"Elephantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and other great wild beasts, which it has yielded to the zealous search of such men as the Rev. Mr. Gunn. When you look at such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their owners about, and these great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the forest- bed is now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual rings ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... it because he understood that the Germans were coming. He had not seen them; but when the gun fell silent he heard whining sounds in the air, as if from a litter of elephantine puppies. Sometimes the twigs of trees fell on him, the dirt in front of him flew up into his face; and always, of course, everywhere about him was that roar of bursting shells which he had come to accept as a natural part of life. And suddenly another man went down, and ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... must help you," said Miss Eudora with elephantine sprightliness. "Now, children, in the first place you must always read beautiful books; then, always look at beautiful things; and lastly, always ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... a Hellenist. Odry is a connoisseur of chinaware. The elephantine Lepeintre junior runs into debt and lives the life of ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... with green, the hat, the Court sword, beating against legs for which the designer was certainly not responsible. First came Gazan; his hat was tilted awry by the bumps of his skull, and the vegetable green of the coat threw into relief the earthy colour and scaly texture of his elephantine visage. At his side was the grim tall Laniboire with purple apoplectic veins and a crooked mouth. His uniform was covered by an overcoat whose insufficient length left visible the end of his sword and the tails of the frock, and gave him an appearance certainly much less dignified ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... extravagantly over-estimated, but it had met with complete failure. Into Ethiopia a punitive campaign had been made against Queen Candace, and a loose suzerainty was claimed over her kingdom, but the Roman frontier still stopped short at Elephantine. Over the territories of the semi-Greek semi-Scythian settlements to the north of the Black Sea Rome exercised a protectorate, which was for obvious reasons not unwelcome to those concerned. Along or near the eastern frontier she well understood ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... explosion of feeling; and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion. Selden's calmness seemed rather to harden into resistance, and Miss Bart's into a surface of glittering irony, as they faced each other from the opposite corners of one of Mrs. Hatch's elephantine sofas. The sofa in question, and the apartment peopled by its monstrous mates, served at length to suggest the turn ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... efficient help; and even Tulee, though far from skilful with her needle, contrived to make dozens of hospital slippers, which it was the pride of her heart to deliver to the ladies of the Commission. Chloe added her quota of socks, often elephantine in shape, and sometimes oddly decorated with red tops and toes; but with a blessing for "the boys in blue" running through all the threads. There is no need to say how eagerly they watched for letters, ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... together and asked them to advise him what he should do. They said mankind must be destroyed, and committed the task of destruction to Athor and Sekhet, who proceeded to smite the men over the whole land. But now fear came upon mankind; and the men of Elephantine made haste, and extracted the juice from the best of their fruits, and mingled it with human blood, and filled seven thousand jars, and brought them as an offering to the offended god. Ra drank and was content, and ordered the liquor that remained in the jars to be poured out; and, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation, which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... roguish glance in his brown eyes—I suppose at some funny canine joke or other, which he could not permit me to share—or else, darting backwards and forwards, gleefully barking and making sundry feints and dashes at me; or, prancing up in his elephantine bounds, with felonious intentions regarding my walking stick, which he considered he had a much better ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Government to the importation of a herd of elephants, which were essential to the realistic depiction of the passage of the Alps by the Carthaginian army; but it is hoped that by the use of skis the transit may be effected without undue casualties among the elephantine fraternity. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... more execrable taste than the emanations from the pedants of Louvain. The "Rhetoricians" are not responsible for all the bad taste of their generation. The gravest historians of the Netherlands often relieved their elephantine labors by the most asinine gambols, and it was not to be expected that these bustling weavers and cutlers should excel their literary superiors in taste ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... figure simulating the elephant no more closely than any one of a score or more mounds in Wisconsin, except in one important particular, viz, the head has a prolongation or snout-like appendage, which is its chief, in fact its only real, elephantine character. If this appendage is too long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes, it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive of the mastodon than of any other animal. No hint is ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... continent existed. From that unknown region of darkness and tempest came the great heaving ground-swell, the tidal wave and the hurricane. Even Spanish pilots never used the perilous southern route. Treasure went overland across the Isthmus. Every year an elephantine treasure-ship sailed from Panama westward through the South Sea; and there was a rich trade between the American mines and the Orient and the Spanish peninsula, by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Doughty's imagination was fired by the gorgeous possibilities of the idea, ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... would say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... moment our friend Crusoe, tired of tormenting his mother, waddled stupidly and innocently into the midst of the crowd of men, and in so doing received Henri's heel and the full weight of his elephantine body on its fore paw. The horrible and electric yell that instantly issued from his agonized throat could only be compared, as Joe Blunt expressed it, "to the last dyin' screech o' a bustin' steam biler!" We cannot ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... of them, and in such happy case there followed interchange of pretty pleasantries. Your English middle-class young man and woman are not adepts at the game of flirtation. I will confess that our methods were, perhaps, elephantine, that we may have grown a trifle noisy as the evening wore on. But we meant no evil; we did but our best to enjoy ourselves, to give enjoyment, to make the too ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... me the fact that his daughter had, while in Egypt, made the acquaintance at the Hotel Savoy on the Island of Elephantine, of the great English railroad engineer, Sir Digby Kemsley, who had purchased a railway concession he had given, and which he was exceedingly anxious to re-purchase and thus continue on friendly terms with France. His daughter, on her return to Luxemburg, ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... The Elephantine papyri have shown that the early Jews of the Diaspora, though untrammeled by the orthodoxy of Jerusalem, maintained the purity of their local cult in the face of considerable difficulties. Hence the gravestones of their Aramaean contemporaries, ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... month's Six Selling Best The Bookman scored with elephantine Jest, Have sold a half a Million in a Year, Yet no one ever heard ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... enterprise in hand; Held a war-council, sent his provost-marshal, And gave the animals a call impartial— Each, in his way, to serve his high command. The Elephant should carry on his back The tools of war, the mighty public pack, And fight in elephantine way and form; The Bear should hold himself prepared to storm; The Fox all secret stratagems should fix; The Monkey should amuse the foe by tricks. "Dismiss," said one, "the blockhead Asses, And Hares, too cowardly and fleet." "No," said the King; "I use all classes; Without their aid ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... last he, too, left the house and directed his steps toward the far end of the garden, where a small gate led directly into the street at the end of which he dwelt. There! Again Frau Kahle and uncouth, elephantine Lieutenant Pommer! The May bowl, he thought, has been too strong for his addled brain. And he stepped silently aside on the velvety sward, under the clump of lilacs. The nightingale, from the centre ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... appearance of portrait-like fidelity. They are chiefly of the first half of the sixteenth century: and I own that, upon gazing at these charming specimens of ancient painting upon glass, I longed to fix an artist before every window, to bear away triumphantly, in a portfolio of elephantine dimensions, a faithful copy of almost every thing I saw. In some of the countenances, I fancied I traced the pencil of LUCAS ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... sculptors he hates to be cooped up long." "I guess he's gone to get a drink at the bar," suggested the practical Miss Bredd. "How did you like my Fricka—oh, here's Mr. Dennett—Caspar, Caspar come over here, here!" The big girl stood up in elephantine eagerness, and a jaunty, handsome young man, with a shaven face and an important chin, slowly made his way through the press of people to the Fridolin table. It was Caspar Dennett, the conductor. After a formal ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Shakespeare we admired him as Paul Pry, as Mr. Toodles and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must have admired him very much—his huge fat person, his huge fat face and his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine wink, to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the bushes. He came out of his hiding place and followed stealthily, or as stealthily as the fact that he had not even taken a correspondence course in creeping allowed. And profiting by earlier mistakes, he did succeed in making far less noise than before. In place of his former somewhat elephantine method of progression he adopted a species of shuffle which had excellent results, for it enabled him to brush twigs away instead of stepping flatfootedly on them. The new method was slow, but it had ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... storm subsided we went on. It was a remarkable sight—a long procession of "Tommies," burghers, carts, and the naval gun, 18 feet long, an elephantine one when ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... wealthy classes and all their ways, could Lionel Moore put in a word for Lady Adela's poor little literary infant? It would be shrivelled into nothing by a blast of this simulated simoom. It would be trodden under foot by the log-roller's elephantine jocosity. In a sort of despair he turned to Maurice Mangan, and would have entered into conversation with him but that Mangan now rose and said he must be going, nor could he be prevailed on to stay. Lionel accompanied him into ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... is a world of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, "to love," which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and violent, is always "regular" in grammar. Ancient and modern tongues tell the same tale—from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the elephantine language that was "made in Germany." Not only is "to love" deficient in no language (as home is deficient in French, and Geist in English), but it is never even "defective." No mood or tense is ever wanting—a proof of how it has been conjugated ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... principle whatever; and as to Fatima's tortoise, it never budged from the beginning of the conflict to the end. Once, indeed, by strewing dandelion heads in the direction of the enemy's ground she induced him to advance, and at the cry of 'Forward, MacPeters!' he put forth a lazy leg, and with elephantine dignity led the attack, on the way to his favourite food. But (in spite of the fable) his slow pace was against him, and in the ensuing melee he was ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to such delicate elephantine compliments. It is just like a man, Miss Benson, to try to kill two birds with one stone —get rid of a rival by sacrificing a useless friend. All the same, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... stipulation, that they should ever respect and guard the frontier of the empire. The treaty long subsisted; and till the establishment of Christianity introduced stricter notions of religious worship, it was annually ratified by a solemn sacrifice in the Isle of Elephantine, in which the Romans, as well as the barbarians, adored the same visible or invisible powers ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... English, but she shook her fist in Mr. Merrick's face and danced around in an elephantine fashion and jabbered ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... anything to do then, for they were fair inside. "Boiler-plate" was finishing some elephantine pleasantry to Natica, when he saw what I saw. A foolish grin rippled across his wide face. "Hullo!" he said to the Hartopp, who looked properly peevish, and then waspish, as she let her glance travel to Natica, who stood perfectly poised and, I fancied, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... lath and plaster of the ceiling below, and if one stepped on this there would be a catastrophe. As it was half dark up above, perhaps one of the others had best go up first with a candle. Then there were more outcries and threatening, until at last Jurgis had a vision of a pair of elephantine legs disappearing through the trap door, and felt the house shake as Madame Haupt started to walk. Then suddenly Aniele came to him and took ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... remained thus equipped until the colonel reached the secret consultation in the private office and the return of the unstamped letter. Then he toppled his supports over on the floor, and laughed until the pain in his elephantine foot bent ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and learning that he was in an anteroom, started in search of him. She found herself in the supper room, hurrying across which, she pulled open a door on the other side with such a vigorous effort of elephantine strength, as to precipitate a waiter, who had just caught hold of the handle, headlong into the room. The unfortunate servitor, who was dressed in white cravat and black coat, landed under the supper table, where he lay motionless. Ann Harriet made ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... another elephantine smile; and then I perceived it was a form of humour with him (or rather, a cheap substitute) to speak of his elder relations by their abbreviated Christian names, without any prefix. 'Marmy's doing very well, thank yah; as well ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... and of structure in the mind which renders it capable of the most delicate sympathies—one may say, simply 'fineness of nature.' This is, of course, compatible with heroic bodily strength and mental firmness, in fact, heroic strength is not conceivable without such delicacy. Elephantine strength may drive its way through a forest and feel no touch of the boughs, but the white skin of Homer's Atrides would have felt a bent rose leaf, yet subdue its feeling in glow of battle, and behave itself like iron. I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool, I should imagine not. But in that case I am all the more mystified by the incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case, and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between the two sides. For instance, the Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft says with melodramatic scorn, "Pity! the scavenger of the ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... ago, bought the turkeys at so good a bargain that he felt the natural reaction in an impulse to extravagance. In the very flood-tide of the money-spending yearnings, he chanced to pass Deacon Hurst's stables and to see two Saint Bernard puppies, of elephantine size but of the tenderest age, gambolling on the sidewalk before the office. Deacon Hurst, I should explain, is no more a deacon than I am; he is a livery-stable keeper, very honest, a keen and solemn sportsman, ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... forced my way up to Elephantine, I went down unto the coast-lakes;[7] I have stood upon the boundaries of the land, and I have seen its centre. I have set the limits of might by my ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... B.C. 66 to B.C. 63, Pompeius conquered Mithridates, Syria and the East, except Parthia. (31) Being (as was supposed) exactly under the Equator. Syene (the modern Assouan) is the town mentioned by the priest of Sais, who told Herodotus that "between Syene and Elephantine are two hills with conical tops. The name of one of them is Crophi, and of the other, Mophi. Midway between them are the fountains of the Nile." (Herod., II., chapter 28.) And see "Paradise Regained," IV., 70: — "Syene, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... London. What a provincial has done. Opinions of leading men." Two columns altogether! There was, however, little in the two columns. The leading men had practised a sagacious caution. They, like the press as a whole, were obviously waiting to see which way the great elephantine public would jump. When the enormous animal had jumped they would all exclaim: "What did I tell you?" The other critiques were colourless. At the end of the green critique occurred the following sentence: "It is only fair to state, nevertheless, that the play was favourably received ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... I shall not have it in my power to bid farewell to any one. Unless, indeed," with a glance at Beauclerk, meant, perhaps, to be coquettish, but so elephantine in its proportions as to be almost anything in the world but that, "some of my friends may wish to ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... tame. He lacked altogether the fire, high-wrought nobility of sentiment, and sense of form essential for tragic art. On the other hand, Alfieri composed some comedies before his death which were devoid of humour, grace, and lightness. A strange elephantine eccentricity is their utmost claim to comic character. Indeed, the temper of Alfieri, ever in extremes, led him even to exaggerate the qualities of tragedy. He carried its severity to a pitch of dulness and monotony. His chiaroscuro was ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Lewis writes from San Antonio to an obscure sheet called the Railway Age, that Brann is not an Englishman as the Age editor in one of his elephantine efforts to be humorous seems to have suggested, and that "all Englishmen in this country repudiate his every utterance." Thanks, awfully; that's the highest compliment ever paid an American sovereign by a British ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and nearer, nearer, slowly yet hurriedly, now stopping to cough and gasp, now taking a few steps by elephantine assault. I should have enjoyed the situation if it had not been for poor Faustina in the cave; as it was I was filled with nameless fears. But I could not resist giving that grampus Corbucci one bad moment on account. A crazy hand-rail ran up one wall, so I carefully flattened myself ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that, and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the case of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least, which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet there is no boy's game, however ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... alone; the sum of your sentiment in your "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten." Wise American journalists, commissioned to explore your soul, have returned characteristically to announce that you "In your German way" (American synonyms: elephantine, phlegmatic, stodgy, clumsy, sluggish) seek desperately to appropriate, in ferocious lech to be metropolitan, the "spirit of Paris" (American synonyms: silk stockings, "wine," Maxim's, jevousaime, Rat Mort). Announce they also your "mechanical" pleasures, your weighty ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... omnibuses coming towards you. Then its clumsiness is lost in the collective uncouthness which becomes of a tremendous grandeur. The procession bears onward whole populations lifted high in the air, and swaying and lurching with the elephantine gait of things which can no more capsize than they can keep an even pace. Of all the sights of London streets, this procession of the omnibuses is the most impressive, and the common herd of Londoners of both sexes which it bears aloft seems to suffer a change into something ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the tug the tow-rope. While these orders were being carried out the lad caught sight of a young girl who had just arrived in a great state of excitement. She was dressed in dazzling finery, and carrying something in a basket. The boy sprang on to the dock wall, and created much merriment with his elephantine caresses. They shouted to him from the vessel to jump aboard or he would lose his passage. He made a running spring for the main rigging as she was being towed from her berth. A wild cheer went up from the crowd when ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... punishment inflicted by beating the soles of the feet: such a flagellation could not very conveniently be administered to an elephant. The figure, if used by Curran, has about it the character of an elephantine bull. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... to England, and was appointed Judge-Advocate; acted as such at King Charles's trial, and was for that latter offence assassinated at the Hague one evening by certain high-flying Royalist cut-throats, Scotch several of them; "his portrait represents him as a man of heavy, deep-wrinkled, elephantine countenance, pressed down by the labours ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Jedediah Cleishbotham, are clearly laborious at times. And even his own letters to his daughter-in-law, which Mr. Lockhart seems to regard as models of tender playfulness and pleasantry, seem to me decidedly elephantine. Not unfrequently, too, his stereotyped jokes weary. Dalgetty bores you almost as much as he would do in real life,—which is a great fault in art. Bradwardine becomes a nuisance, and as for Sir Piercie Shafton, he is beyond endurance. ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... was not married when I saw him last. He married a young lady whom I knew. And now I have been talking with their grown-up sons and daughters. Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me—a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... waddling uncertainly up the walk, with a certain elephantine effort at jauntiness, he nearly collided with the foreign lady who had crossed his path to reach the further limits of the terrace. Not having a cautioning horn attached to his anatomy to warn heedless trespassers from his way, the large person was forced to give ground, but had ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... we have but one historical document, the Book of Esther, to acquaint us with the conditions of the main body of the Jewish people. The fortunate find, a few years back, of a hoard of Aramaic papyri at Elephantine has given us an unexpected acquaintance with the conditions of the Jewish colony in Upper Egypt during the fifth and fourth centuries, and furnished a new chapter in the history of the Diaspora. But this is an ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... at Sais, in Egypt. He, indeed, seemed to be trifling with me when he said he knew perfectly well; yet his account was as follows: "That there are two mountains, rising into a sharp peak, situated between the city of Syene, in Thebais, and Elephantine. The names of these mountains are the one Crophi, the other Mophi; that the sources of the Nile, which are bottomless, flow from between these mountains and that half of the water flows over Egypt and to the north, the other half over Ethiopia and the south. That the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... no lives, and seldom broke bones. They were chiefly opportunities for the display of brilliant enamelled and gilt armour, at the very acme of cumbrous magnificence; and of equally gorgeous embroidery spread out over the vast expanse provided by elephantine Flemish horses. Even if the weapons had not been purposely blunted, and if the champions had really desired to slay one another, they would have found the task very difficult, as in effect they did in the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... foolish bees, Who will contend for points like these, Should not suppose good taste in roses Depends on elephantine noses. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... famine that took place in Egypt when Joseph was there. This famine was believed to have been caused by the king's neglect to worship properly the god Khnemu, who was supposed to control the springs of the Nile, which were asserted by the sages to be situated between two great rocks on the Island of Elephantine. The Legend sets forth that the Viceroy of Nubia, in the reign of Tcheser, was a nobleman called Meter, who was also the overseer of all the temple properties in the South. His residence was in Abu, or ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... grown very old. There was nothing to eat in it and nothing to drink. They had lost the teapot; and when they found it, they couldn't make out what had become of the lid, which, turning up at last and being fixed on to the teapot, couldn't be got off again for the pouring in of more water. Fleas of elephantine dimensions were gambolling boldly in the dirty beds; and the mosquitoes!—But let me here draw a curtain (as I would have done if there had been any). We had scarcely any sleep, and rose up with hands and arms ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... any age, is the result of the gradual modification of the forms which peopled it in the preceding age—if that has been the case, it is intelligible enough; because we may expect that the creature that results from the modification of an elephantine mammal shall be something like an elephant, and the creature which is produced by the modification of an armadillo-like mammal shall be like an armadillo. Upon that supposition, I say, the facts are intelligible; upon any other, that I am aware ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... for about half an hour, the dog keeping a reproachful eye upon us from the nearest chair, and displaying elephantine delight whenever we made any ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... want to stop now," said the other, in his elephantine simplicity, "but we must stop for a moment, because it is a sign—perhaps it is a miracle. We must see what is at the end of the road of sand; it may be a bridge built across the gulf ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... at once so refreshing and so absorbing that he went leisurely, lengthening out the process of production until it came nearer covering the thirty months of elephantine gestation than the normal ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... penance was not required; before many minutes had elapsed the slow, measured, elephantine tread of the perambulating night-policeman woke the sullen echoes of Dawson Place, and if there were any evil-doers lurking thereabouts, caused them to melt away into the dim shadows. Taking her letters, a candle, and a shilling which she had in readiness, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... were nice. I don't think I've ever liked you so much as then. I think you're really much more interesting when you're elephantine. It was quite glorious the way you were planning to go galumphing over ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... brainless technician. Everything is relative, and the scale on which Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius as a museum panorama. Let us not be misled by the worship of the elephantine. It is characteristic of his temperament that the big battle piece he was commissioned by the Barcelona Academy to paint was never finished. Not every one who goes to Rome does as the Romans do. Dowered by nature with extraordinary acuity of vision, with a romantic, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... advantage of the well-known carelessness of American readers, and knowing full well how easily they are duped—how easily they are cozened out of their senses and led into false beliefs with mere plausibilities and sophisms—this imperial and far-reaching Wall Street, this elephantine fox of the world, takes possession of American journalism—owns it, controls it. It seizes and subsidizes the metropolitan press. It purchases newspapers and magazines by the score. It establishes bureaus; it buys every purchasable pen, from the pen of the gray philosopher to ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... Mr Casby rose up in his list shoes, and with a slow, heavy step (he was of an elephantine build), made for the door. He had a long wide-skirted bottle-green coat on, and a bottle-green pair of trousers, and a bottle-green waistcoat. The Patriarchs were not dressed in bottle-green broadcloth, and yet ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... ago have left his shaggy coat, but the earmarks still are there, the ponderous strength, the elephantine dignity. His eyes are dull,—never were bright,—but they seem not vacant, and most often fixed on the Golden Gate where the ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a thoroughly incongruous figure, and greatly injure the general design. The poem appeared in this form in 1743, with a ponderous prefatory discourse by Ricardus Aristarchus, contributed by the faithful Warburton, and illustrating his ponderous vein of elephantine pleasantry. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... that Herodotus himself declared that he could not believe that story; but the priest regarded me not. And he said that Herodotus had never caught a crocodile with cold pig, nor did he ever visit Assyria, nor Babylon, nor Elephantine; but, saying that he had been in these lands, said that which was not true. He also declared that Herodotus, when he travelled, knew none of the Fat Ones of the Egyptians, but only those of the baser sort. And he called Herodotus ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... three in the hind, but there the reduction stops, for the increasing body-weight made necessary the development of broad and heavy feet. The final members of the series comprise only large, almost elephantine animals, with immensely developed and very various nasal horns, huge and massive heads, and altogether a grotesque appearance. The growth of the brain did not at all keep pace with the increase of the head ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... the major, as they all stood breathlessly waiting for the outburst of the furious monster, which Mark painted mentally as something between a lion and a bear, but elephantine in size. ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... wonderful thing, a man killed. Anyway, I would see a man-fight. Great was my disappointment. Black Matt and Tom Morrisey merely held on to each other and lifted their clumsy-booted feet in what seemed a grotesque, elephantine dance. They were too drunk to fight. Then the peacemakers got hold of them and led them back to cement the new friendship in ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... fair Neophytes— Who thirst for such instruction as we give, Attend, while I unfold a parable. The elephant is mightier than Man, Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead), And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's As Woman's brain to Man's - (that's rule of three),— Conquers the foolish giant of the woods, As Woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man. In Mathematics, Woman leads ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... design some wonderful dresses for us. We three unbent as Mrs Siddons, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr Johnson might have unbent, to devise a turn for the Coliseum variety theatre. Not that we would set down the art of the variety theatre as something to be condescended to, or our own art as elephantine. We should rather crave indulgence as three novices fresh from the awful legitimacy ...
— Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress • George Bernard Shaw
... Among the lesser joys of maternity, that of having your children interested in a vivarium is one of the least—in fact, it is an elephantine sorrow. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... not only accompanied the chorus with the drum, but with a species of dance, which, being a clumsy man, he performed in an extremely elephantine manner. After a few ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... stood in his moccasins, yet seemed not tall, so broad he was and ponderously thick. He had an elephantine leg, with a foot like a black-oak wedge; a chimpanzean arm, with a fist like a black-oak maul; eyes as large and placid as those of an ox; teeth as large and even as those of a horse; skin that was not skin, but ebony; a nose that was not a nose, but gristle; hair that ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... speaks in his work. There was scarcely a town in Greece or on the coasts of Asia Minor with which he was not acquainted; he had explored Thrace and the coasts of the Black Sea; in Egypt he had penetrated as far south as Elephantine; and in Asia he had visited the cities of Babylon, Ecbatana, and Susa. The latter part of his life was spent at Thurii, a colony founded by the Athenians in Italy in B.C. 443. According to a well-known ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... doubtless found him "good for service," for the door opened into a brightly lighted drawing-room into which he followed Arthur Papillon, like a frail sloop towed in by an imposing three-master, and behold the timid Amedee presented in due form to the mistress of the house! She was a lady of elephantine proportions, in her sixtieth year, and wore a white camellia stuck in her rosewood-colored hair. Her face and arms were plastered with enough flour to make a plate of fritters; but for all that, she had a grand air and superb eyes, whose commanding ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... recollection of a supple, expressive, un-English bow, and of a deftness of phrase compared with which Trenby's laboured compliment savoured of the elephantine. Swiftly she dismissed the memory, irritably chasing it from her mind, for was it not five long, black, incomprehensible weeks since Peter had vanished from her ken? From the day of the bridge-party at the Edenhall flat, she had neither seen nor heard from him, ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... farther back, straightening out his elephantine legs, inserted one fat hand into his trouser pocket and with some difficulty extracted a combined bill-fold and coin-purse, at once heavy with gold and bulky with notes. Moistening thumb and forefinger, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Jeremiah and learnt from him his lofty monotheism. Doubt was thrown in the last century upon the continuance of the Diaspora in Egypt between the time of Jeremiah and Alexander, but the recent discovery of a Jewish temple at Elephantine and of Aramaic papyri at Assouan dated in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. has proved that these doubts were not well founded, and that there was a well-established ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... enviable, but when he is viewed from the unsympathetic light of the present he seems merely a clever vagabond. Yet Dr. Johnson, who could be so stern towards some of his contemporaries, condescended to love the aforesaid vagabond, in a ponderous, elephantine way, and deified him by writing the life of the ingrate, or an apology therefor. Savage had, once upon a time, led the youthful Johnson more than a few feet away from the path of rectitude, but the philosopher forgave, without forgetting, the wiles of the tempter, and treated him with a generosity ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... away in vain. Thy intention, O blessed one, it is to have from Surya a son furnished with a coat of mail and ear-rings, and who in point of prowess would be beyond compare in this world! Do thou, therefore, O damsel of elephantine gait, surrender thy person to me! Thou shall then have, O lady, a son after thy wish! O gentle girl, O thou of sweet smiles, I will go back after having known thee! If thou do not gratify me to-day by obeying my word, I shall in anger curse ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... running about with their mouths full of the rich herbage, kicking up their heels and biting at one another, in a perfect state of horse-play. It was almost laughable to see them, with such heavy packs on their backs, attempting such elephantine gambols; so I kept them going, to steady them a bit. The creek here I called Winter* Water. At five miles farther we passed a very high mountain in the range, which appeared the highest I had seen; I named it Mount Davenport. We next ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... Low hills covered with tropical forest growth rise from the sandy shores of the Cape, and along its face are three creeks or bays, deep inlets showing through their narrow entrances smooth beaches of yellow sand, fenced inland by the forest of cotton-woods and palms, with here and there an elephantine baobab. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... to straighten his tie, and grabbing his coat from Bickley, who handed it to him with a malicious smile, forced his perspiring arms into it in a peculiarly awkward and elephantine fashion. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... all," with Robert Browning, Charles Kingsley and Monckton Milnes among its contributors. Thinking they had a market, an enterprising publisher rushed out a volume, The Lectures of Lola Montez. When a copy reached the editor, it was reviewed in characteristically elephantine fashion by the Athenaeum: ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... that fell on the "Devil" was on a memorable spring evening in 1751. Dr. Johnson (aged forty-two), then busy all day with his six amanuenses in a garret in Gough Square compiling his Dictionary, at night enjoyed his elephantine mirth at a club in Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row. One night at the club, Johnson proposed to celebrate the appearance of Mrs. Lennox's first novel, "The Life of Harriet Stuart," by a supper at the "Devil Tavern." Mrs. Lennox was a lady for whom Johnson—ranking her afterwards above Mrs. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the air peculiar to military Germans, of men who are going to be amused. They said nothing—did not smile—but strode straight forward, three abreast, swinging their kibokos with a sort of elephantine sporty air. They were men of all heights and thicknesses, but each alike impressed me with the Prussian military mold that leaves a man no imagination of his own, and no virtue, but only an animal respect for whatever can make to suffer, or appease ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the quick, ardent temper of my beloved companion bade me relinquish the thought of confidin' in him. No, I dassent, for I knew that his weight wuz but small by the steelyards, and Mr. Pomper's size wuz elephantine, with probably muscles accordin'. No, I felt I must rely on myself. But the feelin's I felt nobody can tell. Thinks I, "It has come onto me jest what I have always read and scorfed at"; for I had always thought and said that no self-respectin' female need be inviggled ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... as good fortune would have it, an empty baggage-wagon bound for the metropolis turned into the main road from a side one. Immediately Israel limps most deplorably, and begs the driver to give a poor cripple a lift. So up he climbs; but after a time, finding the gait of the elephantine draught-horses intolerably slow, Israel craves permission to dismount, when, throwing away his crutch, he takes nimbly to his legs, much to the surprise of ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... and lending an expression of owlish wisdom to his otherwise heavy features. As on that of the Memnon, not a vestige of a hair was to be seen on the head of Split-log. His lips were, moreover, of the same unsightly thickness, while the elephantine ear had been slit in such a manner, that the pliant cartilage, yielding to the weight of several ounces of lead which had for years adorned it, now lay stretched, and coquetting with the brawny shoulder on which ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... him emit his mewing little laugh, and heard him say, with the elephantine archness affected by certain dry and ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman |
