hearing her troubles, was surprised at the forlorn rickety state of the building, the broken pavement, damp walls, and door that would not shut, because the frame had sunk out of the perpendicular. ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... creek and over a spur of the mountain to the valley of the Yellowstone, which we followed up eight miles to our present camp. Along on our right in passing up the valley was a vast natural pile of basaltic rock, perpendicular, a part of which had been overthrown, showing transverse seams in the rock. Away at the right in the highest range bordering the valley was Pyramid mountain, itself a snow-capped peak; and further up the range was a long ridge ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford

... horror, nausea, rendering me momentarily more helpless, I realised that the creature was beginning to ascend my legs, to climb my body. Even then what it was I could not tell,—it mounted me, apparently, with as much ease as if I had been horizontal instead of perpendicular. It was as though it were some gigantic spider,—a spider of the nightmares; a monstrous conception of some dreadful vision. It pressed lightly against my clothing with what might, for all the world, have been spider's legs. There was an amazing host of them,—I felt the pressure ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... and I went out of the room without speaking. As I walked across the non-resonant, carpeted stone floor I had the most curious set of sensations I have ever experienced. At nearly every step I took I came into a different stratum or perpendicular layer of air. First it was cool to my face, then warm, then chill again, and again warm. Thinking to calm my nervous excitement, I stood still and looked around me. The great window above my head dimly transmitted the sky reflection, but threw little light into the studio. The folds of the curtain ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... quite likely a time two or three times this. It requires only the most elementary ideas of geometry to see that if we suppose a ray of light to shoot from a star at such a distance in a direction perpendicular to the line of sight from us to the star, we can compute how fast the ray would seem to us to travel. Granting the distance to be only two thousand light years, the apparent size of the sphere around the star which the light would fill at the end of one ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... darkness an object like a great black cloud, which rose high above and seemed about to fall upon them. There was no mistaking its nature, however, for by that time the roar of the breakers right ahead told but too plainly that they were rushing straight upon a high perpendicular cliff. At this moment the vessel struck a rock. It was only a slight touch at the stern, nevertheless it tore the rudder away, so that the intention of the captain to put about and take his chance of striking on the rocks to ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... This is a variety of the previous lace, being worked in the same way, but on four lines of threads, instead of two, namely, one diagonal from left to right, one from right to left, one horizontal, and one perpendicular. The spots are worked on the last line made. The distance of the lines is ...
— The Ladies' Work-Book - Containing Instructions In Knitting, Crochet, Point-Lace, etc. • Unknown

... army ants which inhabit tropical America, Mr. Belt considered to be the most intelligent of all the insects of that part of the world. On one occasion he noticed a wide column of them trying to pass along a nearly perpendicular slope of crumbling earth, on which they found great difficulty in obtaining a foothold. A number succeeded in retaining their positions, and further strengthened them by laying hold of their neighbors. They then remained in this position, and allowed the column to ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... over my shoulder. I was the only one who knew how to present arms. I heard something coming, and called out, 'Who goes there?' and Alberta jumped up in such a hurry that the points other tent—her umbrella, I mean— scratched my face, and before I could recover arms, over went my umbrella, perpendicular, straight smash through the glass of the ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... turn his eyes another way; and, as he wore the helmet of invisibility, the Gorgons knew not in what direction to follow him; nor did he fail to make the best use of the winged slippers, by soaring upward a perpendicular mile or so. At that height, when the screams of those abominable creatures sounded faintly beneath him, he made a straight course for the island of Seriphus, in order to carry Medusa's ...
— The Gorgon's Head - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... must follow the Athenian captives to their prison-grave. The Latomia de' Cappuccini is a place which it is impossible to describe in words, and of which no photographs give any notion. Sunk to the depth of a hundred feet below the level of the soil, with sides perpendicular and in many places as smooth as though the chisel had just passed over them, these vast excavations produce the impression of some huge subterranean gallery, widening here and there into spacious halls, the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... tall trees, but keeps low, flitting from stump to stump and from root to root, dodging in and out of his hiding-places, and watching all intruders with a suspicious eye. He has a very pert, almost comical look. His tail stands more that perpendicular: it points straight toward his head. He is the least ostentatious singer I know of. He does not strike an attitude, and lift up his head in preparation, and, as it were, clear his throat; but sits there on a log and pours out his music, looking straight ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... character no less dignified than its founder in Germany. Erasmus, as he sits enthroned in a scholar's chair in the market-place at Rotterdam, the buildings about leaning on their insecure foundations out of the perpendicular, and the market-women, with their apple-bloom complexions, crowding around him, shows a somewhat withered face and figure, less genial than the handsome Heidelberg professor as he stands at Worms. But it was Erasmus, probably, who, among many ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... a gold locket, now in possession of Miss Carroll, represents Dr. Stevenson in his red coat and white waistcoat, and at the back of the locket there is a picture of Parnassus Hill, crowned by the Doctor's residence, with a perpendicular avenue straight up hill, and a negro attendant opening the gate at the foot for Dr. Stevenson, mounted on his horse and returning home. It is a very quaint and ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell

... Bayou, which curves around them on the south and east, and the eastern slope of the uplift has been cut and gulleyed by many torrents. So strong has been the effect of the rushing water upon the soft soil that these cuts have become deep winding ravines, often with perpendicular banks. One of the ravines is ten miles long. Another cuts the plateau itself for six miles, and a permanent stream flows ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler

... I had adopted this healing resolution, I reached the spot where the almost perpendicular face of a steep hill seems to terminate the valley, or at least divides it into two dells, each serving as a cradle to its own mountain-stream, the Gruff-quack, namely, and the shallower, but more noisy, Gusedub, on the left hand, which, at their union, form the Gander, properly so called. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... family, in which the ashes of Nero were deposited, are preserved in the city wall which Aurelian, when he extended its circuit, carried across the "Collis Hortulorum." Those ancient remains, declining from the perpendicular, are called the Muro Torto.—The Lunan marble was brought from quarries near a town of that name, in Etruria. It no longer exists, but stood on the coast of what is now called the gulf of Spezzia.—Thasos, an island in the Archipelago, was one of the Cyclades. It produced a grey marble, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... but they were only small fellows, and may be what are called "efts." They would sun themselves on the warm rocks, and on being disturbed dart into some cranny till danger was past. They ran up and down rocks which were nearly perpendicular, and were very amusing in their ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... The two perpendicular forms called the Douvres held fast between them, like an architrave between two pillars, the wreck of the Durande. The spectacle thus presented was a vast portal in the midst of the sea. It might have been a titanic cromlech ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... circle. wall, precipice, cliff. elevation, erection; square, plumb line, plummet. V. be vertical &c adj.; stand up, stand on end, stand erect, stand upright; stick up, cock up. render vertical &c adj.; set up, stick up, raise up, cock up; erect, rear, raise on its legs. Adj. vertical, upright, erect, perpendicular, plumb, normal, straight, bolt, upright; rampant; standing up &c v.; rectangular, orthogonal &c 216.1. Adv. vertically &c adj.; up, on end; up on end, right on end; a plomb [Fr.], endwise; one one's legs; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... gyroscopic action. It is seen in the ordinary spinning top, which stands erect in its capacity of a gyroscope revolving horizontally. The apparatus that holds Brennan's car upright, and promises to revolutionize transportation, is a top adapted to a new purpose. It is a gyroscope revolving in a perpendicular plane, a steel wheel weighing three quarters of a ton and spinning at the rate of three thousand revolutions to ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... fjord Drangey is situated. This island, which was the property of our guide, is a huge mass of rock, nearly perpendicular, while at one end is the witch's rock resembling the ship in full sail. Drangey is the home of innumerable eider-ducks, who swim at will in and about the surrounding waters. The drake is a very handsome bird, a large portion of his plumage being white; the hen is smaller, and brown ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... But he took good care to turn his eyes another way; and as he wore the helmet of invisibility, the Gorgons knew not in what direction to follow him; nor did he fail to make the best use of the winged slippers by soaring upward a perpendicular mile or so. At that height, when the screams of those abominable creatures sounded faintly beneath him, he made a straight course for the island of Seriphus, in order to carry ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various

... instrument was spinning round and round at an almost perpendicular angle in the binnacle with tremendous velocity. The pointer tore round its points like the hands of a ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... man might stand. There were spots of softer material, scooped out into pockets by wind and water; there were flinty splinters; there were places where the wall, looking from across the canon to be sheer and perpendicular, sloped more gently, and a man might crawl ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... to the north, taking a precipitous trail of shale that Phyllis judged to be a short cut. It was rough going, but their mountain ponies were good for anything less than a perpendicular wall. They clambered up and down like cats, as ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... back, I searched the tangle and must have been looking directly at the bird several seconds before cutting it out from the stalks and branches. It was a least bittern, a female. She was clinging to a perpendicular stem of elder, hand over hand, wren fashion, her long neck thrust straight into the air, absolutely stiff ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp

... detached passages are in the author's very best vein; and there is a truly delightful scene between Lord Anophel and his chaplain Grovelgrub, when the athletic Sir Oran has not only foiled their attempt on Anthelia, but has mast-headed them on the top of a rock perpendicular. But the gem of the book is the election for the borough of One-Vote—a very amusing farce on the subject of rotten boroughs. Mr. Forester has bought one of the One-Vote seats for his friend the Orang, and, going to introduce him to the constituency, falls in with the purchaser of the other ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,—the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as I was informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... of less recent date, which having sunk before its successful competitor was now deserted and ruinous. A moment after the hills, seeming to draw apart as we advanced, disclosed Fort Laramie itself, its high bastions and perpendicular walls of clay crowning an eminence on the left beyond the stream, while behind stretched a line of arid and desolate ridges, and behind these again, towering aloft seven thousand feet, arose ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... this idea. Confucianism even conditioned the development of Japanese grammar, as it also did that of the Koreans, by multiplying honorary prefixes and suffixes and building up all sociable and polite speech on perpendicular lines. Personality was next to nothing and individuality was in a certain sense unknown. In European languages, the pronoun shows how clearly the ideas of personality and of individuality have been developed; but in the Japanese language there really are no pronouns, in ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... glance sufficed to satisfy Gaunt that here was stone not only of splendid quality, but amply sufficient in quantity for every possible want of the party. The quarry-face consisted of an almost perpendicular cliff of grey limestone springing out of the soil at a distance of only some fifty feet from the margin of the stream; it was about thirty-five feet in height, and fully one hundred and fifty feet long, and of course of unknown depth, though a very hasty examination of the top showed that it extended ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... home for examination. We were so tired of our walk down this steep and mountainous path, that on our return, I mounted a horse with a man's saddle, belonging to one of the servants, and contrived to keep on, while it climbed up the perpendicular ascent. As this seemed rather a selfish proceeding while the others walked, I invited the Senora ——- to mount also in front; which she did, and the path being almost perpendicular, my head nearly touched the ground, which certainly made the seat not over safe or easy. However, we reached the top ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... retiring before the Federal advance, on the plank road towards Fredericksburg. His rear guard made a short stand at the crossroads, but withdrew after a few rounds; and Anderson took up a position near Mine Road, where numerous ravines, perpendicular to the river, afforded excellent ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge

... of the windows inserted in each stage. Adopting their principle of classification, though arranging the order of the classes rather differently, we should separate the best towers (viz. those that have two or more windows side by side on the W. front) into two main divisions, according as (I.) perpendicular, (II.) horizontal lines predominate. The first division (I.) has the windows of the belfry stage (three or two in number) prolonged as panels into the stage below. The group is a small one, but includes, perhaps, the finest ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... channel and scarp this mighty cliff; still backward through untold ages to the time when the lowest layer of limestone in the cliff was only soft sediment on the shore of a summer sea. Eternity stretched forward, also, to the time when this perpendicular wall shall have been worn to a gentle slope, clad with luxuriant verdure, and adorned, perchance, with fairer flowers than any which earth now knows; still forward through other untold ages to the time when all earth's fires ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... through a flat country and carrying out to the sea a quantity of fine sediment. Higher up it branches into a number of smaller channels, flowing alternately through flat valleys and between high banks; sometimes he finds a deep rocky bed with perpendicular walls, carrying the water through a chain of hills; where the stream is narrow he finds it deep, where wide shallow. Further up still, he comes to a mountainous region, with hundreds of streams and rivulets, each with its tributary rills and gullies, collecting the water from every square ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... Maggie had uttered a little cry of surprise, and had then remained silent. Etta looked out of the window and said nothing. It was a most singular out-look—weird, uncouth, prehistoric, as some parts of the earth still are. The castle was built on the edge of a perpendicular cliff. On this side it was impregnable. Any object dropped from the breakfast-room window would fall a clear two hundred feet to the brawling Oster River. The rock was black, and shining like the topmost crags of an Alpine mountain where snow and ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... did not materially increase, he concluded that full day had already reached the upper world. It was also brightest in the middle of the black pool, which showed that the opening through which it came must be directly above that point, and that the shaft must be perpendicular. ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe

... is nearly overhead. The angle of arc was between eighty-eight and eighty-nine degrees. Had it been ninety degrees it would have been straight overhead. It was on another day that we learned a few things about taking the altitude of the almost perpendicular sun. Roscoe started in drawing the sun down to the eastern horizon, and he stayed by that point of the compass despite the fact that the sun would pass the meridian to the south. I, on the other hand, started in to draw the sun down to south-east and strayed away to the south-west. You see, we ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... of perpendicular bamboo-canes, standing at some distance apart, to give free admission to the air. The roofs of palm-leaves are strong enough to defy ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue

... on their return,' continued Beltran, 'reported that they had followed the river till they came to a large mountain of perpendicular rocks, which it was impossible to climb, and over these rocks fell the water. And it seemed to them that on the top of this mountain were many trees; and they saw strange wild beasts, such as lions, elephants, and other sorts, which came to gaze at them. And, not daring to advance further, they ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar

... Ages, and Records of Great Britain from the Reign of Edward the Confessor to Henry VIII. The Westminster Public Baths and Wash-houses, designed by the same architect are next door to the library. The Church House opposite is a very handsome building in a Perpendicular style; it is of red brick with stone dressings. The interior is very well furnished with fine stone and wood carving. The great hall holds 1,500 people, and runs the whole length of the building from Smith Street to Tufton Street. The roof is an open timber structure of the hammer-beam ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... is, that the perpendicular lines of the nose and temples form the letter M, and the eyes the two O's. The enthusiast for Roman domination must have been delighted to find ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... another survey of the scene before us. As I said before, the valley was surrounded by hills, and the only outlet was by means of a ragged ravine, through which the water had forced its way, and extended to another plain about half a mile distant The hills opposite to us were nearly perpendicular, and their summit could only be gained by immense exertion on the part of a person on foot. The only places where horses could escape, or leave the valley, was by means of the ravine, or the path we ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... touching this matter, except perhaps by those who know how perseveringly these little Eels make their way up every stream, ditch, and driblet of water into which they can gain access. They penetrate into the water-pipes and pumps; they climb up the perpendicular faces of the rocks and weirs which obstruct the course of the rivers, even when they are only moist—adhering to the ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... wings cannot be counted, but here is a species with such nerve of wing that its wing strokes cannot be seen. 'A hazy semi-circle of indistinctness on each side of the bird is all that is perceptible.' Poised in the air, his body nearly perpendicular, he seems to hang in front of the flowers which he probes so hurriedly, one after the other, with his long, slender bill. That long, tubular, fork-shaped tongue may be sucking up the nectar from those rather small cylindrical blossoms, or it may be capturing tiny insects ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various

... of Lumberville there was a cliff which rose sheer 200 feet above the level of the river. So perpendicular was the cliff that a stone dropped from the overhanging ledge at the top would fall straight down to the railroad track below without touching a twig in its course. Back of this broad ledge there was a very peculiar formation. A column of stone rose abruptly 40 feet higher and was topped with a large ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond

... clear to me that the insensibility which came upon Glaisher, and in a lesser degree upon Coxwell, when, in 1862, they ascended in a balloon to the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to the extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made. Doing it at an easy gradient and accustoming oneself to the lessened barometric pressure by slow degrees, there are no such dreadful symptoms. At the same great height I found that ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... presently brought out a ladder, which he carried down to the riverside, and left there. Then he returned to the tool-house, and came back bearing an armful of planks, each perhaps a foot wide by five or six feet long. Now he raised his ladder to the perpendicular, and let it descend before him, so that, one extremity resting upon the nearer bank, one attained the further, and it spanned the flood. Finally he laid a plank lengthwise upon the hithermost rungs, and advanced to the end of it; then another plank; then a third: and ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... beautiful. The town was formerly walled, and has the remains of a castle built soon after the conquest, frequently the scene of border strife. The church of St Mary belonged originally to a Benedictine monastery founded early in the 12th century. The existing building, however, is Decorated and Perpendicular, and contains a fine series of memorials of dates from the 13th to the 17th century. There is a free grammar school, which till 1857 had a fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. Breweries, ironworks, quarries, brick fields and collieries in the neihbourhood are among the principal industrial establishments. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... remorse or poetical misgivings. Staid and matter of fact as the Merrimac is, it has, nevertheless, certain capricious and eccentric tributaries; the Powow, for instance, with its eighty feet fall in a few rods, and that wild, Indian-haunted Spicket, taking its wellnigh perpendicular leap of thirty feet, within sight of the village meeting- house, kicking up its Pagan heels, Sundays and all, in sheer contempt of Puritan tithing-men. This latter waterfall is now somewhat modified by the hand of Art, but is still, as Professor Hitchcock's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... original Norman tower cased—can not be wholly made a matter of blame to the original builders. For it is clear that some finish, whether a crown like those at Newcastle and Edinburgh or any other, was intended. Still the proportion which is solemn in Romanesque becomes squat in perpendicular, and, if York has never received its last finish, Lincoln has lost the last finish which it received. Surely no one who is not locally sworn to the honor of York can doubt about preferring the noble central tower of Lincoln, soaring still, even tho shorn of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... whole, and encourages the habit of scientific tolerance. We are saved by it from uselessly fretting ourselves because of the ungodly and the inevitable; from mourning over the decline of Gothic architecture into Perpendicular aridity and flamboyant feebleness, over the passage of the scepter from Sophocles to Euripides or from Tasso to Marino, over the chaos of Mannerism, Eclecticism and Naturalism into which Italian painting plunged from the height of its maturity. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... neat little plan of changing the ID brand of the Interior Department to the "two-pole pumpkin" brand, which was done merely by extending another semicircle to the left of the "I" and connecting that letter and the "D" at top and bottom, thus making two perpendicular lines ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... between a rift in the earth's surface, where it cooled in columnar form. The rocky mould which held it, being of softer material, finally disintegrated and crumbled away, leaving the cliff with its peculiar perpendicular formation. ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... the bay, we were soon on the Lake of the Woods. The scenery is very lovely; island follows island. Some seem but a pile of moss-covered stone, every crevice filled with ferns, blueberries, and wild juniper bushes; others are great masses of rock, their perpendicular sides covered with curling black cariboo moss and crowned with great pines; others, again, have shelving sandy shores, covered with tangled vines and bright-hued wild-flowers. As we passed along, each long stretch of the lake appeared more beautiful than the last. Then ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon

... of houses in a street, it is curious to see how some walls slope inwards, and some outwards, and some are cracked from top to bottom. There is hardly a church-tower in Mexico that is not visibly out of the perpendicular. Any one who has noticed how the walls of the Cathedral of Pisa have been thrown out of the perpendicular by the settling down of the foundations, will have an idea of the general appearance of the larger buildings of ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... viticulture is that the nearer the growing parts of the vine approach the perpendicular, the more vigorous the parts. The terminal buds, as every grape-grower knows, grow very rapidly and probably absorb, unless checked, more than their share of the energy of the vine. This tendency can be checked somewhat by removing the terminal buds, ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick

... consisted of six little low-pitched huts, the walls of which had already begun to warp out of the perpendicular, though they had certainly not been long built; the back-yards of some of the huts were not even fenced in with a hedge. As we drove into this settlement we did not meet a single living soul; there were no hens even ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... into the tops of the chimneys of this part of the lower town, and upon the great river sweeping by northeastward like another Amazon. The heel of our misshapen foot extends indefinitely toward Montreal. Upon it, on a level with the citadel, are the Plains of Abraham. It was up its high, almost perpendicular, sides that Wolfe clambered with his army, and stood in the rear of his enemy one pleasant September morning over a hundred ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... and extension of settlement into the State from ports like Chicago was interrupted by the less attractive area of the northwestern part of Indiana. Add to this the geological fact that the limestone ridges and the best soils ran in nearly perpendicular belts northward from the Ohio, and it will be seen how circumstances combined to diminish Northern and to facilitate Southern influences in the State prior to the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... they saw rocks. Darkling and indistinct they loomed up out of the white opaque light. As the children approached they almost bumped against them. They rose up like walls and were quite perpendicular so that scarcely a flake of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... Norman work, and its size shows the original plan, as the existence of the conventual buildings to the north probably rendered its extension undesirable. The south transept has aisles, with Decorated and Perpendicular windows. The fine organ stands on a screen across the north transept; but some of its pipes are upon the choir screen, both screens being the work of Sir Gilbert Scott. The style of the choir is transitional from Early English to Decorated, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... sculpture, and in painting. Ninety-seven plans were submitted for the Houses of Parliament, including Westminster Hall. That of Sir Charles Barry was selected, and the present imposing structure was built, covering eight acres, at a cost of $15,000,000. The style is perpendicular (Gothic), with carvings, intricate in detail and highly picturesque. The building faces the river with a 940 feet front, but her three magnificent square-shaped towers rise over her street front. The clock tower at the northwest corner ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... thickest part up. From the thickest part cut thin slices, slanting down to the knuckle; then make several cuts across to the larger end, and remove these slices from the shoulder-blade. Separate the blade at the shoulder-joint, and remove it. Cut the meat under the blade in perpendicular slices. ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln

... noon—the sunbow's rays still arch The torrent with the many hues of heaven, And roll the sheeted silver's waving column, O'er the crag's headlong perpendicular, And fling its lines of foaming light along, And to and fro, like the pale courser's tail, The Giant steed, to be bestrode by Death, As ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various

... care of in an odd manner. The men cut all their hair close to the head, except a strip about an inch wide, running over the front of the scalp from temple to temple, and another strip, of about the same width, perpendicular to the former, crossing the crown of the head to the nape of the neck. At each temple a heavy tuft is allowed to hang to the bottom of the lobe of the ear. The long hair of the strip crossing to the neck is generally gathered and braided into two ornamental queues. I did not learn that these ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley

... interest. But away to Tol Peden Penwith, where there is another curiosity; in the smooth green middle of a narrow promontory, surrounded and terminated by the boldest rock-scenery, strangely drops down for a perpendicular hundred feet, a circular chasm, not ill named the Funnel, and which not even a stolid Borlase can pretend was dug by the Druids: at the bottom there is communication with the sea by means of a cavern, and in stormy weather the rush up this gigantic earth's chimney-must ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... it, and took its character from hearsay; the other half, like mankind every where, stupidly admiring what is said to be admirable. It is like a crack in a great wall, at the bottom of which is a river, sometimes inundated, sometimes dry; the passage narrow, the sides craggy, bare, lofty and perpendicular; its whole length not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various

... pulling, and, standing up in the boat, began to examine the surroundings with keen interest. They were close to the great crag "shaped like a giant's helmet," as Valdemar Svensen had said. It rose sheer out of the water, and its sides were almost perpendicular. Some beautiful star-shaped sea anemones clung to it in a vari-colored cluster on one projection, and the running ripple of the small waves broke on its jagged corners with a musical splash, and sparkle of white foam. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... many others, like himself, were waiting for a chance at the first vacant one. Reluctantly he made up his mind to walk. He glanced up at the tower of the Metropolitan Building; then stared in astonishment. The hands of the great dial were still perpendicular—the hour indicated was still ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White

... single tree, seamless and stoutly fashioned to be the unharmed plaything of such rocks and boisterous waters as these. In these rapids the river waked to consciousness of mighty life, tossing our little craft through a riot of dancing waves, whirling it round the base of perpendicular rocks set like adamant in the hissing waters, sweeping it helpless as a petal down some glassy plane stilled, as it were, into a concentrated wrath of movement. The men sprang from side to side, from bow to stern, staving the craft with a ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... sufficiently soft and yielding to be readily worked or carved with rude stone implements. Over this entire area there are irregular elevations, somewhat circular in outline, from 50 to 200 feet in height, the faces of which have been worn away by the elements, and are in nearly all instances perpendicular. These consecutive elevations extend back from the Rio Grande from five to fifteen miles. Over this whole expanse of country, in the faces of these cliffs, we found an immense number of cavate dwellings, ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico in 1880 • James Stevenson

... of an immense plain one sees a kind of hut, or rather a very small roof standing above the ground. This is the entrance to the clay pit. A big perpendicular hole is sunk for twenty metres underground and ends in a series of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... breakfast. The blue sky was brilliant with the morning sun, but the little canyon was still damp and cool in the black shadow of its walls and of the beetling mountains that towered beyond. Their camp was at the very head of the canyon. On two sides the walls reached high above them in almost perpendicular cliffs. At the end, the rocky barrier was more broken and was heaped with boulders, through which the clear waters of the streamlet came trickling and gurgling and finally leaped over the wall into a little ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... through the reef into a very good harbour, but I did not think it worth while to examine it, for the reasons that have been just assigned. This island is rendered very remarkable by a high craggy hill, which appears to be almost perpendicular, and terminates at the top in two peaks, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... connected with that range. Most properly had it been called Mount Barren, for a more wretched aridlooking country never existed than that around it. The Mount Barren ranges are of quartz or reddish micaceous slate, the rocks project in sharp rugged masses, and the strata are all perpendicular. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... inhabitants who would throw everything out of their front doors or windows. The consequence was that, without exaggeration, the ice in some places was two feet thick, and every day fresh layers were formed as the French housewives threw out more water. No one remained standing in a perpendicular position for long, and the difficulty was, once down, how to get ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp

... "Its perpendicular height was about 15 feet, and the diameter of its base about 60 feet. It was composed of sand and contained human bones belonging to skeletons which were buried in different parts of it. It was not until this pile of earth was removed and the original surface exposed to view that a probable conjecture ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... that the nail slips lightly over it. No! at every point I must fit in material that is rough and uneven, or slippery and smooth, or jagged, projecting and angular, or round and rolling. There will be no correction by rule, no measure or proportion, no attention to the perpendicular. For it is impossible to produce a thing on the spur of the moment and to give it careful consideration, nor is there anything in the world that can hope at one and the same time to be praised for its care and admired ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... given his own pick to the boy and told him to dig, while he was gone, for himself. And Jason had dug. He was slipping now up the tiny branch, and where the stream trickled down the face of a water- worn perpendicular rock the boy stopped, leaned his rifle against a tree, and stepped aside into the bushes. A moment later he reappeared with a small pick in his hand, climbed up over a mound of loose rocks and loose earth, ten feet around the rock, and entered the narrow mouth of a deep, ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.

... manifestly habitual. Before the bride arrived Mr. Polly's sense of the church found an outlet in whispered criticisms of ecclesiastical architecture with Johnson. "Early Norman arches, eh?" he said, "or Perpendicular." ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... alterations which have taken place in the shape of the valley of the Meuse and some of its tributaries are often demonstrated by the abrupt manner in which the mouths of fossiliferous caverns open in the face of perpendicular precipices 200 feet or more in height above the present streams. There appears also, in many cases, to be such a correspondence in the openings of caverns on opposite sides of some of the valleys, both large and small, as to incline one to suspect that they originally belonged to a series of tunnels ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... that distance from north to south. The group consists of two islands proper, Cayo Grande and Cayo de Sal, the first being triangular in shape, and measuring some six and a half miles each way along the perpendicular and base of the triangle, while Cayo de Sal is about seven and a half miles long by perhaps half ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood

... fallen brush. A thirst-parched stranger might have ridden past twenty times on the bench above without suspecting its presence. The faint cattle trail leading to it entered the draw a quarter of a mile away, and led along under low but almost perpendicular banks. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... the downward force is the upward force. If an object does not fall, it must be supported by a force in the upward direction; the hand must exert a force perpendicular to the mass which it carries; the body must hold itself erect in order to bear its own weight. Just so, an architectural member, if it is not to collapse, must raise itself upward. Upward forces are revealed by the vertical ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... descend the mountain, many sliding down on the snow, very much as they coast at the garden Beaujon, from top to bottom of the Montagnes Russes, and I followed their example. This they called "sledding." The general-in-chief also descended in this manner an almost perpendicular glacier. His guide was a young countryman, active and courageous, to whom the First Consul promised a sufficiency for the rest of his days. Some young soldiers who had wandered off into the snow were found, almost dead with cold, by the dogs sent out by the monks, and carried to the Hospice, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... Consultations were numerous and all took part. The redskins, camped in plain sight, were hurrying to and fro, evidently in council like ourselves. To the right of the trail was a dense wood close to the river bank; on the left was a high perpendicular bluff, its sides unscalable, so our route was a genuine death trap, should they attack us. After grub all gathered in a circle and with pipes we proceeded with our last council. The situation was talked over from every point as to what the Indians might do or might not ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young

... own. God wills that he should do so, that man may live as of himself according to the laws of order, which are as many as there are precepts in the Word, and may dispose himself to receive the love of God. But still God perpetually holds with His finger the perpendicular above the scales, and regulates, but never violates by compulsion, man's free decision. Man's free will is from this: that he feels life in himself as his, and God leaves him so to feel, that reciprocal conjunction may take ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg

... trade of cloth-making has left many traces upon the life of England, architectural, literary, and social. It has filled our countryside with magnificent Perpendicular churches and gracious oak-beamed houses. It has filled our popular literature with old wives' tales of the worthies of England, in which the clothiers Thomas of Reading and Jack of Newbury rub elbows with Friar Bacon and Robin Hood. It has filled our shires with gentlemen; for, ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... years—Fee may be able to get around on crutches! Betty and I felt awfully disappointed when we heard this,—we've been so sure Fee would get perfectly well; but Fee himself was very happy over it. "Once let me assume the perpendicular, even on crutches," he said, smiling at Phil, who sat sadly beside him, "and you see if, after a while, these old pegs don't come up to their duty bravely. I may yet dance at your ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus

... found that it falls with the northerly wind and rises with the southerly one. When you travel over the country, you will find that the valleys are cool and the mountain tops warm. The bees have no sting, and many of the beautiful flowers have no smell. The leaves of the trees are nearly always perpendicular instead of horizontal, as in your country, and consequently one gets very little shade under an ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... and furrowed here and there with noisy streams. It is on this side only that our castle is accessible,—and here not to carriages,—even a cart could reach us but with difficulty, and all of our provisions are brought to us upon the backs of men or mules. Mountains, perpendicular rocks, turrets overhanging a precipice, grand and somber woods, rugged paths and brooks which fall in cascades, do not all these, Madame, make this a very wild and very romantic retreat? On the right bank of the Rhine which stretches ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... to extremes, Mart. What can happen? Even if gravitation should be nullified, I would rise only slowly, heading south the angle of our latitude—that's thirty-nine degrees—away from the perpendicular. I couldn't shoot off on a tangent, as some of these hot-heads have been claiming. Inertia would make me keep pace, approximately, with the earth in its rotation. I would rise slowly—only as fast as the tangent departs from the curvature of the earth's surface. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... of Detour, we observed many thousand tons of white rock lying in the river, which had lately fallen from the bank, leaving a solid perpendicular precipice. This rock, banks and ruins, is, like all the Wisconsin Valley rocks, a very ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... They stand heavy pine spars on end, if rather short, say 8 feet, the common length of many intended for making coffins, and cut them up into three-eighths or half-inch stuff with great patience. A longer one they will lean over and prop up, raising it towards the perpendicular as they advance. They must have some hard jobs. I have just measured a poplar plank in front of a coffin manufactory, which I found to be 5 ft. 3 in. at the butt, 3 ft. 10 in. at the top, 8 feet long, and about 8 inches ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... peachy-cheeked girl, was a peculiarly distinguished-looking man. The delicate pince-nez he wore emphasized slightly the elusive air of supercilious courtliness he always conveyed. Now, as he spoke to Ruth, who, although a tall girl, was some inches shorter than he, he maintained a strict perpendicular from the crown of his head to his heels, only looking down with his eyes. Short women resented this trick of his, protesting that it made them stand on tiptoe to speak ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf

... outer upper lights in a perpendicular window, next to the springing; probably a corruption of the word angle-lights, as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... Pont de Beauvoisin we began to mount the Echelles, which I did on foot, and I never shall forget the first impression made upon me by the mountain scenery. It first burst upon me at a turn of the road—one huge perpendicular rock above me, a deep ravine with a torrent rushing down and a mountain covered with pines and ilexes on the other side, and in front another vast rock which was shining in the reflected light of the setting sun. I never shall forget it. How ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... properties of the curve, upon which the action of the instrument depends, are illustrated in Fig. 2, where MM, NN, are the two branches of an hyperbola; C the center; AB the major axis; F and F' the foci. If now a tangent TT be drawn at any point as P of either branch, and a perpendicular let fall upon it from the nearer focus F be produced to cut at G a line drawn from P to the farther focus F', then this perpendicular will cut the tangent at a point I upon the circumference of a circle described about C upon AB as a diameter, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various

... now rushing upon the breakers with frightful speed. The deck of each offered a terrible spectacle; the loss of crew and passengers appeared almost certain, for before them a tremendous sea broke on jagged rocks, at the foot of a perpendicular cliff. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... is to the falls at Tjibeureum, Kandang Badak and the crater of the Gedeh. Ladies may make the trip in sedan chairs; gentlemen on foot or on horseback. The falls of Tjibeureum consist of three cataracts, falling 400 feet down a perpendicular crag, and the winding road passes ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid

... represented the equator; a second, which stood crosswise on the first, in a north and south plane, the Father took for a meridian; but it could be turned round on its axis; a third stood in the meridian plane with its axis perpendicular, and seemed to stand for a vertical circle; but this also could be turned round so as to show any vertical whatever. Moreover all these were graduated, and the degrees marked by prominent studs of iron, so that in the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... little oak wedges. He took a tall clock home after it had been repaired, and as the floor of the living-room on which it stood was uneven, the front of the clock at the base was always wedged up to bring it perpendicular, and keep the top from overhanging. He was obliged to ask Miriam, the eldest girl, to stand on a footstool, and push the clock towards the wall. As she stretched her right arm up just under the little ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford

... east side, which is first in view as you approach, is a smooth and almost perpendicular precipice, of the same height as the fall; the top, which a little over-hangs, is beautifully covered with pines, firs, and ever-greens of various kinds, whose verdant lustre is rendered at this season more shining and lovely by the surrounding snow, as well as ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... building a large globular nest in clumps of grass, of dry grass, roots, and moss, lined with fine grass and moss-roots. The entrance, which is circular, is at one side; the nest is egg-shaped, the longer diameter being perpendicular, and is placed at a height of about 6 inches from the ground. A nest taken on the 30th. May measured 6.12 in height and 3.5 in diameter externally, and the circular aperture, which was just above the middle, was 1.75 in diameter. It contained ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume

... the table at her, his eyes bright and questioning. Theodosia had listened in silence, as she poured his tea and passed him her hot, flaky biscuits. There was a little perpendicular wrinkle ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... was attained by careful calculations and experiments with perpendicular wires kept in position by weights, which, to avoid oscillation, were suspended in buckets of water. From shaft to shaft the tunnel is 1,770 yards in length and 26 feet in diameter; but for a length of 400 feet at the James Street and Hamilton ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... electric-lit, steel tunnel, with red-hot furnaces on one side, and the gaping mouths of coal caverns on the other. You reached it by perpendicular steel ladders descending through a web of hissing steam pipes and machinery; once across greasy deck-plates and through a maze of dimly lit alleys, you would find Nosey shovelling coal into the furnaces under the direction of a hairy-chested individual afflicted, men said, by religious ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... poor time-keeper, when the difficulty may be that it is not properly set up. A clock which will run when it is much out of beat, is a very good one, and it must run very easily, because it has a great disadvantage to overcome, viz: a greater distance from a perpendicular line one way than the other in order that the verge may escape the teeth. A clock may be set up in perfect beat, but the shelf is liable to settle or warp, and get out of beat so gradually, that it might not be remarked by one not suspecting ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome

... though the country was, the immediate shore was interesting and romantic in its form. In one place perpendicular cliffs, cut up by ragged gorges, descended sheer down into deep water, and meeting the constant roll of the Irish Channel, even in calm weather, fringed themselves with lace-work of foam, as if in cool defiance of the ocean. In another place a mass ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne

... rises the height of about 350 feet, and is said to be three feet and a half out of the perpendicular. The adventurous traveller may ascend to the top by a laborious staircase of 500 steps. Those steps were trod by the late amiable and excellent Sir James Edward Smith, who has described the view presented ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various

... stories of various heights, rising to the top of the tower. Each of these stories or galleries has four windows, facing directly to the points of the compass, and rising of course regularly above each other. These four perpendicular ranges of windows admitted air, and, the fire being kindled, heat, or smoke at least, to each of the galleries. The access from gallery to gallery is equally primitive. A path, on the principle of an inclined plane, turns round and round the building like a screw, and gives access to the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... appeared to penetrate some distance into the bowels of the mountain, and was wide and roomy. Sea-birds in great numbers hovered around its entrance, finding it, no doubt, an ideal nesting-place. It appeared quite inaccessible, for even with a perfect calm the swell dashed against the perpendicular face of the cliff beneath with a force that would have instantly destroyed any vessel unfortunate enough ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... D on plan, on the north side of the apse, retains the early "Perpendicular" windows inserted in the Norman work; its other characteristics are as those described to St. Luke's ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell

... Pedro that he would be taken up later, Ned began the task of making his way down the almost perpendicular face of the cliff. Much to his surprise, there were no hostile demonstrations from the gully in which the attackers had ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson

... exploded? A hapless air-navigator, plunging, amid torn parachutes, sand-bags, and confused wreck, fast enough into the jaws of the Devil! Suffice it to know that Teufelsdrockh rose into the highest regions of the Empyrean, by a natural parabolic track, and returned thence in a quick perpendicular one. For the rest, let any feeling reader, who has been unhappy enough to do the like, paint it out for himself: considering only that if he, for his perhaps comparatively insignificant mistress, underwent such agonies and frenzies, what must Teufelsdrockh's have been, with a fire-heart, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... Sometimes you see level ground on each side of you for two or three hours at a stretch; at other times a gently sloping hill presents itself; and often, on turning a point, the eye is pleased with the contrast of an almost perpendicular height jutting into the water. The trees put you in mind of an eternal spring, with summer and autumn ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... pulling and hauling, and by others shoving behind, we got Madame Cheesnip, as we ever after called her, into a perpendicular position; but she was too much shaken to dance again, especially with the cause of her misfortune. Indeed, for the rest of the evening the ladies fought very shy of poor Nip, and we took good care to keep out of his way. Dicky and I stayed ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... dreadfully keen of late; and poor Natalie wrapped in all the blankets they possessed had nevertheless more than once lain awake with the cold. But now, within thick walls—what matter if they were out of the perpendicular?—and under a tight roof, with the flames leaping briskly up the chimney, no king in his palace ever experienced such a sense of opulent and all-sufficing luxury as Garth and Natalie the first night in ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... geologists, looking as though plumped down by accident in the heathery wild. The ground rises suddenly from the uniform grade of the Brae; up it goes, ever growing steeper, until at length it runs abruptly into a sheer curtain of rock—the Fall—which rises perpendicular some forty feet, on the top of which rests that tiny grassy bowl—not twenty ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant

... last. Once he got the window open, the curate experienced little difficulty in getting through; but the commercial traveler was corpulent and tenacious of his boots, which he held persistently in one hand while Gerald tugged at the other. Still, he was hauled up at last, and the two slid down the perpendicular roof of the coach to the ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay

... events, and preserve the chronology of them, the war Chief in each tribe keeps a war post. This post is a peeled stick of timber, 10 or 12 feet high, that is erected in the town. For a campaign they make, or rather the Chief makes, a perpendicular red mark, about three inches long and half an inch wide; on the opposite side from this, for a scalp, they make a red cross, thus, ; on another side, for a prisoner taken, they make a red cross in this manner, X', with a head ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver

... formerly a regular carriage entrance, though the middle of the area was now made use of for stacking timber, fagots, bundles, and other products of the wood. It was divided from the lane by a lichen-coated wall, in which hung a pair of gates, flanked by piers out of the perpendicular, with a round white ball ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... closed then and there. My, but that night didn't we make the sand fly from the boat! By morning we could begin to see the end of the job. Then, while busy hands began to cut a landing on the perpendicular sandy bank of the Iowa side, others were preparing sweeps. ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker

... I managed to do this at last? A look at my bedraggled, lime-covered clothes may give you some idea. I cut a passage for myself up those perpendicular walls as the boy did up the face of the natural bridge in Virginia. Do you remember that old story in the Reader? It came to me like an inspiration as I stood looking up from below, and though I knew that I should have to work most of the way in perfect darkness, I decided that ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... great events, and preserve the chronology of them, the war Chief in each tribe keeps a war post. This post is a peeled stick of timber, 10 or 12 feet high, that is erected in the town. For a campaign they make, or rather the Chief makes, a perpendicular red mark, about three inches long and half an inch wide; on the opposite side from this, for a scalp, they make a red cross, thus, ; on another side, for a prisoner taken, they make a red cross in this manner, X', ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver

... condition of the knee is characterized by the partly flexed condition of the region. It is best observed by standing to one side of the horse (Fig. 33). Instead of the forearm and cannon regions appearing perpendicular or in line, they are directed forward. This condition may exist in varying degrees. Some individuals show it to a slight degree, the condition being accompanied by a weakness or shakiness of the knee when standing at rest. Sometimes, ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... himself) Why should I not speak to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange? (He points his finger) I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his eye. Retaining the perpendicular. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... was tolerably light, though the sun was unfortunately enveloped in clouds. His disc was invisible, but we could clearly distinguish his situation through the watery barrier. The fall of the cataract is nearly perpendicular. The bank over which it is precipitated is of concave form, owing to its upper stratum being composed of lime-stone, and its base of soft slate-stone, which has been eaten away by the constant attrition of the recoiling waters. The cavern is about one hundred and twenty feet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various

... rendering me momentarily more helpless, I realised that the creature was beginning to ascend my legs, to climb my body. Even then what it was I could not tell,—it mounted me, apparently, with as much ease as if I had been horizontal instead of perpendicular. It was as though it were some gigantic spider,—a spider of the nightmares; a monstrous conception of some dreadful vision. It pressed lightly against my clothing with what might, for all the world, have been ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... the charge was to be blasted out of being instantly. There was but one way open. The hunter sprang straight out from the ledge with a lightning vision of thick, soft-looking bushes far below him. The slope was steep, but by no means perpendicular, and he struck in a thicket which broke the full shock of the fall. His rifle flew far out of his hands. He rebounded, clutching at the bushes; but he could not check himself. Rolling over and over, his ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... but may be, perhaps, on the average, one hundred miles wide. The line of coast on the southern side of the Channel, which forms, of course, the northern border of Normandy, is a range of cliffs, which are almost perpendicular toward the sea, and which frown forbiddingly upon every ship that sails along the shore. Here and there, it is true, a river opens a passage for itself among these cliffs from the interior, and these river mouths would form harbors into which ships might enter from ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... the appearance of a fungus or great sea-mushroom, with a broad-spreading head springing from a small thick base. It is not a little singular that many of the growing islets which are nearly level with the surface of the water have a similar form, not rising from the bottom with a perpendicular side, but with broad overhanging heads resting upon a small base. In many places we passed over some of these isolated sea-mushrooms, upon which there was barely water for a small boat, where one step over the ledge would be in ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... sheep every winter; and, in the course of a conversation with him on the subject of their diving habits, he pointed to the front of a lava headland about 150 feet high, which is only eight or ten degrees out of the perpendicular. "There," said he, "I followed a band of them fellows to the back of that rock yonder, and expected to capture them all, for I thought I had a dead thing on them. I got behind them on a narrow bench that runs along the face of ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... which was found indispensable; and thus, like a party of pilgrims, we proceeded on our way; and before we had gone very far, we discovered that we were subjected to severe penance. The mountain was nearly perpendicular. In some places we had to ascend by a single piece of wood, with rough notches for the feet, resting against a rock twenty or thirty feet above our heads; and on either side was a precipice, so that a false step must have ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat

... sublime grove;' of the grand fountain he says that the 'ebullition is astonishing and continual, though its greatest force of fury intermits' (note the word 'intermits') 'regularly for the space of thirty seconds of time: the ebullition is perpendicular upward, from a vast rugged orifice through a bed of rock throwing up small particles of white shells.' He is informed by 'a trader' that when the Great Sink was forming there was heard 'an inexpressible rushing noise like a mighty hurricane or thunderstorm,' that 'the earth ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... relapsed into a contemplative cheek-scratching that was manifestly habitual. Before the bride arrived Mr. Polly's sense of the church found an outlet in whispered criticisms of ecclesiastical architecture with Johnson. "Early Norman arches, eh?" he said, "or Perpendicular." ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... (the streak to be studied), and which is furthermore white while that of A is bright red. B and B' are adjustable along a scale of degrees, which is not shown in the figure, so that the arc of eye-movement is variable at will. W is a thin, opaque, perpendicular wall extending from E to C, that is, standing on a radius of the perimeter. At E this wall comes to within about 4 mm. of the cornea, and when the eye is directed toward B the wall conceals ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... Lammas sky, amid the trembling air and short shadows of noon. Indoors nothing was to be heard save the droning of blue-bottle flies; out-of-doors the whetting of scythes and the hiss of tressy oat-ears rubbing together as their perpendicular stalks of amber-yellow fell heavily to each swath. Every drop of moisture not in the men's bottles and flagons in the form of cider was raining as perspiration from their foreheads and cheeks. Drought was ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... aeronaut forced the prow of the ship upwards to a sharp angle with the earth. Just at this moment the reluctant engine started up again with such vigour that for a moment the ship threatened to assume a perpendicular position, pointing straight up in the sky. A cry went up from the spectators below who feared a dire catastrophe was about to end a voyage which promised success. But with incomparable sang-froid the young Brazilian manipulated ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not appear a horizontal line; a line that made any angle with the perpendicular less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down together. Accordingly he makes the line of his houses a horizontal line, and fails of course to produce the effect demanded. Here then is one instance ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... line formed almost a perpendicular from Noyon in France north to the Belgian coast, south of Ostend. A battle raged for several days in West Flanders and Northern France and both sides claimed successes. The losses of the Allies and the Germans ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... up for you myself. Won't it make a nice contrast to the humming-bird's? Over the bed, shall I? But then, if it should drop down on your nose, you know! I think the corner over the fireplace will be best. Yes, we'll have it right up perpendicular, in the angle. The branch twists a little, you see, and the nest will run out with its odds and ends like an old banner. Might I push up the washstand to ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... midst of an immense plain one sees a kind of hut, or rather a very small roof standing above the ground. This is the entrance to the clay pit. A big perpendicular hole is sunk for twenty metres underground and ends in a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... Matthew Branthwaite, the wit and sage of Wythburn, once a weaver, but living now on the husbandings of earlier life. He was tall and slight, and somewhat bent with age. He was dressed in a long brown sack coat, belted at the waist, below which were pockets cut perpendicular at the side. Ribbed worsted stockings and heavy shoes made up, with the greater garment, the sum of his visible attire. Old Matthew had a vast reputation for wise saws and proverbs; his speech seemed to be made of little else; and though the dalespeople had heard ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... up the almost perpendicular rock, and his curly hair and sunburned face soon appeared above the edge of the nest. The next moment he leaned over, seized the young birds in spite of their angry cries, transferred them one after the other to his bag, and throwing it across his shoulder, began to return on ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... which was moored to the branch of a fig-tree by a slender rope; the motion of the boat caused the branch to bend and break without our being aware of it, and we drifted out to the middle of the bay, nearly three hundred yards from the perpendicular rocks with which it is surrounded. The waters of the lake in this part were of that bronzed color and had that molten appearance and look of heavy immobility which the shade of overhanging cliffs always gives; and the perpendicular rocks which surrounded it indicated the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... desk beating time with their legs to a rollicking catch sung by the Snake Editor. Before the muddled insects could crawl into a crack, the Mutilator was upon them, and had bolted every one. Then with a look of reproach at the Snake Editor, he drew three perpendicular red lines across that gentleman's features with his claws and departed in high scorn, nor could he ever thereafter be lured into the inner office where the serpent-sharp was laying for him with a space measure. Since that time he has lived in the room occupied by the ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow

... manner in which to celebrate the glorious Fourth. Consultations were numerous and all took part. The redskins, camped in plain sight, were hurrying to and fro, evidently in council like ourselves. To the right of the trail was a dense wood close to the river bank; on the left was a high perpendicular bluff, its sides unscalable, so our route was a genuine death trap, should they attack us. After grub all gathered in a circle and with pipes we proceeded with our last council. The situation was talked over from every point as to what the Indians ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young

... hither and thither in the midst of a medley of whirling wreckage, flying ropes'-ends, and struggling men. Opening my eyes I beheld the hull of the schooner, a short distance away, standing almost perpendicular, and slowly gliding downwards, bows first. Even as I looked she vanished into the dark profundity beneath, and then I directed my glances above me. It seemed that I was fathoms deep, for the phosphorescent foam that boiled overhead looked almost as far aloft as a frigate's lower ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... upon millions of years that had been required for this stratum and that—he liked to amaze himself with the sounding figures. I remember him expressing a wish to see the Grand Canon of Arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high, the long story of geological creation is written. I had stopped there during my Western trip of the previous year, and I told him something of its wonders. I urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with him. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... board were models of efficiency and quiet discipline, herding back the excited passengers and trying to keep them away from the rail, for the slant of the deck was now almost perpendicular. ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... of Berenice, Countess of Hurstmonceux, was situated about seven miles south of Edinboro', on the north banks of the Esk. It was an elegant modern edifice, raised upon the ruins of an ancient castle, overhanging a perpendicular precipice, with a sheer descent of several hundred feet to the river. It looked down upon the course of the Esk, winding between rocks of lofty height, whose sides were fringed with a tangled mass of shrubs, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... animals and hundreds of cooking fires formed a heavy haze which, covering the township as with a pall, hung half-way between the level of the valley and the overhanging brae where the advance-guard stood halted. It was not an inviting picture. The dust and vapour seemed unable to face the perpendicular violence of the midday sun; the only perceptible movement in the middle distance was the shimmer of the atmosphere, squirming as it were under the relentless heat; while the great pall of dust and smoke, as if ashamed to raise its head, mushroomed ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer

... climbing brought them out upon the semicircular platform which crowns the rock. Below them on the far side was a perpendicular black cliff, a hundred and fifty feet high, with the swirling, foam-streaked river roaring past its base. The swish of the water and the low roar as it surged over the mid-stream boulders boomed through ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... risen behind us; it was a distinctly perplexing moment, hard upon the nerves. The tomb was empty, except for a few bones that might have been anything huddled at the bottom, and Mrs. Portheris sat down on the lower end of it. "I really do not feel able to go any further," she said; "the ascent is so perpendicular." ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... comprehends that the third place, counting from the right, contains only figures which represent hundreds, &c. he will have conquered one of the greatest difficulties of arithmetic. If a paper ruled with several perpendicular lines, a quarter of an inch asunder, be shown to him, he will see that the spaces or columns between these lines would distinguish the value of figures written in them, without the use of the sign (0) and he will see that (0) ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... and wild olives, on either hand this gorge, quite inaccessible to any large array of armed men, though capable of being traversed by solitary foresters or shepherds. Below, the hills fall downward in a succession of vast broken ridges, in places rocky and almost perpendicular, in places swelling into rounded knolls, feathered with dark rich forests of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... western gateway, built by Benedict, and though it has since been much altered, a considerable part of the original structure remains: "The western side has been faced with Perpendicular work, and an arch of that character has been built in front of the original Norman arch, above which is a very elegant arcade, the alternate arches of which have small windows within them; these light the chamber over the gateway which occupies the situation of the chapel of St. Nicholas. ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips

... beds arranged along the middle of the floor. The inspector pulled off the mattresses, and out from under each there leapt a dozen rats, which, if I may be believed, made for the walls and ran straight up them, disappearing in the rafter-holes at the top. The sight of countless rats hurrying up perpendicular walls may be familiar to some people, but I venture to call it an amazing spectacle, worthy of record. Then came the opening of one or two travelling-trunks. The inspector ran his hand through the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... why he had said "you and I." Evidently he was wondering too, for he fell into reflection. She changed her position to ease the dull pain in her ankle, which his talk had almost driven from her mind. The rock had a perpendicular edge, so she let her feet hang over, resting the injured one upon the other. He was sitting in a similar position. The silence of the night had gathered about them, broken occasionally by the yapping of coyotes far down the valley. Segments of dull light fringed the horizon; the ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... that Rectus was to go first. This did not look very brave on my part, but I felt that I wanted to be under him, while he was climbing, so that I could break his fall if he should slip down. It would not be exactly a perpendicular fall, for the wall slanted a little, but it would be bad enough. However, I had climbed up worse places than that, and Rectus was very nimble; so I felt there was ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton

... sun of summer, that I whipped my leader short round, and entered the precincts of "Gurt-na-Morra." As I proceeded along the avenue, I was struck by the slight traces of repairs here and there evident,—a gate or two that formerly had been parallel to the horizon had been raised to the perpendicular; some ineffectual efforts at paint were also perceptible upon the palings; and, in short, everything seemed to have undergone a kind of attempt ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... apparent time, when it began to ebb; and at 22^h 15^m apparent time it was low water. The change, from ebbing to flowing, was very quick, or in less than 5^m. The water rose and fell seven feet four inches perpendicular; and every day the same whilst ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... were of that description denominated tub-mills. It consists of a perpendicular shaft, to the lower end of which an horizontal wheel of about four or five feet diameter is attached, the upper end passes through the bedstone and carries the runner after the manner of a trundlehead. These mills ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley

... rising hills; the level meadows and the little villes, with their antique perpendicular Gothic churches, which form the points around which they have clustered for centuries, even as groups of boats in the river are tied around their mooring-posts; the bridges and trim cottages or elegant ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland

... having been lately thrown up; whilst on another table, at the opposite side of the left ravine, which winds round in the direction of the wall, as nearly as if it were the work of art, stands the other redoubt. Beyond this, again, there is a perpendicular precipice, the hills there abruptly ending; so that on two sides the walls of the fort skirt the extremity of a bare rock. It was along the outer ridges of these ravines, and through the churchyard of St. Etienne, ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... held down the balloon were preparing to let go the ropes; the band began to play, the men in the balloon took off their caps and waved farewell, people cheered—and the Kangaroo was off. She rose swiftly and buoyantly, remaining almost perpendicular until she was caught by a southwest current of air and sailed away towards the hills. As she rose the children could see Hugh at the edge of ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton

... spot on which it stood. The roof sloped nearly to the ground. It was at this time dark, brown, and ugly, but had originally been formed of blooming olive and laurel branches, brought from beyond the mountains. The house was situated in a narrow gorge, whose rocky walls rose to a perpendicular height, naked and black, while round their summits clouds often hung, looking like white living figures. Not a singing bird was ever heard there, neither did men dance to the sound of the pipe. The spot was one ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... began to descend the mountain, many sliding down on the snow, very much as they coast at the garden Beaujon, from top to bottom of the Montagnes Russes, and I followed their example. This they called "sledding." The general-in-chief also descended in this manner an almost perpendicular glacier. His guide was a young countryman, active and courageous, to whom the First Consul promised a sufficiency for the rest of his days. Some young soldiers who had wandered off into the snow were found, almost ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... and mountain passes of that country her people are born and bred. To her climate her people are born and bred. The climate would take care of the rest. You can't exactly despatch motors and motor guns down swamps for a hundred miles and over cataracts and through mountain passes on the perpendicular. Canada's back country is her perpetual city of refuge. Nevertheless, the day of dependence on false security is past. National status implies national defense, and at time of writing the indications are that the whole military system of the Dominion will be put on a new basis, training ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... myself mounted in the balloon," says Guyton de Morveau, "at seven o'clock. We rose rapidly and in an almost perpendicular direction. The fall of the mercury in the barometer was scarcely perceptible when the dilation of the hydrogen gas in the balloon had become considerable. The globe swelled out, and a light vapour around the mouth announced to us that the gas was commencing to escape by ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion

... Stenhouse, "and found an opening leading into a large bight which jutted back to eastward into the Barrier. We endeavoured without success to scale the steep ice-foot under the cliffs, and then proceeded up the bay. Pulling along the edge of perpendicular ice, we turned into a bay in the ice-cliff and came to a cul-de-sac, at the head of which was a grotto. At the head of the grotto and on a ledge of snow were perched some adelie penguins. The beautiful green and blue tints in the ice-colouring ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... closed her eyes when every one in the vessel imagined he saw, in whatever direction he turned, a most horrible human head; it rose out of the waves, not like that of a person swimming, but perfectly perpendicular as if invisibly supported upright on the watery surface and floating along in the same course with the bark. Each wanted to point out to the other the cause of his alarm, but each found the same expression of horror depicted on the face of his neighbor, only that his hands and eyes were directed ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... way in a tour of the valley. Save where the wagon road descended and where the steep side hill of the north wall arose, the boundaries were utterly precipitous. From a narrow gorge, flanked by water-smoothed rock aprons, the river boiled between glassy perpendicular cliffs. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... extending over areas several hundred miles in length and breadth. When the periodical inundations subside, the river hollows out a channel to the depth of many yards through horizontal beds of clay and sand, the ends of which are seen exposed in perpendicular cliffs. These beds vary in their mineral composition, or colour, or in the fineness or coarseness of their particles, and some of them are occasionally characterised by containing drift-wood. At the junction of the river and the ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... did not go by the board, nor the roof come thundering down upon her head. There was not even a sound of destruction to be heard, and the sides of the house seemed to be firm and decided in their intention to maintain their perpendicular position. A few minutes later, when the committee announced to the multitude the success of their undertaking, and Fred had displayed the flag from the window, peal upon peal of stunning huzzas saluted ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic

... will be seen to consist of a perpendicular limb or upright, of a horizontal one or stretcher, and of a short slanting stick, as the third is called. The upright is usually cut about half an inch wide, shaved to a thin edge at top, but "High Elms" recommends it to have a forked foot to ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... light companion; but soon I too was obliged to lag, and about midday found myself alone in the solitudes of the Dalles. At last there came a gorge deeper and steeper than any thing that had preceded it, and I was forced to rest long before attempting its almost perpendicular ascent. When I did reach the top, it was to find myself thoroughly done up—the sun came down on the side of the embankment as though it would burn the sandy soil into ashes, not a breath of air moved through the silent hills, not a leaf stirred ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler

... on slowly. About noon he found himself threading a narrow canon, shaded by gigantic redwood tress, with steep, almost perpendicular sides, with here and there a narrow streamlet descending in a cascade, and lighting up the darkened scene with ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... fortress is always delightful to me; my destructiveness rejoices in guns and drums, and all the circumstance of glorious war. The place itself, too, is so fiercely picturesque—such crags, such dizzy, hanging heights, such perpendicular rocky walls, down to the very water's edge, and such a broad, bright bay. The scenery all round Quebec is beautiful, and we went to visit two fine waterfalls in the neighborhood, but of course to us just now there is but one waterfall ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... company, however, had soon other matters to engage their attention. The brig was now approaching that part of the river where the deep channel runs under the lofty and perpendicular cliffs of San Lorenzo. The bed is as wide as in other places, but on the eastern side is a line of islands extending for several miles, and forcing the current over to the west. It was still doubtful, however, whether ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... in front of a pretty good house. It was about five feet high, about fifteen inches through; it came close to the ground, and it was sloped a little towards the top on each side, leaving a flat about four inches wide on the top of all. It had just been clipped; and it was as perpendicular and as smooth as a wall: I put my eye and looked along the sides of the several lines near the top, and if it had been built of stone, it could not have been truer. I lament that I did not ask the name of the owner, for it does him infinite ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various

... emotion more searching than anything Continental. I had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home—at Saragossa Illinois—in books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small and subdivided into six narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular screens of mahogany, something higher than a man's stature, furnished on either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in ancient Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a narrow table—a ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James

... they are possessors is taken care of in an odd manner. The men cut all their hair close to the head, except a strip about an inch wide, running over the front of the scalp from temple to temple, and another strip, of about the same width, perpendicular to the former, crossing the crown of the head to the nape of the neck. At each temple a heavy tuft is allowed to hang to the bottom of the lobe of the ear. The long hair of the strip crossing to the neck is generally gathered and braided into two ornamental queues. I did not ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley

... of cannel-coal for the production of paraffin, it is necessary that the perpendicular tubes or retorts into which the coal is placed be heated only to a certain temperature, which is considerably lower than that applied when the object is the production of coal-gas. By this means nearly all the volatile matters pass over in ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... very best vein; and there is a truly delightful scene between Lord Anophel and his chaplain Grovelgrub, when the athletic Sir Oran has not only foiled their attempt on Anthelia, but has mast-headed them on the top of a rock perpendicular. But the gem of the book is the election for the borough of One-Vote—a very amusing farce on the subject of rotten boroughs. Mr. Forester has bought one of the One-Vote seats for his friend the Orang, and, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... levies a contribution on. It is called the Anthophora pilifera, and during the fine weather it makes a collection of honey intended to be absorbed by its own larvae, if it had not the misfortune to be watched by one of these intriguing Coleoptera. Wherever in Provence there is a perpendicular wall, natural or artificial, a little cliff, a sloping ditch, or the wall of one of those caves which the people of the country use for putting their tools in, the Anthophora hollows out galleries, at the bottom of which he builds a certain number of chambers. He fills each of them with ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... same party made a similar circuit three times—in the morning, at noon, and in the evening—that the full light might uncover what the shadows had hid, and that the shadows might show what a perpendicular light could not reveal. There is all the difference as to discovery whether a thing is lying under the shadow of another, or ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... foolishnesses, ... as they are accounted by people who say to me 'no one would ever think, without knowing you, that you were so and so.' Now if I send all my idle questions to Colburn's Magazine, with other Gothic literature, and take to standing up in a perpendicular personality like the angel on the schoolman's needle, in my letters to come, without further leaning to the left or the right—why the end would be that you would take to 'running after the butterflies,' for change of air and exercise. And then ... oh ... then, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... her horse around, reared him to almost a perpendicular height, merged herself like so much fluid khaki into his great, towering, threatening neck, reacted almost instantly to her own balance again, and went plunging off toward the wild, rough, untraveled foot-hills and—certain destruction, any unbiased onlooker would have ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... three-fourths of a mile wide, gradually narrowing to a width of less than one hundred feet at the extreme point. The long battlemented sides of this lofty triangle, like some mighty fortress, grim and frowning, are protected and supported by perpendicular cliffs of black rock, rising like some bastioned wall of terrifying proportions, two hundred feet above the shoulder of the mountain. In a sheltered nook, near the point, about five hundred feet below the base of the cliffs, stands the Sam's Point Hotel, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... the old ordinance in Boston against smoking in the streets. This will aim a blow at side stove-pipes as well as at meerschaums; but, fortunately, it will not prevent the smoking of hams or of perpendicular chimneys. ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various

... of stone, but in decay; it has an ancient aspect, but this applies still more to the village of Ariankot, which occupies the flat top of a low spur detached from the fort by a small stream. The spurs fall in perpendicular cliffs of some 20 feet in height, and in these are traces of numerous caves similar to those already spoken of, and some of which are still used as dwellings by the Balti people, who come to take service as porters between Dir and Chitral. ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard

... the American shore, the question arose as to which method would be the best to adopt in ascending the giddy height. A covered way leads to the top of the bank, which is more than two hundred feet in perpendicular height. Up this steep our ingenious neighbours have constructed on an inclined plane of boards a railway, on which two cars run in such a manner that the weight of the descending car draws up the other to the top of the bank. Both are secured by a strong cable. By the side of this ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... appearance thereon is the point a, where the visual ray passes through it. If now we trace on the floor a line AB from the nail to the spot B, just under the eye, and from the point o, where this line passes through or under the glass, we raise a perpendicular oS, that perpendicular passes through the precise point that the visual ray passes through. The line AB traced on the floor is the horizontal trace of the visual ray, and it will be seen that the point a is situated on the vertical ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey

... change had marched alongside the fluctuations of our temper. The circumference of the bowl was the same as at first, but imperceptibly yet swiftly the hollow had deepened, sunk farther from the sky, the walls had become almost perpendicular and to my terror I found myself looking upward from the bottom of a pit ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... drab-coloured basin, El-Majr. Based upon mighty massive foundations of brown and green trap, the undulating junction being perfectly defined by a horizontal white line, the capping of sandstone rises regular as if laid in courses, with a huge rampart falling perpendicular upon the natural slope of its glacis. This bounding curtain is called the Taur el-Shafah, the "inaccessible part of the Lip-range." Further eastward the continuity of the coping has been broken and weathered into the most remarkable castellations: you pass mile after mile of cathedrals, domes, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton

... means dense enough to make it possible for him to escape observation. He was confident, however, that if he could change places with the warrior, he could discern the canoe without any closer approach. He was at a disadvantage, for the bluff was perfectly perpendicular and so high that he could not reach the ground above without retreating up the river for at least a quarter of a mile, where the bluff was depressed enough to permit him to draw himself upward upon it. Had the ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne

... Jesse saw the band of goats apparently take alarm at something. They turned and began to disperse, some of them climbing slowly up the apparently perpendicular ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough

... upwards the course of a mountain stream to a spot where a small waterfall threw itself over a slab of perpendicular rock, which seemed to bar his farther progress. On a nearer view, he discovered a flight of steps, roughly hewn in the rock, on one side of the fall. Ascending these steps, he entered a narrow winding pass, between high and naked rocks, that afforded only space for a rough footpath, ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... had no crevices sufficiently large to admit our bodies; but on riding five miles southward to Oakey creek we found a low ridge extending some miles on its left bank which promised many openings. We soon found one which I considered to be of the right sort, namely a perpendicular crevice with red tuff about the sides. Being provided with candles and ropes we descended perpendicularly first, about six fathoms to one stage, then obliquely, about half as far to a sort of floor of red earth; Mr. Rankin, although a large ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... text. The result may still be seen at Mandalay in the collection of buildings commonly known as the four hundred and fifty Pagodas: a central Stupa surrounded by hundreds of small shrines each sheltering a perpendicular tablet on which a portion of this veritable bible in stone is inscribed. Mindon-min also corrected the growing laxity of the Bhikkhus, and the esteem in which the Burmese church was held at this time is shown by the fact that the monks of Ceylon sent a deputation to the Sangharaja of Mandalay ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... temple is raised on a platform exceptionally low—only a few feet above the level of the plain; the entire height, including the platform, was 156 feet in a perpendicular line. The stages—of which the four upper were lower than the first three—receded equally on three sides, but doubly as much on the fourth, probably in order to present a more imposing front from the plain, and an easier ascent. "The ornamentation of the edifice was chiefly ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin

... away towards the north, fed by the Yosemite Fall, a cataract unsurpassed in height by any other upon the globe. The vertical height of the fall is set down at 2,550 feet, though it is not composed of one perpendicular sheet of water. The reader will remember that the lands coming under the general term of the Yosemite Valley have been ceded by the National Government to the State of California, to be kept in its present wild and natural condition for all time. It must ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... is derived from the fact that at this place the Delaware River has forced itself through the rocky barrier," continued the Professor, "hedged in on one side by cliffs of perpendicular rock, three hundred feet high, extending some distance along the river, leaving scarcely room at some places for the river and the canal. Some quite rare plants grow here, said to be found in few other localities in the United States. You see the highest flat rock along the Narrows? ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas

... principal, and they are important. The noxious effects may be obviated, or rather the noxious cause will not be generated, under the following arrangement, namely, a carpet of painted canvas for the floor of the tent; a tent with a light roof, as defense against perpendicular rain or the rays of a vertical sun; and with side walls of moderate height, to be employed only against driving rains. To the first there can be no objection: it is useful, as preventing the exhalations of moisture from the surface of the earth; it is convenient, as always ready; ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... the river from bank to bank to bar the channel, nearly opposite Fort Jackson and exposed to the perpendicular fire of St. Philip, were heavy ship's chains, supported and buoyed by hulks, rafts, and logs, and half a dozen large schooners. The rebels had also established some works on the banks of the river about four miles from town, known as the McGehee and Chalmette batteries, ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various

... magnified rather more than twenty times in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the ridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, it assumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular but ruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and a quarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, it resembles a tall massy tower,—such a tower as my friend, Mr. D.O. Hill, would delight to draw, and give delight by drawing,—a tower three ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... name, but very like the gentian; and there were also the wild daphne and scarlet anemones. The lofty trees located on both sides of the road had been tapped for their sap, and little wooden spouts were conducting the glutinous deposit into small earthen jars hung on the perpendicular trunks,—reminding one of the mode of "milking" the toddy palms in India and Ceylon, by which ingenious means the natives obtain, a liquor which, when fermented, is as strong as the best Scotch or ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... manner in which chloroform renders the glands insensible to the subsequent action of meat. In the plant last referred to, which had been exposed for 2 m. to three drops of chloroform, some few tentacles curved up only to a perpendicular position, and particles of meat were placed on their glands; this caused them in 5 m. to begin moving, but they moved so slowly that they did not reach the centre until 1 hr. 30 m. had elapsed. Another ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... each of these we have many sub-divisions, and if we typify these by drawing horizontal lines to indicate the different degrees of density, there is another arrangement which we might symbolise by drawing perpendicular lines at right angles to the others, to denote types which differ in quality as well as in density. There are thus many varieties of this mental matter, and it is found that each one of these has its own especial and appropriate rate of ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant

... of the rockets increased and the mighty ship quivered as its plummeting descent was checked slightly. Tom quickly adjusted the stabilizer trim tabs to keep the ship perpendicular to the ground, then watched the stern scanner carefully as the huge blast-pitted concrete ramp loomed larger ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell

... though not twenty years of age. The Old Turk, funny, fat and good-natured. The latter part of our journey lay thro' a pass in the mountains from the summit of which the Valley of Magnesia suddenly burst on our view, with the town on the eastern side at the foot of a perpendicular rocky mountain very like the rock of Gibraltar, but if anything higher, more craggy, and bold: the valley that lay before us, bounded on the W. by a ridge of regular round topped hills, and to the Nd. the eye could not reach the extent of this immense plain, which is covered with vines, ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury

... shadow is registered. The least distortion takes place when the object is in contact with the plate, and the shadow of that part of the object which lies perpendicularly under the light is less distorted than that of the parts lying outside the perpendicular. The light and the plate remaining constant, the amount of distortion varies directly with the distance between the ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... said the Duke, "that your shafts and bolts fall harmless on those ozier walls? Shoot in the air; let the arrow fall perpendicular on those within—fall as the vengeance of the saints falls—direct from heaven! Give me thy bow, Archer,—thus." He drew the bow as he sate on his steed, the arrow flashed up, and descended in the heart of the reserve, within a few feet ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... terraces of gray limestone have the air of antique fortifications and watch-towers of the border. They are truly "munitions of rocks." Chariots and horsemen could find no field for their manoeuvres in this broken and perpendicular country. Entangled in these deep and winding valleys by which they must climb up from the plain, the invaders would be at the mercy of the light infantry of the highlands, who would roll great stones upon them as they passed through the narrow defiles, and break their ranks by fierce and ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... inclined at a small angle to each other. For it is certain that to an eye so situated the apparent density of the stars, supposing them pretty equally scattered through the space they occupy, would be least in the direction of the visual ray perpendicular to the lamina, and greatest in that of its breadth; increasing rapidly in passing from one to the other direction, just as we see a slight haze in the atmosphere thickening into a decided fog-bank near the horizon by the rapid increase of the mere ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... Meanwhile the intermediate bars were heated and expanded, and the nuts screwed up as before. The lamps being again withdrawn, they contracted in cooling, and the walls were further drawn together. This process was continually repeated, until at length the walls were restored to their perpendicular position. The gallery may still be seen with the bars extending across it, and binding together its ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... for anything," but equally funny to the lookers-on to see the amused Chiswell, one of his mates, roll over and over on the greensward in repeated convulsions of side-splitting laughter, whilst the others, standing up, had hard work to keep their perpendicular and writhed in awful shapes as they joined in chorus with him, as Tirrell was slowly wading out of ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... the same effect when steaming through the Kyles of Bute, for there the ship seems to be going full speed for the shore of an entirely enclosed sea, and here, saving for the tell-tale railway, there seems no way out of the abyss without scaling the perpendicular walls. The rocks are at their finest at Killingnoble Scar, where they take the form of a semicircle on the west side of the railway. The scar was for a very long period famous for the breed of hawks, which were specially watched by the Goathland ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... need not marvel much at seeing the ground retreat just here. It is nearer our hand, and quite as well worth our while to enquire, why the tower at Bridgnorth in Shropshire leans exactly in the same direction, and is full as much out of the perpendicular as this ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... track to Kairouan, where strings of camels are for ever moving to and fro, laden with merchandise from the north or with desert products from the oases of Djerid and Souf. The dry bed of the torrent glows in hues of isabel and cream, while its perpendicular mud-banks, on the further side, gleam like precipices of amber; the soil at your feet is besprinkled with a profusion of fair and ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... continued his lordship, pointing to the mute pack now following the huntsman, 'you've lost us our fox, sir—yes, sir, lost us our fox, sir. D'ye call that nothin', sir? If you don't, I do, you perpendicular-looking Puseyite pig-jobber! By Jove! you think because I'm a lord, and can't swear, or use coarse language, that you may do what you like—but I'll take my hounds home, sir—yes, sir, I'll take my hounds ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... carrying a pair of pails on a yoke, deposited them upon the edge of the pavement in front of the inn, and straightened his back to an excruciating perpendicular. His remarks had been addressed to a rickety person, wearing a waistcoat of that preternatural length from the top to the bottom button which prevails among men who have to do with horses. He was sweeping straws from the carriage-way beneath the stone arch that ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... itself from my door was almost on a level with the cottage; but on coming to the end of the lane, it was discovered to be situated on a high perpendicular bank, at the foot of which run the clear waters of the Cluden, where they hasten ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... and decidedly plain in design. There are shops that have a certain suggestion and imitation of old-fashioned quaintness, and there are other buildings that have a tinge of the Scotch baronial hall style of architecture. Then there is the coffee-house Gothic, the pie-shop Perpendicular, the commercial Classic, the fender and fire-grate Transitional, the milk and cream Decorated, and various ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton

... let the instrument stand out of the perpendicular, and do very little while standing vertically. Indeed, it is well to strike a number of half-circles, first from right to left and then from left to right, and finally draw a full circle, sloping the pen on one side, gradually raising ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose

... small rocky islands, on one of which we landed, and climbed its summit, but saw nothing to repay us for the trouble or the danger of the ascent: the surface was composed entirely of loose blocks of sandstone, which, when trod upon, would crumble away or roll down the nearly perpendicular face of the rock; and it was only by grasping the branches of the acacias and other trees that were firmly rooted in the interstices of the less-decomposed rocks that we were saved from being precipitated with them. On our return we passed through the channel ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... was oblique to the White Oak road; and on getting there, it was to swing round to the left till perpendicular to the road, keeping closed to the left. Ayres did his part well, and to the letter, bringing his division square up to the front of the return near the angle; but Crawford did not wheel to the left, as was intended. On the contrary, ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan

... here to sleep. At the slightest sound, open the windows of the court and call me. Pay attention also to the water-side. Ten metres of perpendicular rock is ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc

... with the northerly wind and rises with the southerly one. When you travel over the country, you will find that the valleys are cool and the mountain tops warm. The bees have no sting, and many of the beautiful flowers have no smell. The leaves of the trees are nearly always perpendicular instead of horizontal, as in your country, and consequently one gets very little shade under ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... the sea, and the soft shadows of the trees and mountain, were much the same. The Coquette lay, as before, at her anchor near the cape, and the Shrewsbury glittered towards the south, until its surface was concealed by the projection of a high and nearly perpendicular bluff. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... lengths; and as far as my eye could stretch its wings, now on the left and now on the right side, such did this cornice seem to me. Thereon our feet had not yet moved when I perceived that bank round about, which, being perpendicular, allowed no ascent, to be of white marble and adorned with such carvings, that not Polycletus merely but Nature would be ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri

... ordered to assault the Koket-bir gate of the fortress. The guns from Islamgye and the Fala saddle opened fire, and continued it during the afternoon. The ascent to the fortress, or amba, as it is called, was by an excessively steep and narrow path, amidst large boulders, with perpendicular black cliffs on the right. The Koket-bir gate consisted of a rough stone gateway 15 feet deep, with folding wooden doors. On either side the approach was defended by a thick hedge with stakes. Seventy feet higher up there was a second hedge, and another gate opening on the ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... and to blast rocky embankments, we can hardly understand how a people, with such limited mechanical appliances as then existed, can have surmounted the obstacles that presented themselves to their progress. In one place the way was a plank road resting on beams, which were driven into the perpendicular face of the solid rock a few feet above the water's edge, whilst a little further on it is seen to wind along terraces cut artificially, high up on the hillsides. Hundreds if not thousands of lives must have been sacrificed in the work, for it must be remembered that the Roman generals and ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... bridge, the aspect of things at the rock was much altered. The beacon-house and building had both a naked look to those accustomed to their former appearance; a curious optical deception was also remarked, by which the lighthouse seemed to incline from the perpendicular towards the beacon. The horizontal rope-ladder before noticed was again stretched to preserve the communication, and the artificers were once more obliged to practise the awkward and straddling manner of their passage between ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to the very edge of the cliff and looked straight down, to where, two hundred feet below, the perpendicular was first broken by a slope of titanic bowlders, among which the trunks of dwarfed pines twisted here and there into the light, from ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris

... and lower apartments are consequently extremely gloomy. The upper rooms are the most suitable to dwell in, but visitors frequently find it exceedingly fatiguing to toil up and down the stairs; and some of the stone-paved passages, miscalled streets, are almost perpendicular. Altogether, one needs extraordinary strength in this city of precipices. It is thus very unsuitable to invalids, apart from its variable climate. It is subject to very rapid changes of temperature, warm winds from the south ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... family. The crust or shell of this nest seems to be formed of such dirt or loam as comes most readily to hand, and is tempered and wrought together with little bits of broken straws to render it tough and tenacious. As this bird often builds against a perpendicular wall without any projecting ledge under, it requires its utmost efforts to get the first foundation firmly fixed, so that it may safely carry the superstructure. On this occasion the bird not only clings with its claws, but partly supports itself ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... united streams run into the lake Ontario, at the place where Oswego fort is situated. But this river is so rapid as to be sometimes dangerous, besides its being full of rifts and rocks; and about twelve miles on this side of Oswego there is a fall of eleven feet perpendicular, where there is consequently a postage, which however, does not exceed forty yards. From thence the passage is easy quite to Oswego. The lake Ontario, on which this fort stands, is near two hundred and eighty leagues ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... meadows at the head of Weber Canyon until Reed's return. They then learned that the train which preceded them had been compelled to travel very slowly down the Weber River, filling in many irregular places with brush and dirt; that at last they had reached a place where vast perpendicular pillars of rock approached so closely on either side that the river had barely space to flow between, and just here the water plunged over a precipice. To lower the wagons down this precipice ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... England, on the Oxford and Worcester line of the Great Western railway. Pop. (1901) 1542. It is picturesquely situated towards the north of the Cotteswold hill-district. The many interesting ancient houses afford evidence of the former greater importance of the town. The church of St James is mainly Perpendicular, and contains a number of brasses of the 15th and 16th centuries and several notable monumental tombs. A ruined manor house of the 16th century and some almshouses complete, with the church, a picturesque group ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... ground and the leaves; he never ascends the tall trees, but keeps low, flitting from stump to stump and from root to root, dodging in and out of his hiding-places, and watching all intruders with a suspicious eye. He has a very pert, almost comical look. His tail stands more than perpendicular: it points straight toward his head. He is the least ostentatious singer I know of. He does not strike an attitude, and lift up his head in preparation, and, as it were, clear his throat; but sits there ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs

... concerning the Dahomey village. But some scoffers from the South had spoiled part of the novelty of it by alleging that the men of northern Africa were really natives of Mississippi or Louisiana, and were dancing only plantation hoe-downs in slow time and increased perpendicular action. ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')

... contrariwise, slope up from left to right, with a single exception in the case of the letter Z, in which, if rule I be followed, the sloping line (in this case made with a down stroke) will be the only one possible to accent. III, Always accent the directly perpendicular lines, except in the N, where these lines seem originally to have been made with an up stroke of the pen; and the first line of the M, where the perpendiculars originally sloped in towards the top of the letter (see ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown

... because of yours. They should make a line at right angles with your horse's spinal column. Draw yourself back a little, until you can feel the pommel under your right knee. 'Draw' yourself back; don't lean, but keep yourself perfectly erect, your back perpendicular to your horse's. Sit a little to the left; lean a little to the right. Let your left shoulder go forward a little, your right shoulder backward. Now you are exactly right. Try to remember your sensations at this minute, in order to be able to reproduce them. When I say 'Careful,' pass yourself ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne

... the nearest end of the plate, over which the glass is slided till it lies upon the plate, having driven much of the quicksilver before it. It is then, I think, pressed upon cloths, and then set sloping to drop the superfluous mercury; the slope is daily heightened towards a perpendicular. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... the semicircular arch may be demonstrated to excel in strength the elliptical arch, which, approaching nearer to a straight line, must be constructed with stones whose diminution downwards is very little, and of which the pressure is almost perpendicular. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... whole in deepest shade. How that wall was ever ascended to the inland seemed the puzzle; but Drew, who had been off the place before, pointed out to them a narrow path, which wound upwards through a glen, seemingly sheer perpendicular. That was the road to the capital, if any man dare try it. In spite of the shadow of the mountain, the whole place wore a dusty and glaring look. The breaths of air which came off the land were utterly stifling; and no wonder, for La Guayra, owing to the radiation of that vast ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... a huge broad stone, which, lying athwart other tall perpendicular stones, made a kind of hut, approached by a pathway of upright narrow pillars, irregular and crude. Vast must have been the labour of man's hands to lift the massive table of rock upon the supporting ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Norman tower cased—can not be wholly made a matter of blame to the original builders. For it is clear that some finish, whether a crown like those at Newcastle and Edinburgh or any other, was intended. Still the proportion which is solemn in Romanesque becomes squat in perpendicular, and, if York has never received its last finish, Lincoln has lost the last finish which it received. Surely no one who is not locally sworn to the honor of York can doubt about preferring the noble central tower of Lincoln, soaring still, even tho ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... the use of the latter, in the cemetery called the Green Church Haw, on the north side of the cathedral. The people were still allowed to pass within the north side of the cathedral in their processions, and the Perpendicular doorway which exists, walled up, towards the west end of the north aisle wall, was inserted for their passage. The right that the mayor and corporation of the city still retain of entering the cathedral in their robes and with their maces, etc., borne before them, by the great ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer

... contour of his features was remarkably regular, though his lips were rather full, and his nose somewhat flat, yet free from the disgusting depression and cavities of the negro race. His forehead was high and perpendicular, while his mouth glistened with ivory when he spoke or smiled. I had frequent opportunities to talk with the king afterwards, and was always delighted by the affectionate simplicity of his demeanor. As it was the country's custom to educate the first-born of royalty for the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... Eyes, standing against the perpendicular back ledge of the Council Rock, and with her heart full of love for the girls who could get so much fun out of a kite, wished success to their cause with all her soul. Then she stood up in the center of the rock and sent forth ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey

... had been, at the age of six, marked, like Soyera, with three perpendicular lines on the forehead—the sign ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty

... place the planting-board back on the pegs and place the tree at the right depth, against the notch in the side. It will then stand exactly where a stake stood, and if the stakes were in line, the trees will be also, if they are kept perpendicular while the earth is being filled in. The earth should be packed about the roots by hand, the tree being set no deeper than it ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume

... extreme richness and grace of line, and for which we may be most grateful to their builders. And, indeed, the superiority of the Surface-Gothic cannot be completely felt, until we compare it with the more degraded Linear schools, as, for instance, with our own English Perpendicular. The ornaments of the Veronese niche, which we have used for our example, are by no means among the best of their school, yet they will serve our purpose for such a comparison. That of its pinnacle is composed of a single upright flowering plant, of which the stem shoots up through the centres ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin

... with those vast gorges, the marvellous results of aqueous action, called canyons, which attain their greatest dimensions in North America; such as the Great Canyon of the Colorado, which is at least 300 miles in length, and in places 2000 yards in depth, with perpendicular or even overhanging sides; but the analogy, at first sight specious, utterly breaks down under closer examination. Some selenographers consider them to consist of long-extending rows of confluent craters, too minute to be separately distinguished, and to be thus due to some ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger

... sends forth a pleasing chirp: when several are together they sing in harmony on different notes. I had some difficulty in catching a specimen of this frog. The genus Hyla has its toes terminated by small suckers; and I found this animal could crawl up a pane of glass, when placed absolutely perpendicular. Various cicidae and crickets, at the same time, keep up a ceaseless shrill cry, but which, softened by the distance, is not unpleasant. Every evening after dark this great concert commenced; and often have I sat listening to it, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... till there came the man of Sweden, the great Linnaeus, till the sexes were recognised, and everything was ruled out and set in place again. A wonderful man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnaeus who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and levered our mental globe a little more perpendicular to the ecliptic. He actually gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of window—perhaps the first man who had ever done so for seventeen ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... himself slide over the left shoulder, and the lion's skin that was modelled over it, and Sabina followed him cautiously. By bending their heads they could now stand and walk, and there was a space fully five feet wide, between the statue and the perpendicular masonry ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... on the south side of the Missouri, one thousand six hundred and ninety-three miles from its confluence with the Mississippi. It rises to the west of the Black mountains, across the northern extremity of which it finds a narrow rapid passage along high perpendicular banks, then seeks the Missouri in a northeastern direction, through a broken country with highlands bare of timber, and the low grounds particularly supplied with cottonwood, elm, small ash, box, ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

... an angle, that the shock in descending is modified, and the joints and sockets protected from the injury occasioned by concussion. But in the elephant, where the weight of the body is immense, the bones of the leg, in order to present solidify and strength to sustain it, are built in one firm and perpendicular column; instead of being placed somewhat obliquely at their points of contact. Thus whilst the force of the weight in descending is broken and distributed by this arrangement in the case of the horse; it would be so concentrated in the elephant as to endanger every joint ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... and idle from the masts, yet the vessel rolled as in a storm, heaving on a tremendous swell so violently that it would seem her masts must be shaken out of her. The air was sweltering, the sky the color of burnished copper, out of which the sun beat remorselessly in almost perpendicular beams. Pitch ran from every seam of the decks, great blisters like bubbles rose upon the woodwork; the decks were no sooner swabbed than—presto!—it was as though they had not known the touch of water ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... of Nottingham Castle, by which the young King Edward III. and his loyal associates gained access to the fortress and captured the murderous regent and usurper Mortimer, Earl of March, is known to this day as "Mortimer's Hole." It runs up through the perpendicular rock upon which the castle stands, on the south-east side from a place called Brewhouse yard, and has an exit in what was originally the courtyard of the building. The Earl was seized in the midst of his adherents and retainers on the night of October 19th, 1330, and after a skirmish, notwithstanding ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea

... descending, the other rising, the valley narrows to a gorge. In its depths, a hundred and fifty feet or more below, the torrent is noisily roaring, and at the other side, half way up, the carriage-road is built out from the almost perpendicular wall of the Gourzy. We draw nearer, and at length I cross, high above the stream, by a rude wooden bridge, and rejoin the main road. The slope I have quitted steepens now into a precipice, and the two sides of this ravine move closer and closer together, their bare limestone brows a ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... represent the premises, and at the angles formed with them by the slanting or by the perpendicular lines the middle term occurs. The schema of Figure IV. resembles Z, the last letter of the alphabet: this helps one to remember it in contrast with Figure I., which is thereby also remembered. Figures II. and III. seem to ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... royal family of Abyssinia were imprisoned in early times, is a little to the north of Lake Haik, and beyond the Mille. It runs north and south, in length about twelve or thirteen miles, and is exceedingly high and steep, the sides thereof being almost perpendicular. Mr Krapf, amongst the most considerable rivers which he passed in this quarter, mentions the Ala, which he states runs to, and is lost in, the deserts of the country of Adel. This is important, and this river is no doubt the Wali of Bruce, which he mentions (vol. iii. p. 248) as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... assumed the perpendicular and indignantly exclaimed, "Well, I don't care if you did; ...
— Good Stories from The Ladies Home Journal • Various

... camp, and a large amount of Kaffir kraals. Every Sunday he had five services at different places, one of them eighteen miles from the nearest, a space that had to be ridden at speed in the mid-day sun. There was no house, but a couple of rooms with perpendicular sides and a verandah, one for chapel, the other for sitting-room, while Kaffir beehive huts were the bedrooms of all. For a long time blankets and plaids did the part of doors and shutters; and just as the accommodations ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... lower than 8000 feet. In these higher elevations one sees what a struggle some of the trees have for mere existence. Again and again a mountain pine will be found, a tree perhaps fifty feet high, bowed over almost to the ground. This was done by snow. Given the slightest list from the perpendicular when the heavy, wet snow falls upon it, it is bound slowly to be forced over. If it is a tough, strong tree it may sustain the weight until melting time comes, when it is released. But it never ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... the brig to assume various unseemly attitudes, and perform gymnastic exercises wonderful to behold. As the wind increased and the sea became more turbulent, the Dolphin tumbled about like an elephant dancing a hornpipe, insomuch that it was difficult for a person to keep his perpendicular. Indeed, as I was passing along from the camboose to the cabin, with a plate of toast in one hand and a teapot in the other, the brig took a lee lurch without giving notice of her intention, and sent me with tremendous force across the deck, to leeward, where ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... to have been noticed that, as every line from the surface to the centre is perpendicular, a descent by slopes, such as is represented, would really ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... presenting the most agreeable scenes, replete with the useful product of a rich soil and fine climate; the whole bounded by lofty mountains, clothed with rich and almost impervious forests of evergreens, occasionally intermixed with high and nearly perpendicular rocks, whose summits are, for a great part of the year, covered with snow;—the whole forming one of the most agreeable, picturesque, and romantic scenes that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various

... of El-Hasee is sandy, like all those of Fezzan. It is bounded on the north by the perpendicular buttresses of the Hamadah, and on the south by sandy swells. The well is not copious, but affords a regular supply of slightly brackish water. The people descend to the bottom, thirty or forty feet, and fill their gerbahs. The blacks are very troublesome, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson

... them much additional grandeur. Instances have occurred in which the fiery stream has plunged over a sheer precipice of immense height, so as to produce a glowing cascade exceeding in breadth and perpendicular descent the celebrated Falls of Niagara. In other cases, the lava, instead of at once flowing down the sides of the mountain, has been first thrown up into the air as a fiery fountain several hundred feet in height. This happens ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous

... volume of water of enormous proportions. Between it and the valley below there was a dam nearly 1,000 feet wide, 100 feet high, ninety feet thick at the base and twenty at the top. This barrier gave way and the water rushed into the valley in a solid wave with a perpendicular front of ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall

... was a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... The ceiling was excellent; the whole building in the best repair. "What is to be done?" he asked of one of his satellites. "Well," said the man, "there is nothing for you to meddle with here, except possibly to require that the columns should be restored to the perpendicular." "Restored to the perpendicular? what do you mean?" said Verres, who knew nothing of architecture. It was explained to him that it very seldom happened that a column was absolutely true to the perpendicular. "Very good," said Verres; "we will have ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church

... of between sixteens and eighteen degrees in one instance, and in another between twenty-five and thirty degrees, with the horizontal line. But it is difficult to explain, by the action of water, how a large block of the white stone without strata is caused to overhang an almost perpendicular corner of one of the islands, which beneath that block consists of the dark ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... day had already reached the upper world. It was also brightest in the middle of the black pool, which showed that the opening through which it came must be directly above that point, and that the shaft must be perpendicular. ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe

... me that the insensibility which came upon Glaisher, and in a lesser degree upon Coxwell, when, in 1862, they ascended in a balloon to the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to the extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made. Doing it at an easy gradient and accustoming oneself to the lessened barometric pressure by slow degrees, there are no such dreadful symptoms. At the same great height I found that even without my oxygen inhaler ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... question whether that portion of the world on the equinoctial line is or is not an inaccessible desert. The Spaniards affirm that it is inhabited by numerous peoples,[3] while the ancient writers maintain that it is uninhabitable because of the perpendicular rays of the sun. I must admit, however, that even amongst ancient authorities some have been found who sought to maintain that that part of the world was habitable.[4] When I asked the sailors of the Pinzons if they had seen the polar star to the south, they said ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... portion near the summit. The stage road from Truckee to the summit runs along the base of a moraine close by the margin of the lake on one side, while on the other side, along the apparently almost perpendicular rocky face of the amphitheater, 1000 feet above the surface of the lake, the Central Pacific Railroad winds its fearful way to the same place. In the upper portion of this amphitheater large patches of snow still ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... fastened above the knee, which, as they stamped in unison, made a loud switching noise. These natives were painted from shoulder to hip, with five or six stripes rising from the breast, their faces streaked with white perpendicular lines, making it appear as the dancing of dead men's bones. For some time the dancers continued to stamp to and fro, and then, assembling at a fire that burned close by, they simultaneously sat down. Other dancers then took their places, dressed in fur cloaks, and ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... one of these wheels, or where the bank is too high, the water must be raised by the labour of man or beast. The commonest method, which is the one employed generally on the Tigris, is to raise it in skins, which are drawn up by horses, donkeys, or cattle. A recess with perpendicular sides is cut into the bank, and a wooden spindle on wooden struts is supported horizontally over the recess. A rope running over the spindle is fastened to the skin, while the funnel end of the skin is held up by a second rope, running over ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined, Embleming heaven and earth united now, Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought, 275 Filling the abyss with sun-like lightenings, And perpendicular now, and now transverse, Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass, Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart; Infinite mine of adamant and gold, 280 Valueless stones, and unimagined ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... inner peridium ashen or bluish, remote from the calcareous crust, which is extremely fragile, easily shelling off; columella indistinguishable from the base of the sporangium, thin, alutaceous; capillitium of short, generally colorless, delicate, sparingly branching or anastomosing threads perpendicular to the columella; spores black in mass, by transmitted ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... searched the tangle and must have been looking directly at the bird several seconds before cutting it out from the stalks and branches. It was a least bittern, a female. She was clinging to a perpendicular stem of elder, hand over hand, wren fashion, her long neck thrust straight into the air, absolutely ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp

... covered with a grassy sod, and large trees arose from its sloping sides. The horizontal passage was kept in a safe state by a lining of bricks, and I walked through it into the heart of the Indian sepulchre. It was a damp, dark, weird interior; but the perpendicular shaft, which ascended to the apex, kept up an uninterrupted current of air. I found it anything but a pleasant place in which to linger, and soon retraced my steps to the boat, where I once more embarked upon the ceaseless current, and kept upon my winding ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... not, maladroits," said the Duke, "that your shafts and bolts fall harmless on those ozier walls? Shoot in the air; let the arrow fall perpendicular on those within—fall as the vengeance of the saints falls—direct from heaven! Give me thy bow, Archer,—thus." He drew the bow as he sate on his steed, the arrow flashed up, and descended in the heart of the reserve, within a few feet of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... aisles, visibly in the form of a cross, though with its arms clipped down to the trunk, with a separate chancel, with a large square short tower, and with a bell-shaped spire, covered with lead and irregular in its proportions. Who does not know the low porch, the perpendicular Gothic window, the flat-roofed aisles, and the noble old grey tower of such a church as this? As regards its interior, it was dusty; it was blocked up with high-backed ugly pews; the gallery in which the children sat at the end of the church, and in which two ancient ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope

... surmounting crags and delving into valleys, so that it can be seen topping height after height as it climbs the mountain range until it becomes a mere thread and finally is lost to view in the far distance. Walking along it for some little way I found that it scaled almost perpendicular cliffs, up one of which I passed, the top of the wall here taking the form of steps, while down the opposite side the descent was so steep that for greater security I made it backwards on hands ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... surface ran the main artery of the nest. Halfway up, a flat board projected, and here the column divided for the last time, half going on directly into the nest, and the other half turning aside, skirting the board, ascending a bit of perpendicular canvas, and entering the nest from the rear. The entrance was well guarded by a veritable moat and drawbridge of living ants. A foot away, a flat mat of ants, mandibles outward, was spread, over which every passing individual stepped. Six inches farther, and ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... Generally instant death is their portion, though I recall an instance, while on an expedition against the hostile Indians thirty years ago, where a number of mules of our pack-train, loaded with ammunition, tumbled nearly five hundred feet down an almost perpendicular chasm, and yet some of them got on their feet again, and soon rejoined their companions, without having suffered ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... their branches not unfrequently dipping into the water. In some instances they grew out in nearly horizontal lines, for thirty or forty feet. The water being uniformly deepest near the shores, where the banks were highest and the nearest to a perpendicular, Hutter had found no difficulty in letting the ark drop under one of these covers, where it had been anchored with a view to conceal its position; security requiring some such precautions, in his view of the case. Once beneath the trees and bushes, a few stones fastened ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... higher of the two without much trouble except for a laborious scramble over large, rough stones, but the ascent of the other threatened to be difficult. It rose in front, a wall of splintered crag, seamed by deep gullies, for the strata was tilted up nearly perpendicular. All the gullies were climbed by expert mountaineers, but this needed a party and a rope, and the other way, round the shoulder of the great rock, was almost as hard. Festing knew the easiest plan was to descend a neighboring ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... much occupied with seeing how right it is. Good Lord, my dear, in a world given over to the first person perpendicular, can't you see the amazing beauty and rarity of your child's soul? Every day and all day long she gives herself,—to you, to me, to the kiddies, to her friends. She is the eternal mother." Mildred Lorimer was not the eternal ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... don't mean this as general, but particular Examples may be found of such pursuits: Though several also keep their perpendicular Like poplars, with good principles for roots; Yet many have a method more reticular— 'Fishers for men,' like sirens with soft lutes: For talk six times with the same single lady, And you may get ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... many of the latter were so hot that meat could be boiled in them. Salt existed in all directions in abundance and of good quality. A sulphurous spring was also discovered, bubbling out from the base of a perpendicular rock three hundred feet high, the waters of which were dark-blue and tasted like gunpowder. In short, the land presented every variety of feature calculated to charm the ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... Baillet tells us that this method of studying had been formed entirely from his own practical knowledge and hard experience: at a late period of life he had commenced his studies, and at length he imagined that he had discovered a more perpendicular mode of ascending the hill of science than by its usual circuitous windings. His work has been compared to the sounding of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... have no connecting sequence for the other players. Too restless to lose more than one bet in the place he had chosen, Judson tried to rise, tangled his feet in the chair, and fell down, laughing uproariously. When he struggled to the perpendicular again, after two or three ineffectual attempts, he was fairly behind ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde

... 11, the difference between a natural and distorted spine will be readily perceived. In Fig. 10, the curved line shows the course of the spine, occasioned by distortion; the perpendicular line, in this and Fig. 11, indicates the true direction of the spine; the horizontal lines show that one shoulder and hip are forced ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... words passed till they got back to the trees, and then turned off where the horses had previously done so. Two minutes' walk brought them to a roughly-made shed, built against the almost perpendicular side of the hill. It was built of logs, and there was nothing to show that it was inhabited. No smoke curled up from the chimney. The door and shutters were closed. Anyone who, passing through the valley, had turned among the trees and accidentally come upon it, would have taken it ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty

... crooked characters, disposed in columns, and had evidently been prepared by some person who had before him at the time a book containing various alphabets. Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes, Roman letters inverted, or placed sideways, were arranged and placed in perpendicular columns; and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle, divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Mexican Calendar, given by Humbolt, but copied in such a way as not to betray the source whence it was, derived. I ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... fog at the rate of fifty feet a second, had hurled itself at an iceberg. Had the impact been received by a perpendicular wall, the elastic resistance of bending plates and frames would have overcome the momentum with no more damage to the passengers than a severe shaking up, and to the ship than the crushing in of her bows and the killing, to a man, of the watch below. ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson

... or five hundred yards wide, and down its centre ran the stream. Close to the water's edge rose abruptly a steep rock. It was some fifty feet in height and but four or five yards across at the top. On the north and west the rocks were too perpendicular to be climbed, but the other sides had crumbled down, the stones being covered with brushwood. From the point where they were looking they could see the six horses lying among the bushes. They were evidently tightly roped, and had probably been led up there when ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty

... broad, formed by the confluence of the St. Lawrence on the right, and the smaller river, St. Charles, on the left. Far away the united streams are again divided into a northern and southern channel by the picturesque Isle of Orleans. To the right hand is seen Point Levi, and the almost perpendicular banks of the St. Lawrence; on the left the more gradually sloping shore presents a long line of intrenchments and redoubts, reaching to a distance of seven or eight miles, ending at the great chasm into which the Montmorency River hurls down its waters in a ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach

... Dinsmore and Ramona had long since been picked out by the outlaws as a defensible position in case of need. The ledge that ran up to it on the right offered no cover for attackers. It was scarcely three feet wide, and above and below it the wall was for practical purposes perpendicular. In anticipation of a day when his gang might be rounded up by a posse, Pete Dinsmore had gone over the path and flung down into the gulch every bit of quartz big enough to shelter ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine

... in error touching this matter, except perhaps by those who know how perseveringly these little Eels make their way up every stream, ditch, and driblet of water into which they can gain access. They penetrate into the water-pipes and pumps; they climb up the perpendicular faces of the rocks and weirs which obstruct the course of the rivers, even when they are only moist—adhering to the moss ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... the stile. The footprints of the two men were here very clearly impressed in the thin but soft soil, and they all took care not to trample on the tracks. They followed the prints closely, and found that they led straight to the edge of a cliff forming a sheer precipice, almost perpendicular, at the foot of which the sea, some two hundred feet below, ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... system of signals and passwords, and with a retreat in the mountains, known as the 'Pocket,' so inaccessible to any but themselves that no one as yet has been able even to definitely locate it—a sort of basin walled about by perpendicular rocks. The leader is a man of mixed blood, who has travelled in all countries and knows many dark secrets, and whose power lies mainly in the mystery with which he surrounds himself. No one knows who he is, but many of his men believe him to be the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... you think I managed to do this at last? A look at my bedraggled, lime-covered clothes may give you some idea. I cut a passage for myself up those perpendicular walls as the boy did up the face of the natural bridge in Virginia. Do you remember that old story in the Reader? It came to me like an inspiration as I stood looking up from below, and though I knew that I should have to ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... two steep hills, one of which is crowned with the woods of Blaise Castle, and the other with a group of buildings consisting of the parish church, a charming little Gothic structure known as "The Hall," and the national schoolhouse. The church is a fine perpendicular edifice of considerable antiquity, with a square tower surmounted, in true West of England style, by a small turret, having a tiny Gothic spire at one corner. The parishioners are proud of their church, and with justice. It contains some good stained-glass windows, two interesting mediaeval monuments, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... meet or are "coupled" at the ridge, this coupling being managed not by rusty iron, but by great solid pins of oak. A roof of oaken wattles was laid across these, till within eleven or twelve feet of the ground, and from the ground upwards a stone wall was raised, as perpendicular as was found practicable, towards these overhang-wattles, this wall being roughly "pointed" with sand and clay and lime. Now into and upon the roof was woven and intertwisted a covering of thatch, that defied all winds and weathers, and ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton

... help fixing myself on the banks of the lake for several minutes, till this apparition was lost, and confounded with the shades of night. Looking round, I shuddered at a craggy mountain, clothed in dark forests and almost perpendicular, that was absolutely to be surmounted before we could arrive at Wallersee. No house, not even a shed appearing, we were forced to ascend the peak, and ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... roads is that which leads from the province of Aconcagua in Chili to Cujo, running along the deep ravines of the rivers Chillan and Mendoza, bordered on one side by deep precipices overhanging these rivers, and on the other by lofty and almost perpendicular mountains. Both of these rivers derive their origin from the Alpine vallies of the Andes, the former running westwards to the Pacific; while the latter takes a much longer course towards the Southern Atlantic. This road requires at least eight days journey to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr

... extent, or about three hundred and fifty yards in diameter. In the center was a lake, also circular. The broad belt of shore around this lake was covered with rich grass, level as a bowling green, and all this again was surrounded by a nearly perpendicular cliff, down which indeed he had fallen. This cliff was thickly clothed with ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade

... geologists, as well as the uniform material of which it is composed. It is all of a calcareous nature, but differing in condition from any of the other islands of the same substance. The strata are exposed in the perpendicular cliffs on the sea-shore in numerous precipices, from a hundred feet to minor altitudes, and are composed either of the most minute shells, or of parts of shells so triturated that they scarcely indicate their origin. In some places, however, there are laminae ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane

... made little progress. The bars fitted so closely into the holes that there was but a small quantity of lead, and without a hammer and chisel it seemed impossible to make the hole sufficiently large to move the bars so as to allow Brown to exert his strength upon them. If the two centre perpendicular bars could be got out, the lowest horizontal bar might be sent up. This would afford ample room for the stoutest of ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston

... at him in admiration, leaned out of the perpendicular, and promptly drew from his trousers' pocket a roll of stupendous proportions. Wetting his thumb, he began to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... which may be used for bad purposes, and says, "Somehow, when I take a little, it don't seem to go right." Again he gives a vacant look at his friends, gets up, resting his hands on the table, endeavours to keep a perpendicular, but declares himself so debilitated by his sleep that he must wait a little longer. Sinking back upon the settee, he exclaims, "You had better send that nigger to his cabin." This was carrying the amusement a little beyond Marston's own "gauge," and it being declared time to adjourn, preparations ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... of Herman Mordaunt's sleigh, on the other side of the barrier, but could see nothing. The broken cakes, pressed upon by millions of tons weight above, had risen fully ten feet, into an inclination that was nearly perpendicular; rendering crossing it next to impossible, even to one a-foot. Then came Herman Mordaunt's voice, filled with paternal agony, and human grief, to increase the ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... admitted, the cannon ought to be pointed to the zenith of the place. Its fire, therefore, will be perpendicular to the plane of the horizon; and the projectile will soonest pass beyond the range of the terrestrial attraction. But, in order that the moon should reach the zenith of a given place, it is necessary that the place ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... formation, may be conveniently given here. On the south side of the harbour, there is a nearly level plain (mentioned in the First Chapter) about seven miles long, and three or four miles wide, estimated at ninety feet in height, and bordered by perpendicular cliffs, of which a section is represented ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin

... weight, in addition to its own, but he pushed with his hands against the ceiling, increasing the downward pressure on the rod, which was only acted upon as a powerful spring would have been, but still maintaining its perpendicular position concentric to the inner surface of the helices. I held,' says the reporter, 'an iron rod in my hand, with the end of which I touched that of the suspended rod. I could not detach it by pulling or jerking, and could only alter its position so as to cause ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various

... means of accomplishing his designs. He invited the entire Mam-luk corps to a banquet, which he proposed to give in the Citadel Palace in honour of the departure of Tussun Pasha for Mecca. This palace is built upon a rock, and is reached by perpendicular paths. On May 1st, the day fixed upon for the festivity, Mehemet Ali received his guests in great splendour and with a cordiality calculated to dispel any suspicions the Mamluks might have entertained. At the conclusion of the banquet, as they were returning home, they were fired upon ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... appreciable mutual disturbance, thus plainly showing that at an interval of only 157,250 miles their attractive power was virtually inoperative. Signs of internal agitation, however, were not wanting. Each fragment threw out a short tail in a direction perpendicular to the line joining their centres, and each developed a bright nucleus, although the original comet had exhibited neither of these signs of cometary vitality. A singular interchange of brilliancy was, besides, observed to take place between the coupled objects, each of which alternately ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... results. The horizontal arrangement of the prisms, which we had found to prevail in vertical columns, was here modified to suit the altered conditions of the case, and the axes of the prisms changed their inclination so as to be always perpendicular to the surface on which the ice lay, as far as could be determined by the eye. Thus, in following the many changes of inclination of the wall, the axes of the prisms stood at many different angles with the vertical, from a horizontal ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... the hands of his bitterest foes. We pushed on as fast as the rugged nature of the country would allow us to move; crossing valleys and streams, and climbing mountains, till we arrived at the foot of a lofty and perfectly perpendicular precipice, along the foot of which we moved for some distance. As I looked up, I saw that stones hurled from the summit would completely have annihilated us. Almost at right angles from the cliff arose another hill, up which we now began to climb. On reaching the summit, we turned ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston

... letter, recognizing the characteristic broad margins and the repressed rounded perpendicular hand with its supreme effort after significance, and his thought reflected a tinge of his old amused curiosity. It was only a reflection, and yet it distinctly embodied the idea that he might be on the brink of a further discovery. He glanced at Janet again: her hands ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... in Zazen—that is to say, the crossed-leg sitting, and the half crossed-leg sitting. Seat yourself on a thick cushion, putting it right under your haunch. Keep your body so erect that the tip of the nose and the navel are in one perpendicular line, and both ears and shoulders are in the same plane. Then place the right foot upon the left thigh, the left foot on the right thigh, so as the legs come across each other. Next put your right hand ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... one axis on which it can revolve in equilibrio. Suppose the axis of the earth to shift forty-five degrees; then cut it into one hundred and eighty slices, making every section in the plane of a circle of latitude, perpendicular to the axis: every one of these slices, except the equatorial one, would be unbalanced, as there would be more matter on one side of its axis than on the other. There could be but one diameter drawn ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... far back and low down on their heads, and the outer rims are very much crumpled; also they have very high and prominent cheek-bones, whilst one side of the face is different from the other. The backs of many murderers' heads are nearly perpendicular, or, if anything, rather inclined to recede than otherwise—they seldom project—whilst the forehead is ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... first two fingers. (TWO) Without changing the grasp of the right hand, place the piece on the right shoulder, barrel up and inclined at an angle of about 45 deg. from the horizontal, trigger guard in the hollow of the shoulder, right elbow near the side, the piece in a vertical plane perpendicular to the front; carry the left hand, thumb and fingers extended and joined, to the small of the stock, tip of the forefinger touching the cocking piece, wrist straight and elbow down. (THREE) Drop the left hand by ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... put off however, the water had reached the fires; there was a violent lurch, the ship had heeled completely over, washing many overboard, and of course causing a great confusion among those who had been steady before, and making the deck almost perpendicular. The captain, however, succeeded in lowering another boat, and putting into it, as he trusted, the few remaining women, the Bishop, and most of the men. This was, of course, that which had safely reached Corncastle, and of which he only now heard. The last boat ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... no human right to go before supper," said Ivan Petrovitch as he saw him off. "It's extremely perpendicular on your part. Well, now, perform!" he added, addressing Pava in ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... to their journey's end, on the "Flyer," and then rest in some palatial hotel at last. Each mounted his horse, taking with them by way of baggage all that was necessary for the trip,—tent, provisions, clothing and Bibles. They plodded through miry swamps, they climbed up and down almost perpendicular ledges, and cut their way through canebrakes with a hatchet. When they had creeks to cross they swam their horses. At night they camped, often in the rain and sometimes without food. More than once they ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker

... is impossible. A study of the map, with the figures showing elevations, will give you a better idea of it than a long verbal description. It is an extraordinarily desolate scene. A few wild goats scramble over the rocks, or rush down the nearly perpendicular cliff; occasionally a solitary bird raises its harsh note; the wind howls fiercely; and as you lie under the lee of a mass of lava, taking in the scene and picking out the details as the rising sun brings them ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... every point of the surface, we have what is called an equipotential surface. The difference of potential between any two points is called an electromotive force. The lines of force are necessarily perpendicular to the surface. When the lines of force and the equipotential surfaces are straight, parallel, and equidistant, we have a uniform field. The intensity of the field is shown by the number of lines passing through unit area, and the rate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various

... terrace-form just below on the bluff, and protected by solid walls. From this curious pueblo another transition takes us to the extraordinary cliff-houses found in the Chelly, Mancos, and McElmo canons, and elsewhere,—veritable human eyries perched in crevices or clefts of the perpendicular rock, accessible only by dint of a toilsome and perilous climb; places of refuge, perhaps for fragments of tribes overwhelmed by more barbarous invaders, yet showing in their dwelling-rooms and estufas marks of careful building and ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... enemies of value in keeping these species in control. This collection was arranged in a specially designed case having a series of three nearly horizontal trays thirty-seven and one-half inches by eighteen and one-half inches upon each side, and an elevated central portion bearing two nearly perpendicular ones upon each side, the middle being occupied by a glass case containing an attractive natural group. A brief account of the exhibit under appropriate heads is ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis

... Charmian, judicially, "but you have not been false, and I am not going to let you say so. If you don't promise not to, I will tell Mr. Ludlow myself that you were always perfectly true, and you couldn't help being true, any more than a—a broomstick, or anything else that is perpendicular. Now, will ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells

... 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 ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... forewoman, a pinched perpendicular figure, dropped the condemned structure of wire and net on the table at Lily's side, and passed on to the next figure in ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... shrewdest species of all those I know personally. It has the strange habit of digging out deep and spacious burrows for concealment, in the perpendicular sandy banks of southern Florida rivers where the deep water comes right up to the shore. Starting well under low-water mark, the crock digs in the yielding sand, straight into the bank, a roomy subterranean chamber. In this ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... more considerable at these islands, than at any other of my discoveries in this ocean, that lie within the tropics. At Annamooka it is high water, on the full and change days, nearly at six o'clock; and the tide rises and falls there, upon a perpendicular, about six feet. In the harbour of Tongataboo, it is high water on the full and change days, at fifty minutes past six. The tide rises and falls on those days, four feet nine inches, and three feet six inches at the Quadratures. In the channels between the islands, which lie in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... nearly to the end of Great Island, which is about four miles across, he sees rising before him, from the sea, a bold romantic point of land, uplifting a crown of rich evergreen and forest trees over shores of perpendicular rock. This is ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... standard is an oily, shining black, and as far as the conformation of the head and face is concerned and the relative proportion of nervous matter outside of the cranium to the quantity of cerebral matter within it, is found between the simiadiae[257] and the Caucasian. Thus, in the typical negro, a perpendicular line, let fall from the forehead, cuts off a large portion of the face, throwing the mouth, the thick lips, and the projecting teeth anterior to the cranium, but not the entire face, as in the lower animals and monkey tribes. When all, or a greater part of the face is thrown anterior to the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... and unique instrument, horizontal and perpendicular Grand, five octaves, hammerless action, including keyboard, pedals, gong, peal of bells, ophicleide stop, and all the newest improvements, can be seen at Messrs. SPLITTE AND SON's Establishment, High Holborn, and purchased ON THE FIFTY YEARS' ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various

... off with a sirocco from the south-west, ('a Boston east wind boiled,' and the only unpleasant summer wind on the coast,) after which it stopped short; the sand and the orange blossoms settled again, and every thing hung perpendicular. The next morning a puff came up from the south in a very blustering manner, as though it had an immense capital to back it, but proved very short-winded. Our little craft thinking to beat us, shook its sails out right and left, and dashed out of the harbor, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... absolutely remote in their kind. Let it be observed, the more remote in their nature, the greater is the excellence of these pieces. As a proof of this, I remember a famous caricatura of a certain Italian singer, that struck at first sight, which consisted only of a straight perpendicular stroke, with a dot over. As to the French word outre, it is different from the rest, and signifies nothing more than the exaggerated outlines of a figure, all the parts of which may be, in other respects, a perfect and true picture of nature. A giant or a dwarf may be called ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... room stood an iron camp-bed without curtains. There, on a worn mattress, lay King Friedrich, the terror of Europe, without coverlet, in an old blue roquelaure. He had a big cocked-hat, with a white feather [hat aged, worn soft as duffel, equal to most caps; "feather" is not perpendicular, but horizontal, round the inside of the brim], ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... square portion over the fire-place, which was once adorned with a gay paper, but whose brilliancy has long been defaced by smoke and grease. A broken pipe or two, a couple of irons, and a brass candlestick whose shaft leans considerably out of the perpendicular, occupy the mantelpiece. An old rocking-chair and two or three common ones extremely infirm on their legs, complete the furniture. The walls are nearly bare of ornament; the exceptions being a highly-coloured print of a horse-race, and a sampler worked by Betty, ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson

... of earth for a few minutes and then passed off the sun again, now broke upon them in a heavy shower. They saw the rain first falling on Chellaston Mountain, which was only about a quarter of a mile distant, falling in the sunshine like perpendicular rays of misty light; then it swept down upon them; but so bright was the sunshine the while that it took them a few minutes to realise that this dazzling shower could actually be wet. Its drenching character was made apparent by the sight of field labourers running to a great spreading ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... at our fiery chariot—so strange a development of the world for them; not the dogs that yelp, and are furious if we don't realize that they're frightening us. No, but the horrid little jeering boys, who run beside the car at their best speed when we're forging up perpendicular hills on our lowest. These are the creatures I would wipe out of existence with one fierce wish, if I had it in me. To think that they—they—should have the power to humiliate us. I don't get back my self-respect till we're on a level, or my joie de vivre until we're shooting downhill, ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... countless deep-worn ravines. The centre of the island has been hollowed out by the crater of the volcano into a capacious basin, almost circular, and, excepting to the south, where there is a huge cleft or rent, its sides or edges rise almost perpendicular full eight hundred feet from the base. After some trouble, carefully backing in with the swell, a landing was effected on the south side, when a most extraordinary sight was displayed to our view. Before us, in the hollow of the basin, was a lake of yellow liquid, smoking hot, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... strands of a wild grapevine, severed by his knife, hung dangling below his eyrie, betraying his mode of ascent. He had gone up hand over hand, aided by his powerful shoulder muscles and by his feet, which must have stuck like the feet of flies to the perpendicular ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... accompanied with snow and sleet, that they were steering directly towards it, and did not see it till it was at a less distance than that of a mile. Captain Cook judged it to be about fifty feet high, and half a mile in circuit. It was flat at the top, and its sides rose in a perpendicular direction, against which the sea broke to a great height. The weather continuing to be hazy, the captain, on account of the ice islands, was obliged to proceed with the utmost caution. Six of them were passed on the 12th, some of which were nearly two miles in ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... cased—can not be wholly made a matter of blame to the original builders. For it is clear that some finish, whether a crown like those at Newcastle and Edinburgh or any other, was intended. Still the proportion which is solemn in Romanesque becomes squat in perpendicular, and, if York has never received its last finish, Lincoln has lost the last finish which it received. Surely no one who is not locally sworn to the honor of York can doubt about preferring the noble central tower of Lincoln, soaring still, even tho shorn of its spire. The eastern transept, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... the "Latter-Day Pamphlets" he likened Christianity to a great tree, sprung from the seed of Nazareth, and since fed by the opulences of fifty generations; which now is perishing at the root, and sways to and fro ever farther and farther from the perpendicular; and which in the end must come down, and leave to those who found shelter beneath it and thought it infinite, a wholesome view of the upper eternal lights. And his contempt for controversial or dogmatic theology may be gauged by his reply to one who asked ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote

... a distinctly perplexing moment, hard upon the nerves. The tomb was empty, except for a few bones that might have been anything huddled at the bottom, and Mrs. Portheris sat down on the lower end of it. "I really do not feel able to go any further," she said; "the ascent is so perpendicular." ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... she could not have been more helpless against the argument that lay in it. But she was permitted to move now, and her husband never again made any reference to what had occurred this morning. He knew the force of his own words. If this white-handed man with the perpendicular profile had been sent to govern a difficult colony, he might have won reputation among his contemporaries. He had certainly ability, would have understood that it was safer to exterminate than to cajole superseded ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... short distance from Fort Bridger; the overland road passes by their side. They consist of a sandstone bluff, reddish-brown in color, rising with the abruptness of a pile of masonry from the perfectly level plain, carved along its perpendicular face into a series of partially connected religious edifices, the most remarkable of which is a cathedral as colossal as St. Peter's, and completely relieved from the bluff on all sides save the rear, where a portico joins it with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... looked up brightly at the Prince. Brightly, but the perpendicular line of perplexity between his brows was not smoothed away. He laughed, and even then it did not. But he accepted ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... there are whole symphonies of sound. The winds smites the tree-tops over our heads, a surf-like roar comes up the slope, and the yellow pine-needles fall across the deepest darks as motes sail down a sunbeam. One wearies of the constant perpendicular, always these stiff, columnar lines, varied only by the melancholy incline where some great pine-chieftain is leaning to his fall supported in the arms of his comrades, or by the tragic prostration of the 'down timber'—beautiful ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... I saw the moon appear. It grew brighter and brighter, and I saw the land, dead to leeward of us, not three hundred yards away. It was a cruel sight—black rock and bitter snow, with cliffs so perpendicular that the Elsinore could have laid alongside of them in deep water, with great gashes and fissures, and with great surges thundering and spouting along ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... in the dark, narrow streets, where the rivers flow under the windows of empty dwellings; he might see them tottering, and threatening downfall upon each other—leaning over and casting shadows, black and mysterious upon the water—no line perpendicular, no line horizontal, the very beau-ideal of picturesque decay—buildings of which Longfellow might have sung ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn

... bad, but remained quite silent, occupied with her own thoughts. At length Tozer stopped and put her down. It was a place upon the edge of a cliff on the shore of the lake, and as much as a mile from the house. The cliff was almost fifty feet high, and was perpendicular. All around was the thick forest, and it was unlikely that such ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille

... the most strenuous days I ever had in the islands, as the road—and what a road!—constantly led up and down the steepest slopes. It seemed to me we were climbing perpendicular mountains all day long, and I had many an opportunity of admiring the agility of my companions. I am a fair walker myself, but I had to crawl on my hands and knees in many spots where they jumped from a stone ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... is thirty-five feet wide and thirty feet high, and is situated at the foot of a perpendicular cliff, and far above the water-level of Bryant. Just within the entrance it expands to sixty or seventy feet, with a height of about fifty feet; and this part of the cave has been used by the citizens of the county as a place for holding camp-meeting. I estimated ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen

... an explorer of unknown regions, a beauty-worshipper at a shrine whose pearly, sun-kissed portals open to him alone. People travel thousands of miles horizontally to rest their eyes on scenes infinitely less novel, beautiful and grand than one perpendicular mile of vantage would open to them, little matter ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... body of water, which comprehends, with constant accumulations from the tributaries on the way, the overflowings of Lakes Erie, Superior, Michigan, and Huron. The astonishing effect of such a body of water, dashed abruptly over a precipice of 150 perpendicular feet, may be conceived; such is the momentum of this immense volume of fluid, that, when it strikes the rocky bed at the base of the cataract, it rebounds in a thick cloud of vapour—and when the sun's rays intercept it, as was the case when I arrived there, a beautiful ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell

... Welsted sink, His merits balanced, you shall find The laureate leaves him far behind; Concannen, more aspiring bard, Soars downwards deeper by a yard; Smart Jemmy Moor with vigour drops; The rest pursue as thick as hops. With heads to point, the gulf they enter, Linked perpendicular to the centre; And, as their heels elated rise, Their heads attempt ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... or five villages could be made out; their attention, however, was chiefly directed to the object of their journey. Some three hundred feet below the spot where they stood a rock jutted out from the hillside, and extended some five or six hundred feet into the valley. Its sides were perpendicular save where it stood out from the hill. Here a strong wall some forty feet high ran across it; two square towers stood at the angles, but there was no gateway visible. The wall was continued right round the top of the rock, which was crossed by two other walls each defended by flanking ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty

... further heed to them, Roger and his companion now directed their whole attention to the work of climbing. At times they came on perpendicular precipices, and had to make long detours to surmount them. After some hours' labor they reached the snow. They were now near a shoulder between two lofty peaks, and after an hour's climbing stood on its crest. The Aztecs were now mere ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty

... to admit our bodies; but on riding five miles southward to Oakey creek we found a low ridge extending some miles on its left bank which promised many openings. We soon found one which I considered to be of the right sort, namely a perpendicular crevice with red tuff about the sides. Being provided with candles and ropes we descended perpendicularly first, about six fathoms to one stage, then obliquely, about half as far to a sort of floor of red earth; Mr. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... intermediate bars were heated and expanded, and the nuts screwed up as before. The lamps being again withdrawn, they contracted in cooling, and the walls were further drawn together. This process was continually repeated, until at length the walls were restored to their perpendicular position. The gallery may still be seen with the bars extending across it, and binding together its ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... had lingered in the school yard until the other girls were out of sight, then climbing the almost perpendicular hill so rapidly that she arrived on the crest with little breath and a pain in her side, she had sauntered deliberately up and down before the imposing homes of her schoolmates, staring at them with ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... ISLAND OF LAMBAY.—In the Irish Sea, a few miles from the southeast coast of Ireland, is the Island of Lambay, owned by Cecil Baring, Esq. The island is precisely one square mile in area, and some of its sea frontage terminates in perpendicular cliffs. In many ways the island is of unusual interest to zoologists, and its fauna has been well set forth ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... a wide lagoon, which narrowed towards the southern end, where a perpendicular cliff of some extent rose directly out of the water, its summit covered with trees. Both Owen and Dan were of opinion that this formed one end of the channel leading to the sea. No boats or canoes could be discovered on the beach. Further along it to the northward ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston

... myself on the projecture of a rock. Above and below, the hill-side was nearly perpendicular. Opposite, and at the distance of fifteen or twenty yards, was a similar ascent. At the bottom was a glen, cold, narrow, and obscure. This projecture, which served as a kind of vestibule to the cave, was connected with a ledge, by which, though not without peril and toil, I was conducted ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... about twelve degrees, it will become necessary to fill the antarctic reservoir in June and the Arctic Ocean in December, in order to check the straightening, since otherwise it might get beyond the perpendicular and swing the other way. When this motion is completely arrested, I suggest that we blow up the Aleutian Isles and enlarge Bering Strait, so as to allow what corresponds to the Atlantic Gulf Stream in the Pacific to enter the Arctic Archipelago, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... which habitually swim in large bodies of water, having need of seeing laterally, have, in fact, their eyes placed on the sides of the head. Their bodies, more or less flattened according to the species, have their sides perpendicular to the plane of the water, and their eyes are placed in such a way that there is an eye on each flattened side. But those fishes whose habits place them under the necessity of constantly approaching the shores, and especially the shelving ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... any prospect of a termination to the storm. Chilled through, my tattered clothing saturated, I saw before me a night of horrors unless I returned to my fire. The scramble up the side of the rocky canyon in many places nearly perpendicular, was the hardest work of my journey. Often while clinging to the jutting rocks with hands and feet, to reach a shelving projection, my grasp would unclose and I would slide many feet down the sharp declivity. It was night when, sore ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts

... for any Sunday—whence the eyes and mind of Cosmo turned to the remnants of night that banded the street, and from them he sank into metaphysics, chequered with the champing clank of the bits, the voices of the ostlers, passengers, and guard, and the perpendicular silence of the coachman, who sat like a statue ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... the fine perpendicular church standing back from the road, with its churchyard about it; and just beyond it, he turned, his pace involuntarily slackening, to look at a small gabled house, surrounded by a garden, and overhung by a splendid lime ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... miles of the main valley, which varies in width from three quarters of a mile to a mile and a half, the walls on either side are from two thousand to nearly five thousand feet above the road, and are nearly perpendicular. From these walls, rocky splinters a thousand feet in height start up, and every winter drop a few hundred tons of granite, to adorn the base of the rampart with ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... among it that overtopped the firs, and yet its diameter was so small that it looked no larger than a pole; and the supporting boughs of the firs being now removed it could not uphold itself, but bent so much from the perpendicular as to appear incapable of withstanding a gale. The bark of the oak, when stripped and stacked, requires fine weather to dry it, much the same as hay, so that a wet season like 1879 ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... figure; old indeed, and grey-haired, but with every muscle rendered as tough as whip-cord by constant exercise. He was dressed carelessly, and more like a Frenchman than an Englishman of the period, while, from his hard features and perpendicular rigidity of stature, he bore some resemblance to a Swiss officer of the guards, who had resided some time at Paris, and caught the costume, but not the ease or manner of its inhabitants. The truth was, that his language and ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... didn't know anything, how to get out of it then, so I piled in, "for," says I to myself, "never let on to any one that you don't know anything, but make them believe that you do know all about it." So says I to him, takin' up me shillalah this way (holding a very crooked stick perpendicular), "We'll take that for the straight line of the earth's equator"—how's that for gehography? (to the audience). Ah, that was straight till the other day I bent it in an argument. "Wery good," says he. "Well," says I, "now the sun rises ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... covered with nothing but flowering thyme and rounded pebbles. There was ample scope for every imaginable polygon; trapezes and triangles could be combined in all sorts of ways. The inaccessible distances had ample elbow-room; and there was even an old ruin, once a pigeon-house, that lent its perpendicular to the graphometer's performances. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... the rockets increased and the mighty ship quivered as its plummeting descent was checked slightly. Tom quickly adjusted the stabilizer trim tabs to keep the ship perpendicular to the ground, then watched the stern scanner carefully as the huge blast-pitted concrete ramp loomed ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell

... event when Cutty arrived there would be no Kitty Conover. Something that would sound unusual to Cutty and accidental to Karlov. She hit upon it. She seized a plank from her barricade, raised it to a perpendicular position, then flung it down violently. Would Cutty hear and comprehend that she was warning him? As a matter of fact, Cutty never heard the crash, for at that particular minute he was standing up to get the kinks ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... Barbara by steamer and greatly enjoyed the sail. Finding no pier upon our arrival, we had to descend an almost perpendicular ladder to a small boat. In this apparently perilous process, the boatmen were actively assisted by Captain Johnson, whose mellow toned voice softened and cheered the transit. In the descent, a woman dropped her baby ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms

... object that I have ever seen, either abroad or at home. Neither the Acropolis of Athens, nor the Larissa of Argos, nor even Gibraltar, can enter into the remotest competition with this gigantic citadel.' Indeed, when a man is aware of the impression produced by a perpendicular rock over six hundred feet high, he may judge of the stupendous effect from a citadel rising almost insulated in the centre of a plain, sloping to the sea, and ascending to the height of nineteen ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... that are not screened in this manner by trees planted between the stream and them. But as he drifted farther down, before he reached the bridge, the west front would have burst upon him, quite new, exceedingly rich and proud, a strict example, one may believe, of the Perpendicular, and of what was for the first time, and for a moment only, a true English Gothic. It would have stood out before him, catching the sun of the afternoon in its maze of glass. It would have seemed a thing to endure; within his lifetime it was to ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... variability in the degree and manner in which chloroform renders the glands insensible to the subsequent action of meat. In the plant last referred to, which had been exposed for 2 m. to three drops of chloroform, some few tentacles curved up only to a perpendicular position, and particles of meat were placed on their glands; this caused them in 5 m. to begin moving, but they moved so slowly that they did not reach the centre until 1 hr. 30 m. had elapsed. Another ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... growing dim and indistinct, the sun was sinking, and the cloud, that had at first shown only a golden border, was lifting tall perpendicular masses, while the tossing of the little boat became more and more distressing. Anxiety and sense of responsibility kept Hubert from feeling physical discomfort; but Vera began to cry, and to declare that it would be the death of her if she ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... vertical &c adj.; stand up, stand on end, stand erect, stand upright; stick up, cock up. render vertical &c adj.; set up, stick up, raise up, cock up; erect, rear, raise on its legs. Adj. vertical, upright, erect, perpendicular, plumb, normal, straight, bolt, upright; rampant; standing up &c v.; rectangular, orthogonal &c 216.1. Adv. vertically &c adj.; up, on end; up on end, right on end; a plomb [Fr.], endwise; one one's legs; at ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... very bluff through which the river had cut its bed was formed of the debris it had thrown off, and constituted a bulwark protecting its flank. Farther up-stream the slope, became steeper, then changed to a rugged perpendicular face showing marks of recent cleavage. This palisade extended on and on, around the nearest bend, following the contour of the Salmon as far as they could see. The sun was reflected from its myriad angles and facets in splendid iridescence. Mammoth caves and caverns gaped. In spots ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... line 545. Many of the houses in Old Edinburgh are built to a great height, so that the common stairs leading up among a group of them have sometimes been called 'perpendicular streets.' Pitch, meaning 'height,' is taken from hawking, the height to which a bird rose depending largely on the pitch ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... been bent." Most travellers must remember the entrance to the valley of Cluse, from the plain of Bonneville, on the road from Geneva to Chamouni. They remember that immediately after entering it they find a great precipice on their left, not less than two thousand feet in perpendicular height. That precipice is formed by beds of limestone bent like a rainbow, as in Fig. 10. Their edges constitute the cliff; the flat arch which they form with their backs is covered with pine forests and meadows, extending for ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... place make a round hole through which a stem of corresponding diameter can be firmly introduced. If a similar opening is made in a second upright, the horizontal stem can be run through both. Gates, closing perpendicularly or horizontally in frames moving without friction on a perpendicular or horizontal axis, can be ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... melancholy scenes with him; I feel that. Do you remember, when we were in Switzerland together, how, as we wound down the Susten and the Grimsel passes, with the perpendicular cliffs some thousand feet above us, and a torrent as many feet below, we used to shudder at the thought of two men, wrestling upon that dizzy verge, and striving to throw each other over! I almost imagine that I am about to engage in such a strife now, with the additional horror that the contest ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... Eh? (He disengages himself) Why should I not speak to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange? (He points his finger) I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his eye. Retaining the perpendicular. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... convenience dear. He had begged a dust-sheet from the housekeeper with which to cover his bed during the day, and regularly, before retiring, shook an ounce of soot out of his window. The bed, by the way, was overhung by the wall, which, for some reason best known to those who built it, deserted the perpendicular for an angle of forty-five, three inches from Anthony's nose. The candlestick had seen merrier days: that there might be no doubt about the matter, it said as much, announcing in so many words that it was ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... "General Staff," and adorned with an atmospheric double column of facetious Japanese. Anthony always handed them to Tana without a smile; hours afterward the recipient could be found puzzling over them in the kitchen and declaring earnestly that the perpendicular symbols were not ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... canoe-rest, on which the daubs of red-ochre, and the roots of trees used to fasten or tie it together appeared fresh. A canoe-rest is simply a few beams, supported horizontally, about five feet from the ground, by perpendicular posts. A party with two canoes, when descending from the interior to the sea-coast, through such a part of the country as this, where there are troublesome portages, leave one canoe resting, bottom up, on this kind of frame, to protect it from ...
— Report of Mr. W. E. Cormack's journey in search of the Red Indians - in Newfoundland • W. E. Cormack

... the seven heavenly planets by the ancient Chaldaeans; and that the meanest capacities might be informed of this, just at the central perpendicular line, on the chapter of the first pillar, which was of sapphire, stood the image of Saturn in elutian (Motteux reads 'Eliacim.') lead, with his scythe in his hand, and at his feet a crane of gold, very artfully enamelled, according to the native hue ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... in connection with the keyboard, are attached to a loop of wire called the pallet-eye, fastened to the movable end of the pallet. A piece of wire is placed on each side of every pallet to steady it and keep it in the perpendicular during its ascent and descent, and every pallet is covered at top with soft leather, to make it fit closely and work quietly. When P is pulled down (Fig. 1) the pallet C descends, and air from the wind-chest A rushes through D into the pipe over it. But the slider f is a narrow strip ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller

... forms grand masses of foliage which turn a beautiful golden yellow in autumn; and the Black Poplar with its perpendicular leaves, rustling and trembling with every breath of wind, towers over ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock

... and one soon becomes familiar with the very low platforms of the stations that are raised scarcely above the rails. The porters wear blue smocks and trousers of the same material, secured at the waist by a belt of perpendicular red and black stripes. The railway carriages have always two foot-boards, and the doors besides the usual handles have a second one half-way down the panels presumably for additional security. It is really in the nature of a bolt that turns on a pivot and falls into ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home

... terrific gorge over a thousand feet deep, where the purple shadows look like shrouded phantoms hastening out of sight. This abyss is crossed by means of extraordinary engineering skill, much of the roadway along the nearly perpendicular side of the ravine having been hewn out of the solid rock. To accomplish this it was necessary at first to suspend workmen by ropes over the brow of the cliffs, lowering them down until they were opposite the point to ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... scarcely fifty years, and the tower of Magdalen had just risen to rival its beauty; Duke Humfrey's Library and the Divinity School were still in their first glory, and the monks of St. Frideswide were contemplating transforming the choir of their church into the splendid Perpendicular such as Bray had achieved at Westminster and Windsor for Henry VII. But Erasmus tells us nothing of what he saw; only what he heard and said. This lack of enjoyment in Nature, lack of interest in topography and archaeology, was ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... same straight line are parallel." The evidence given is: "If they are not parallel, they will, if sufficiently produced, meet at some point, which is impossible, because from a given point without a straight line but one perpendicular can be drawn." Is this evidence sufficient to constitute proof? Does it convince you? Why, ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon

... observes the Rev. Mr. Nightingale, "I should conceive would now be required to repair this venerable part of St. Saviour's Church in such a manner as is absolutely necessary. The pillars have in a great degree lost their perpendicular position: the mouldings and mullions of the windows are distorted in the most shameful manner; the walls are rapidly hastening to their final decay; and the whole place appears to be destined to become once more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various

... neat geometrical pattern of little scars, perpendicular on the forehead, horizontal on the cheeks and in concentric circles on the chest (done with loving care and a knife, in his infancy, by his papa) said only "Ptwack" as he chewed a mouthful of coffee-beans and hide. ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... or Tarpei'us Mons, a hill at Rome, about eighty feet in perpendicular height, whence the Romans ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... made a detour to avoid some bare, rocky island. Several of these islands were quite columnar,—being evidently the emerged capitals of basaltic prisms, like the other uplifts on the banks. A fine instance of this formation was the stately and perpendicular "Rooster Rock" on the Oregon side, but not far from Cape Horn. Still another was called "Lone Rock," and rose from the middle of the river. These came upon our view within the first hour after breakfast, in company with a slender, but graceful stream, which fell ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... of Clyde, 10 m. W. of Girvan, Ayrshire, Scotland. It is of conoidal form, with an irregular elliptic base, and rises abruptly to a height of 1114 ft. The only side from which the rock can be ascended is the east; the other sides being for the most part perpendicular, and generally presenting lofty columnar forms, though not so regular as those of Staffa. This island is composed of micro-granite with riebeckite, of great interest on account of the rare occurrence of this type in Britain. It is comparatively ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... you have no doubt already surmised to be a clear-cut line of dense fog, due to the fact that a perpendicular plane of extremely cold air in that situation cuts through an atmosphere which, on both sides of this sheet of frigid air, is exceedingly warm, and laden with moisture to the saturation-point. This curtain of ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... Weapons and bits of weapons and pieces of human bodies are scattered through it like plums. The so-called trench may be no more than a yoked line of shell holes converted with dainty toil and loss to a more perpendicular angle. And the tangled pattern of craters is itself pocked with the smaller dents of bombs. There are three grades of holes—great mine craters that look like an earth convulsion themselves, pitted with shell holes, which in turn are dimpled by bombs. Imagine a place like the Ypres salient, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... of vegetation or animal life, or by the efforts of man, by gravitation constantly tends to the common centre of attraction; and the great reason of the duration of the pyramid above all other forms is, that it is most fitted to resist the force of gravitation. The arch, the pillar, and all perpendicular constructions, are liable to fall when a degradation from chemical or mechanical causes takes place in their inferior parts. The forms upon the surface of the globe are preserved from the influence of gravitation by the attraction of cohesion, or by chemical attraction; but if their ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... it Mount Royal. The city of Hochelaga is round compassed about with timber, with three courses of rampires [stockades], one within another, framed like a sharp spire, but laid across above. The middlemost of them is made and built as a direct line but perpendicular. The rampires are framed and fashioned with pieces of timber laid along on the ground, very well and cunningly joined together after their fashion. This enclosure is in height about two rods. It hath but one gate of entry thereat, which is shut with piles, ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock

... there we found that the only way onto the roof was by a long perpendicular ladder leading to a trap door. We all scrambled up this—all but the Minister of Justice, who remained behind in the garret ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson

... a weakness was observable in her knees; and when she saw me she was not so far gone as not to know who I was. She tried to make a curtsy, and in doing so very nearly lost her balance, and it took her some ten yards to recover her perpendicular. With a little struggling, stuttering, and stumbling, she got right, and pursued ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... favorite seat of Berenice, Countess of Hurstmonceux, was situated about seven miles south of Edinboro', on the north banks of the Esk. It was an elegant modern edifice, raised upon the ruins of an ancient castle, overhanging a perpendicular precipice, with a sheer descent of several hundred feet to the river. It looked down upon the course of the Esk, winding between rocks of lofty height, whose sides were fringed with a tangled mass of shrubs, ferns, and thistles, and whose summits were crowned with thickets of hazel, pine, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... intricate puzzles of intersecting lines, sacred devices, anagrams, and, among others, the device of a bar across a tun, indicating the name of Barton. Most of the carving, however, is less elaborate and intricate than these specimens, being in a perpendicular style, and on one pattern. Before the wood grew so very dark, the beauty of the work must have been much more easily seen than now, as to particulars, though I hardly think that the general effect could have been better; at least, the sombre richness that overspreads ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... sir, that an ordinary robin is perfectly aware that while squirrels and cats are able to ascend the perpendicular trunk of a tree, they cannot climb the painted pillar of a piazza; and consequently it is perfectly safe to build a nest at the top ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton

... a horse wading into a pebbly stream. That was enough. A minute later I was struggling to reach the stone I had fought to gain before; and by its help I got upon my feet, when I saw Sandho some twenty yards away, standing in a depression by the side of a perpendicular mass of rock, down whose side a spring of water gushed and ran off below the rock, to sink out ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn

... down, and just opposite the catafalque so that it is perpendicular to the direction of vision, stand the central powers of our government, its President and counsellors. President Johnson is facing the middle of the coffin upon the lowest step; his hands are crossed upon his ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... and cut into pens, and Indian ink was rubbed, whole weeks passed, without the least bit having been done. With just as much ado he always set about his writing, and really, by degrees, put together a most charming manuscript. The title of the poems was in German text; the verses themselves in a perpendicular Saxon hand; and at the end of every poem was an analogous vignette, which he had either selected somewhere or other, or had invented himself, and in which he contrived to imitate very neatly the hatching of the wood-cuts and tail- pieces which are used for such purposes. To show me these things ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... there came the man of Sweden, the great Linnaeus, till the sexes were recognised, and everything was ruled out and set in place again. A wonderful man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnaeus who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and levered our mental globe a little more perpendicular to the ecliptic. He actually gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of window—perhaps the first man who ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... that similar aid could have been afforded to Warburton and others who attempted to trace the south-coast line. But for hundreds of miles along the shores of the Bight no vessel could reach the shore or lie safely at anchor. Long ranges of perpendicular cliffs, from 300 to 400 feet high, presented a barrier effectually forbidding approach by sea. About 1867, however, an excellent harbour was discovered about 260 miles to the west of Fowler's Bay. The South Australian Government at once undertook a survey of this ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest

... longitude from latitude now; and I'm always puzzled as to which is perpendicular ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... Bill Talpers who had evolved the neat little plan of changing the ID brand of the Interior Department to the "two-pole pumpkin" brand, which was done merely by extending another semicircle to the left of the "I" and connecting that letter and the "D" at top and bottom, thus making two perpendicular lines ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... between the ledge and the shore, and in a moment more the boat struck heavily upon the gravelly beach, which was, at this time of tide, not more than ten feet wide, and the waves already rolled over it against the perpendicular rocks. With one consent, the four men leaped from the boat into the surf. The mate carried the painter on shore with him, and endeavored to swing around the boat, which had come stern foremost to the beach. Burns imprudently moved out into the surf to assist him, when the ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic









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