"Precipice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... captivity through trusting to his word, and then followed a scene so horrible that I dare not write the details. All were killed some—thirty-two, I believe—and their still breathing bodies hurled over the precipice. It is probable that shortly afterwards Theodore regretted having allowed himself to be guided by passion. With Menilek he had lost Shoa; by the murder of the Galla prince he had made those tribes his deadly foes. He sent word to the Bishop, ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... hundred miles from land see the glow, and we here, on the precipice above, can read ordinary ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... pursued here, there was no escape. The third milestone passed, he came to the country road; he pursued it, counting out his thousand steps, as Caecilius had instructed him. By this time it had left the stony bottom, and was rising up the side of the precipice. Brushwood and dwarf pines covered it, mingled with a few olives and caroubas. He said out his seven pater nosters as he walked, and then looked around. He had just passed a goatherd, and they looked hard at each other. ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... feeling on this point to him. Suspension is often mentioned in descriptions of torture. Beatrice Cenci was hung up by her hair and the recently murdered Queen of Korea was similarly treated. In Tolstoi's My Husband and I the girl says she would like her husband to hold her over a precipice. That passage ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... animal (the Arab) to its paces in scouring the country in all directions. It is not often that an assistant adjutant-general sets out on a tour in search of the picturesque; but in this instance the search was completely successful. Rock, ravine, precipice, and dell—running waters and waving woods, come as naturally to his pen as returns of effective force and other professional details; and, whatever the writing of them may be, we are prepared to contend that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the darkness encircling the clambering soldiers broke out a roar "like that of an approaching train,"[133] there was a rush of hoofs and the clatter of scattering stones. In a moment a group of loose animals, whether horses, mules or cattle, it was impossible to discern, bounding down the rocky precipice, tore past the last companies of the Royal Irish Fusiliers and disappeared as quickly as they had come into the gloom of the valley. The rear of the Irish Fusiliers checked and staggered back upon the long line of ammunition mules. ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... rest until I had reached a high point of the path where a sudden turn along the edge of a precipice threw open the whole view of the valley. It was yet early morning, and I watched the floating bits of mist drifting above the dark canons, canons so narrow that the sun never reached their beds. Through clumps of leafless oaks the noisy arroyo could be seen hidden here and there by the ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... inclosed by a long line of trees, which, in the distance, appear to stand in the water. Thence the vast stream sweeps boldly into the south, and with a rush discharges down the rapids, and straight over the line of precipice, in a vast tumultuous greyish-drab torrent which speedily emerges into comparatively still water below. The rock here is an exceedingly hard, mottled limestone, resembling the stone at St. Andrew's Rapids on Red River. Where exposed ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... half a mile began the gorge, where the river narrowed and became boisterous and terrible. The beauty of the scene cannot be conveyed in language. The one side of the valley was blue with evening shadow, through which loomed forest and precipice, hillside and mountain top; and the other was still brilliant with the sunset gold. The wide and wasteful river with its ceaseless rushing—the beautiful water-birds too, which abounded upon the islets and were so ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... elbows. He had a look like that of some man, known so far as a harmless retiring burgher, about to make a public confession which will change all, bringing his head perhaps to the block; or the look of a man on the verge of a precipice, still half resisting the desire to jump, yet knowing that he will jump, nothing can save him from it; the look of a man, in fine, pregnant with intention, but walking in ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... Francisco Mountain, the horse of Major St. John Mildmay lost its footing, and began to slip on the ice toward a precipice which looked down a couple of thousand feet. Will saw the danger, brought out his ever-ready lasso, and dexterously caught the animal in time to save it and its rider—a feat considered remarkable ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... of his word. He walked straight out of the Casino; but uncertainly, feebly, as a man who has received a staggering blow between the eyes, as a man who has been pitched into a mountain-pool in January, as a somnambulist who has wakened to find himself on the edge of a precipice. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... gathering night. Cold and weather mattered little to him, still less did danger. But Fisher minor mattered very much. For Percy or any of the rest he might probably have stayed where he was; but for the one boy in Fellsgarth he oared about he would cheerfully go over a precipice. ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... its usual width by the huge black cliffs that walled it in, went rushing and foaming through a succession of furious rapids for nearly a quarter of a mile, plunging at length in one great leap over a precipice of nearly a hundred ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... in a whirl. She felt as if she had been walking gaily along a pleasant path and had stopped suddenly on the very brink of a precipice. It would be idle to deny that Raymond Parsloe Devine had attracted her extraordinarily. She had taken him at his own valuation as an extremely hot potato, and her hero-worship had gradually been turning into love. And now her hero had been shown to have feet of clay. It was hard, I consider, ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... Cornish man, that these strangers (as he thought them) should be so favorably impressed by his native county. But Tyrrel all the while looked ill at ease, though he sidled away as far as possible from the edge of the cliff, and sat down near Cleer at a safe distance from the precipice. He was silent and preoccupied. That mattered but little, however, as the rest did all the talking, especially Trevennack, who turned out to be indeed a perfect treasure-house of ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... fit to command until he has learned to obey—he will not know how. The one great thing life has to teach you is—obey. There was a young bear once that was bound to go his own way. The old bear told him it wouldn't do to jump over a precipice, but, somehow, he couldn't believe it and jumped. 'Twas the last thing he ever did. It's often so with the young. Their own way is apt to be rather steep and to end suddenly. There are laws everywhere,—we couldn't live without them,—laws of nature, God, and man. ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer's ken, Unless he climb, with footing nice, A far projecting precipice. The broom's tough roots his ladder made, The hazel saplings lent their aid; And thus an airy point he won. Where, gleaming with the setting sun, One burnish'd sheet of living gold, Loch-Katrine lay beneath him rolled; In all her length far winding lay, With promontory, creek, and bay, ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... do wonder at the adroitness with which we both talked. There was scarcely a slip on either side, though we were at cross-purposes if ever men were. But I suppose that in both of us there was a very great tension of mind—as of men walking on the edge of a precipice; and it was the knowledge of that which saved us both. After dinner I said I would walk again out of doors; and he thought it was mere affectation, since I must know by now that His ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... her young." He would go out on all-day excursions, enjoying the thrills of clambering up to what appeared to be inaccessible ledges, until eventually he became an expert cragsman. One day he came upon David Haggart {14a} sitting on the extreme verge of a precipice, "thinking ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... light is feeble and blurred, there is the same uncertainty about one's walk as if the deepest darkness prevailed. The most careful observation fails to advise you as to whether the next step is to lie on a level, up an incline, or over a precipice. A few bad falls quite demoralise a man, and make him more than ever ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... the cells carved in the living rock were just behind the face of the precipice, and in each of these an arrow-slit had been pierced outward to the daylight, and so the captive had a thin ray from the blessed sun for his comfort. The case of one of these poor fellows was particularly hard. From his dusky swallow's hole high up in that vast wall of native rock he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant, and none of them fatiguing. When you start out to "do" the Falls you first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of looking down from a precipice into the narrowest part of the Niagara river. A railway "cut" through a hill would be as comely if it had an angry river tumbling and foaming through its bottom. You can descend a staircase here a hundred ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Green leaves and sunshine have gladdened his heart. Jacob is gloomy, converses unwillingly, Trembling his fingers, the reins are hung slack, "Spirits unholy!" he murmurs unceasingly, "Leave me! Begone!" (But again they attack.) Just on the right lies a deep, wooded precipice, Known in those parts as "The Devil's Abyss," 191 Jacob turns into the wood by the side of it. Queries his lord, "What's the meaning of this?" Jacob replies not. The path here is difficult, Branches and ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... the Twin Star outfit had thrice raided the Sanderson flocks. Lambing sheep had been run cruelly. One herd had been clubbed over a precipice, another decimated with poison. In return, the herders shot and hamstrung Twin Star cows. A herder was held up and beaten by cowboys. Next week a vaquero galloped home to the Twin Star ranch with a bullet through his leg. This was the situation at the time when the owner of the big ranch ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... the mountain and jumping on our horses, galloped against the enemy. When we arrived at the precipice which falls sheer from the mountain, the English were already so near that our only course ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... never had before. It was as if something divine within me awoke to outface the desolation. I felt that it was time to act, and that I could act. There is no cure for terror like action: in a few moments I could have approached the verge of any precipice—at least without abject fear. The silence—no longer a horrible vacancy—appeared to tremble with unuttered thinkings. The manhood within me was alive and awake. I could not recognize a single landmark, or discover the least vestige ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... early, I had some notion of the bo'sun's design; for I went to the edge that overlooked the valley, and peered down, and, finding it nigh a sheer precipice, found myself nodding my head, as though it were in accordance with some part formed wish. Presently, looking about me, I discovered the bo'sun to be surveying that part which looked over towards the weed, and I made across to join him. Here, again, I ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... repulsed by virtue.) A unicorn (Great Britain), royally gorged, lies extended at the foot of a precipice, against which it has broken its horn; in the background a vast country (America), diversified by plains, rivers and mountains. Exergue: SUB GALLIAE AUSPICIIS (Under the auspices of France). On the platform: I. ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... postillion tugged at his reins; he had not sufficient interval of space to check his team; he threw a despairing glance at O'Toole. It seemed impossible the berlin could pass. There was no use to cry out; O'Toole fell behind the carriage with his mind made up. He looked down the precipice; he saw in his imagination the huge carriage with its tangled, struggling horses falling sheer into the foam of the river. He could not ride back to Bologna with that story to tell; he and his horse must take the same ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... long before the region of mystery comes. True mystery casts no shadows around. It is a sudden and awful gulf yawning across the field of knowledge; its form is irregular, but its lips are clean cut and sharp, and the mind can go to the very verge and look down the precipice ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... influence for good or evil between every man and woman in the universe; and the man who marries in ignorance of this force, or who violates its laws, is as foolish as he who tempts the law of gravitation by jumping from the brow of a precipice without calculating the distance to the ground beneath. This force is an emanation from the body according to temperament, it is identical with gravitation in its phenomena, and I introduce it to-night to your consideration under ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... insidious argument of poverty; also, that the recent application to perfect her modest learning was in parallel with an unexpressed hope of independence in the cities. Frequently—and invariably after nights when old Tom was on his sprees—Jane had found her pathetically near the precipice of desperation, and it required some pointed talks to hold ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... Great pieces of cork, and bags of hay and corn, hung dangling from mighty hooks—the latter to feed the cattle, should they be compelled to camp out on some sterile spot on the Veldt, and methinks to act as buffers, should the whole concern roll down a nullah or little precipice, no very uncommon incident in the blessed region they must pass to ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... refuge lay, utterly dispirited, just as the sun was setting. He turned a sharp angle round an abrupt cliff. He saw a horseman within ten yards of him—Captain Desborough, holding a pistol to his head! Hungry, cold, desperate, unarmed—his pistols had gone with his horse over a precipice—he threw up his arms, and was instantly chained fast to Desborough's saddle, only to be loosed, he knew, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... miles up the canyon, where lies to the west a sombre, dark square mountain, crowned by what it needed little fancy to believe a castle in ruins, with central keep and far-reaching walls. On the brow of a precipice fifteen hundred feet above us, at the end of the castle-wall, a gigantic figure in full armor seemed to stand on guard for ever. I watched it long as we rode round the great base of the hill, and cannot recall any such striking simulation elsewhere. My guides called ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... by the Indians at this time was a black jaguar,—a magnificent animal, and very fierce. He was discovered crouching in a thicket backed by a precipice, from which he could only escape by charging through the ranks of his enemies. He did it nobly. With a roar that rebounded from the face of the high cliff and echoed through the valley like a peal of thunder, he sprang out and rushed at the savages in front, who scattered like chaff right and ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... answered, "this lane goes but a few yards further round the edge of the cliff, and there it ends in a precipice; the little platform where we are is all but the end of the way. Indeed, I chose it upon that account, seeing, when I first came here, that from its height and isolation it was well ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... a man of wide reading and worldly experience, but not ungenerous impulses, does feel about the mere fanatic, who is at once a nuisance to humanity and an honour to human nature. Yet who can read that last line without feeling that Wilde is poised on the edge of a precipice of bathos; that the phrase comes very near to being quite startlingly silly. It is as in the case of Maeterlinck, let the reader move his standpoint one inch nearer the popular standpoint, and there is nothing for the thing but harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth. Somehow the image ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... left bank rose a chain of kopjes and a precipice of rocks. Between the precipice and the river bank there was a narrow path covered by the fragments of fallen rock. And upon the summit of the precipice a kippersol tree grew, whose palm-like leaves were clearly cut out against the night sky. The rocks ...
— Dream Life and Real Life • Olive Schreiner
... of them fall or falter!... The Seora ——- and I shut our eyes and held each other's hands, and certainly no one breathed till we were safe on the other side. We were then told that we had crossed within a few feet of a precipice over which a coach had been dashed into fifty pieces during one of these swells, and of course every one killed; and that if instead of horses we had travelled with mules, we must have been lost. You may imagine that we were ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... "it is too much for my poor nerves. Only think of it; Mr. Peters loads Mr. Pownal's gun with sixteen buck-shot, topples him off a precipice twenty feet high, breaks three of his ribs, and makes a considerable incision in his skull. Never was there such a wonderful escape. It ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... inland beyond their reach, and dismantling and demolishing the forts, the English forces occupied their time until October 19th. Thirty-four guns were found in the fortifications and 1000 barrels of powder. Some of the guns were carried to the ships and the rest flung over the precipice into the sea; while the powder was used to blow up the castle and the neighbouring country houses.[167] The expedition returned to Jamaica on 22nd October.[168] Only six men had been killed by the Spaniards, twenty more being lost by other "accidents." Of these ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... this precipice only to face a worse one. Shefford's nerve was sorely tried when he saw steep slants everywhere, all apparently leading down into chasms, and no place a man, let alone a horse, could put a foot with safety. Nevertheless the imperturbable Indian never slacked his ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... and of all safety? Ought not every reasonable prince to perceive, that the despot is a madman, and an enemy to himself? Should not every enlightened prince beware of flatterers, whose object is to lull him to sleep upon the brink of the precipice which they ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... gracious words, and then they began to grow angry, that he whom they knew as the carpenter of their village should make such an astounding claim. They rose up in wrath, thrust him out of the synagogue, and would have hurled him over the precipice had he not eluded them ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... cannot but think, which has appeared in our literature since Shakespeare. And what became of this wonderful production of nature? He shattered himself, he inevitably shattered himself to pieces against the huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British Philistinism. But Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment of a supreme modern poet; except for his genius he was an ordinary nineteenth-century ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... any obstacle in the chasm? Did some precipice or abyss hold him in its gloomy depths? Had—and at the thought he fancied that his heart had stopped beating—Had some gulf swallowed the lad when he was groping ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... coal or hoisting tackling—pushing in and out among the statelier craft of any seaport. It is this stage in a great man's career which is the test. Is the man sure enough of himself to leave everything behind, and jump over the precipice into the unknown? If ever he wishes to return to what he has left, he will have just the height of this jump to climb back to the old place. The old place is a certainty. The unknown may engulf in failure. He {178} must ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... spring verdure with heavy masses of bronze and crimson, and magnolias exhale intoxicating odours from snowy chalices. Blue lilies and flaxen pampas grass grow in thickets upon the emerald slopes, and the ordered loveliness of the mountain Paradise, walled in by dense jungle and savage precipice, brings the glamour of dreamland into the stern environment of mysterious forest and frowning peak. A rudely-paved and mossy path, shadowed by the black foliage of stately casuarinas, leads into the gloomy jungle. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... vainly for some refuge, some pinnacle of rock or precipice they could climb, and from which they could beat down their attackers. There was nothing but the welter of volcanic waste: rock heaps and boulders and smooth streams of solid lava. Perhaps in the crater, he thought, over the ragged ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... on to a still more vivid description of the broad road, so smooth, so easy, so charming to every sense, so thronged with people all gaily dancing onwards to destruction, the sudden end of the road, where it launched its thronging crowds over a precipice into the foaming, seething sea ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... were making their way through the crowded and noisy street toward the unfinished Suspension Bridge which spans the gorge, linking the city to the height which is crowned by the great hospital. Beyond the hospital, opposite to the Grand Rocher, a terrific precipice of rock beneath which a cascade leaps down to the valley where lie the baths of Sidi Imcin, is a wood of fir-trees commanding an immense view. This was the objective of their walk. The sun shone warmly, brightly, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... foot of the hill and halted to reconnoitre the slopes as far as was possible. After half an hour, since nothing could be seen, the advance was resumed up the side of a precipice and through a jungle so thick that we had to cut our road. It was eleven o'clock before we reached the summit of the ridge and emerged on to a more or less open plateau, diversified with patches of wood and heaps of great boulders. Two squadrons had re-formed on the ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... the island of Kauai to recover and restore to life the body of Lohiau, the lover of her sister, Pele, she arrived at the foot of the Kalalau Mountain shortly before sunset. Being told by her friends at Haena that there would not be daylight sufficient to climb the pali (precipice) and get the body out of the cave in which it was hidden, she prayed to her gods to keep the sun stationary (i ka muli o Hea) over the brook Hea, until she had accomplished her object. The prayer was heard, the mountain was climbed, the guardians of ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... just back, we never saw our buggies again. Once, following a crescent, far below us lay the water battery concealed by the trees that grew by the water's edge, looking, from where we stood, like quite a formidable precipice. Then still beyond, after leaving the river, we passed through a camp where the soldiers divided their attention equally between eating their supper and staring at us in the most profound silence. Then, through an old gate, down ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... armies. The tierra caliente, or low level, terminates at Plan del Rio, the site of the American camp, from which the road ascends immediately in a long circle among the lofty hills, whose commanding points had all been fortified and garrisoned by the enemy. His right, intrenched, rested on a precipice overhanging an impassable ravine that forms the bed of the stream; and his intrenchments extended continuously to the road, in which was placed a formidable battery. On the other side the lofty and difficult ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... is dark and dangerous. After advancing sixty or seventy feet we descend a strong but rough ladder twenty feet long, placed against a very precipitous rock. Not the faintest glimmer of daylight reaches that spot; but after a while we stand on the brink of a perpendicular precipice, the bottom of which is strongly illuminated through a hole in the surface rock more than 200 feet above. Standing on the verge of this awful pit in the dim light, the rocks and crags seem to take on most weird shapes. We go down into the great ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness; he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if not with desperate outcry, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... above. Deep beds of rich ferns clothed the lower slopes, and sheets of that delicate flower, the enchanter's nightshade, reared its white blossoms down to the bank of a little clear stream that came flowing from out of the mighty yawning arch of the cavern, while above the precipice rose sheer the ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Among the first Spanish explorers a small party attempted to cross the Colorado Canyon. They wandered down on to the plateau north of the river, and there their food and water gave out. Many hundreds of feet below them at the bottom of a sheer precipice flowed the great river. Their leader swooned from thirst and exhaustion. It seemed certain that death was near. Above them towered a wall they could not surmount. Just as they were ready to throw themselves into the river so far below, their leader ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... sea grows a peculiar kind of stringy reed, very strong and pliable. She tied several of these reeds together, made a noose at one end, and with the other end tied herself to a rock near the edge of the precipice, that she might not overbalance herself, and be dragged down in her endeavours to recover her kid. She then threw down the noose at the other end of the line, and after one or two attempts succeeded with great dexterity ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... by the blessing of chance, Lucien, standing on the brink of the precipice over which he was destined to fall, heard warnings on all sides. D'Arthez had set him on the right road, had shown him the noble method of work, and aroused in him the spirit before which all obstacles disappear. Lousteau himself (partly from selfish motives) had tried to warn him away by describing ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... his nature and threatened to wreck a carefully-built life. It was his first meeting with the little demon that rebels in a man after he thinks his character and his reactions thoroughly established, and he shuddered as he realized how close the strange imp had pulled him to the precipice. Yesterday, that precipice had seemed a new paradise; now it was a yawning chasm—and he drew ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... tenor of these remarks it was to be inferred that the princess had the depth of a precipice, the grace of a queen, the corruption of diplomatists, the mystery of a first initiation, and the dangerous qualities of a siren. The two clever men of the world, incapable of foreseeing the denouement of their joke, succeeded in presenting Diane d'Uxelles as a consummate specimen of ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... of that sketch; the mountain is humpbacked, and the face of that precipice is exactly like Colonel Bury;' and he caught up a pencil to help out the ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... never in the day or night dream yourself to be upon some lofty overhanging precipice? did you never in imagination look down over its extreme verge upon the dark coast that skirts the foot of it, so far below you that you only distinguish the Rocks themselves by the white foam of the blue wave that breaks over them? Did you never hold by a bush ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... hearts break, lad, and then in verse. Shall I weep? No. Let me laugh; for, my faith, it is laughable. I brought it on myself. Fate led me to the precipice, and I myself jumped over. Yesterday I had pride, I was heir to splendid estates, with forty thousand livres the year to spend. To-night . . . Let me see; the vicomte owes me fifty pistoles. It will be a start in life . . . And much ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... easily disabled than a snake. Always zealous in obedience to the Biblical law, it is honest to confess to a decided preference for elbow-room when engaged in its actual fulfilment. This was a fight with man's first enemy in close and awkward quarters—a precipice behind, walls of rock in front and at either hand. Three times my length, strong enough to constrict to death a giant, wily enough to seek the cover of the matted roots of the tree, several points were in favour of the snake. My first wild haphazard stroke, which had ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... know each concession is another nail in their coffin. The Central Government fear that the taking up of a spirited position by any pre-eminent Chinese would carry the Chinese people with him, and therefore the Central Government endeavour to keep up appearances, and to skirt the precipice of war as near as they possibly can, while never intending ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... pleasure. They were astonishing triumphs, but they were dearly bought. The position was, in fact, an impossible one to maintain long. O'Connell had carried the whole mass of the people with him up to the very brink of the precipice, but how to bring them safely and successfully down again was more than even he could accomplish. Resistance he had always steadily denounced, yet every day his own words seemed to be bringing the inevitable moment of collision ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... my gentleman, she took him out of our company, and led him out of the temple, through a golden gate on the right, into a round chapel made of transparent speculary stones, by whose solid clearness the sun's light shined there through the precipice of the rock without any windows or other entrance, and so easily and fully dispersed itself through the greater temple that the light seemed rather to spring out of it than to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... an affirmative sign. Then, having looked around with the anxious glance of a man who calculates a precipice over which he has fallen, he passed his hand across his eyes ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... with the worm that never dies. On one occasion, it having been supposed by Peter that the Captain had gone to the East Neuk of Fife, weeks elapsed, we remember, ere he was found sitting dead, just as if he had been alive, in his usual attitude in his arm-chair, commanding a view of the precipice of the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... little, as one may see. Endowed with too much good sense and good faith not to perceive the precipice, he soon felt that he was straying, and began a retrograde movement. I do not call this about-face a crime on his part: M. Reybaud is one of those men who cannot justly be held responsible for their metaphors. He ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Harrel seemed bound to the Baronet, he left her—a prey himself to an anxiety yet more severe than that with which he had filled her! He now saw all his long cherished hopes in danger of final destruction, and suddenly cast upon the brink of a precipice, where, while he struggled to protect them from falling, his eyes were ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... a curiously convenient, undiscriminating epithet. I use it here. The Dixville Notch is, briefly, picturesque,—a fine gorge between a crumbling conical crag and a scarped precipice,—a pass easily defensible, except at the season when raspberries would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... in the renegade's mind. He could not at once decide on taking so bold and sudden a leap as that to which he was urged, though conscious of the peril as well as misery of his present position at the court. As the deer, driven by wolves to the precipice's brink, hesitates on making the plunge down—though it give him the only chance of escape from the ravening jaws of his fierce pursuers—so ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... run, Whene'er we part, my trembling heart forebodes, That you will ne'er come back to me again. I see you on the frozen mountain steeps, Missing, perchance, your leap from crag to crag. I see the chamois, with a wild rebound, Drag you down with him o'er the precipice. I see the avalanche close o'er your head, The treacherous ice give way, and you sink down Intombed alive within its hideous gulf. Ah! in a hundred varying forms does death Pursue the Alpine huntsman on his course. That way ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... drew his sword, and, riding up to Arthur, suddenly ran him through the body. Arthur cried aloud, and begged for mercy as he fell from his horse to the ground; but John dragged him to the edge of the precipice, and threw him over into the sea while he was ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the cup it presents at her lips, she stands, France, with her future staked on the word it may pledge. The vengeance urged of desire a reserve countermands; The patience clasped totters hard on the precipice edge. Lopped of an arm, mother love for her own springs quick, To curdle the milk in her breasts for the young they feed, At thought of her single hand, and the lost so nigh. Mother love for her own, who raised her when she lay sick Nigh death, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... just behind. The crosses of the past week, of the day before, of two days before, extended in a line down the slope; they glided along, plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking long strides as if they were in danger of being carried over a precipice. ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... around. Not a breath of air stirred the snow-laden boughs; and the wild, gray face of the precipice, towering above us, seemed to grow awesome ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... Jack and Murray and their companions, in perfect silence, climbed up the rugged precipice which formed the outworks of the island fortress. They knocked their knees and cut their shins against the sharp points of the rocks, and scratched their hands and faces with the thorny plants which ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... mountain, and, standing on the terreplein of the precipice in front of what is now Robert College, he marked the narrowness of the Bosphorus below, and thinking of the military necessity for a crossing defended on both shores, he selected a site for a castle ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Oolitic Conglomerates abundantly testify, to denuding and disintegrating agencies,—a platform beaten by the surf where it descended to the sea level, and washed in the interior by rivers, with here a tall hill or abrupt precipice, and there a flat plain or sluggish morass,—there grew vast forests of cone-bearing trees, tangled thickets of gigantic equisetaceae, numerous forms of Cycas and Zamia, and wide-rolling seas of fern, amid whose open spaces club mosses ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... felt as if an invisible arm had seized me and was dragging me down. I shrieked and stood trembling above the foaming water until assistance came. Here the mere idea of vertigo produced vertigo. A plank on the ground may be crossed without arousing any idea of falling; but if it is above a precipice, and we think of the distance below, the impulse to fall is very strong. Even when we are in perfect safety we may feel what is known as the "fascination" of a precipice. The sight of the gulf below, becoming a fixed idea, produces a resultant inhibition on all other ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Evangelists. Meanwhile, I suspect that he is not by any means without a suspicion that he is on a platform beset with far greater dangers, himself. He has walked a little this way, and that way; and his "common sense" has shewn him that there is an ugly precipice on every side. Nay; he perceives that the ground trembles, and cracks, and shakes,—and even ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... and made prisoners of seventy of the principal citizens of Waterford. Large sums of money were offered for their ransom, but in vain. They were brutally murdered by the English soldiers, who first broke their limbs, and then hurled them from a precipice into the sea. It was the first instalment of the utterly futile theory, so often put in practice since that day, of "striking terror into the Irish;" and the experiment was quite as unsuccessful as all such ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... height of the precipice, in general, is twenty- three yards; the length of the lapse, or slip, as seen from the fields below, one hundred and eighty-one; and a partial fall, concealed in the coppice, extends seventy yards more: so that the total length of ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... and Lapoulle cleaned his musket. The first item was a splendid victory won by Bazaine, who had driven an entire Prussian corps into the quarries of Jaumont, and the trumped-up tale was told with an abundance of dramatic detail, how men and horses went over the precipice and were crushed on the rocks beneath out of all semblance of humanity, so that there was not one whole corpse found for burial. Then there were minute details of the pitiable condition of the German armies ever since they had ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... quite near the lake, lay a small town, its wooden wharves and warehouses lining the shore for some distance. Lower down, the bank rose high, dropping precipitously to the water's edge; and nearer still, the precipice changed to a steep, but green and wooded bank, and here, on the summit of the bank, stood ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... hour drew near, Mallard set out to walk a short distance along the road, to meet him. Unlike the Sorrento side of the promontory, the mountains here rise suddenly and boldly out of the sea, towering to craggy eminences, moulded and cleft into infinite variety of slope and precipice, bastion and gorge. Cut upon the declivity, often at vast sheer height above the beach, the road follows the curving of the hills. Now and then it makes a deep loop inland, on the sides of an impassable ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... resistance, the plains of Macedonia and Thessaly, as far as the foot of Mount Oeta, a steep and woody range of hills, almost impervious to his cavalry. They stretched from east to west, to the edge of the sea-shore; and left, between the precipice and the Malian Gulf, an interval of three hundred feet, which, in some places, was contracted to a road capable of admitting only a single carriage. [6] In this narrow pass of Thermopylae, where Leonidas and the three hundred ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... had led France on to the brink of a precipice, and he had in his turn been led on by her; king and people had given themselves up unreservedly to the passion for glory and to the intoxication of success; the day of awakening ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... inclination received from his parents to keep well with the Court, cramped the resolutions of his great soul. I bewailed this change in his behaviour both for my own and the public account, but much more for his sake. I loved him as much as I honoured him, and clearly saw the precipice. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... dome or bombproof all trace of buildings had disappeared. A glistening lake of leperous-like molten lead lay in the centre of the crater, strangely iridescent. A broad path of destruction, fifty yards or so in width, led from the scene of the disruption to the precipice against which the Ray had played. The face of the cliff itself seemed covered with a white coating or powder which gave it a ghostly sheen. Moreover, the rain had turned to snow and already the entire aspect of ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... of man is troubled, when the phrase is quoted that blood 'renews,' when comfort is preached as the aim of life. Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories. Here we see resolution in the first stage, but resolution of a special kind: he resolved to do it like jumping over a precipice or from a bell tower and his legs shook as he went to the crime. He forgot to shut the door after him, and murdered two people for a theory. He committed the murder and couldn't take the money, and what he did manage to snatch up he hid under a stone. ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a bluff against which the full force of the stream has dashed for ages, until it has formed a precipice several hundred feet high. It is called by the Indians The Place of the Death Song. There is a legend which says that at one time the bands of the Ogallallas and Brules lived upon this river, immediately opposite the precipice. While residing there one of the braves of the Ogallallas ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... grassy ridge, and across this the last of the enemy was bolting, and in a few minutes had disappeared amid the most appalling yells from the Levies. That was the last our party saw of them, for we now found our path again blocked up by a precipice and again I had to send men above and below to find a practicable way. I then called for a return of casualties, and found we had escaped scot free (I expect the enemy had too). So ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... of resistance is not a good thing, but I can hardly bear to think of the suffering I endured during those weeks with Ulick Dean, walking in Hyde Park, round that Long Water, talking of sin and its pleasures, feeling every day that I was being drawn a little nearer to the precipice, that I was losing every day some power of resistance. It is terrifying to lose sense of the reality of things, to lose one's own will, to feel that one is merely a stone that has been set rolling. To feel like this ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... opposite side of the river may here be seen for many miles the Palisades, a long, rough mountain ridge close to the water's edge. Its upper half is a perpendicular precipice of bare rock of a columnar structure from 100 to 200 feet in height, the whole height of the mountain being generally from 400 to 600 feet, and the highest point in the range opposite Sing Sing 800 feet above the Hudson, and known as the High Torn. The width of the mountain is from a half mile ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... all we descended the precipice, 300 feet in depth, forming the wall of the old crater, but now thickly covered with vegetation. It is so steep in many places that flights of zig-zag wooden steps have been inserted in the face of the cliff in some ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... the water supply is nothing short of marvellous. At one point we ascended a long, wide, gentle slope all laid out in tiny fields, and well watered from two large, fast-flowing streams. But where did they come from, for the slope ended abruptly in a sharp, high precipice overlooking a gorge through which flowed the Chin Ch'uan, a tributary of the Anning. But on turning a corner at the head of the slope we saw that from high up on the mountain-side an artificial channel had been constructed with infinite ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... the old castle stands terminates, on one side, at the foot of the castle walls, in a precipice of rocks, and on two other sides, also, the ascent is too steep to be practicable for an enemy. On the fourth side there is a more gradual declivity, up which the fortress could be approached by means of a ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... a precipice, you calculate the distance of the solid points with astonishing accuracy. In the first place, you dangle your legs as if to measure the space, which you divide in your judgment, by the motions of your feet; then you throw yourself exactly upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... the slope is found to be steeper, and more difficult than was expected. What from below seemed a gentle acclivity turns out to be almost a precipice—a very common illusion with those unaccustomed to mountain climbing. But they are not daunted—every one of the men has stood on the main truck of a tempest-tossed ship. What to this were even the scaling of ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... way to a place by this wall, where, by looking over, there could be seen, at a distance along the hill, a small place where the rock which formed the face of it was precipitous. The precipice seemed to be about ten or ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... Jacques Cartier. The two former examined the seaboard, and the latter first entered the grand estuary of the St. Lawrence, which he named from the saint's day of its discovery; and he also was the earliest white man to gaze down from the mighty precipice of Quebec, and pronounce the obscure Indian name which was hereafter to suggest a world-famed capital. Then, the dwellings and navies of nations and generations yet unborn were growing all around in hundreds of leagues of forest; a ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... this hour the caffe was closed and the club was empty. For the sun beat down with fury upon the open space with its tiled pavement, and the seats let into the wall that sheltered the Piazza from the precipice that frowned above the sea were untenanted by loungers. As Maurice went by he thought of Gaspare's words, "When a man cannot go any more into the Piazza—Madonna, it is finished!" This was the place where the public opinion of Marechiaro was formed, where fame was ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... were on the way up the river to war on the Iroquois. Joining the Indian canoes, he slipped past the hilly shores of the St. Lawrence and in five days was between the main bank on the north side and the muddy shallows of the Isle of Orleans. Sheering out where the Montmorency roars over a precipice in a shining cataract, the canoes glided across St. Charles River among the forests of masts heaving to the tide below the beetling heights ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... a river of the plains. Immediately around us the valley of the stream was tolerably open; and at the distance of a few miles, where the river had cut its way through the hills, was the narrow cleft, on one side of which a lofty precipice of bright red rock rose vertically above the low hills ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... the snow falling, looking down thousands of feet, made me crave a hand to keep the snowflakes from drawing me down. The wholesale milliner and the rest considered me a reckless soul, and many were the falsetto shrieks they emitted if I went within ten feet of the edge of the precipice. They did not realize the insurance and assurance of ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... the foot of the slide—that is to say, at the edge of the valley—there was a tall cliff, or rock wall, and over this precipice all the mass of snow now was pouring, driven with such mighty force against this wall of rock at its foot that it broke into fine particles more like mist than snow. In a vast cascade it poured down and out over the valley, making one of the most wonderful ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... perilous trip through the forest, lasting eight days. Often they could only push their way backwards for long distances, through the terrible thickets. It rained and they were cold and wet. But on the eighth day they found themselves on the top of a dizzy precipice just above the Rhine. There they lay hidden until nightfall, although they were in constant danger of being discovered by German sentinels and townspeople who passed near them. When darkness came, they crawled about for two hours, seeking to find a trail that would lead ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... miles to go if we could have flown like birds; but the way lay in and out of rocks, with quite a little precipice to descend at times, so that the journey must have been double that length. The hope of a good meal, however, made us trudge on, and after a few stops to rest I saw that we must now be nearing the shore, for the ground was much ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... dark clouds in the sky a few straggling sunbeams find their way to the valley. Upon the border of an immense cliff stands a group of men whose costume denotes them to be brigands of the Apennines. Upon the very edge of the precipice, erect and calm, is a young man, surrounded by the brigands, who are preparing to throw him into the depths below. The chief is a short distance away, and seemingly about to give the fatal signal. A few paces in advance stands a female, of strange ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... wish better." "Yes," adjoined Arnaud, "for that wish should be that I ever had remained unborn."' He polishes the broken blade of a sword, and views himself therein; the sight so horrifies him that he determines to throw himself over a precipice, but draws back at the last moment. He goes to a cavern, and conjures up the prince of hell. "Arnaud knew himself to be interrogated. What he required.... What was that answer the effects explain.... There passed in liveliest portraiture ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... climb, while a chill wind whipped down out of the mountains and raised the sand in the valley. It was less than eighty feet to the precipice edge above, but it was almost perpendicular, and as they climbed, the buffeting winds began to press against their bodies ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... "lead thee about," but He will not lead thee wrong. Unutterable tenderness is the characteristic of all His dealings. "Blessed be His name," says a tried believer, "He maketh my feet like hinds' feet" (literally, "equaleth" them), "he equaleth them for every precipice, ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... produce a great revulsion in the feelings of Colonel Clifford; but as for Robert Bartley his very character was shaken to the foundation by his crime and its terrible consequences. He was now like a man who had glided down a soft sunny slope, and was suddenly arrested at the brink of a fathomless precipice. Bartley was cunning, selfish, avaricious, unscrupulous in reality, so long as he could appear respectable, but he was not violent, nor physically reckless, still less cruel. A deed of blood shocked him as much as it would shock an honest man. Yet now through following his natural ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... upstairs one in a building on the edge of the ramparts, and after a few nights they broke through the ceiling into an empty chamber, which had a window looking on the roof. With a rope made of their bedclothes they lowered themselves clean over the ramparts on to the edge of the precipice over the river; and along this they passed—having no daylight to make them giddy—and took their way ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... where he was going or what he had to attack or when proximity to the enemy had been reached, was that the infantry, marching in fours, were suddenly fired into at a point where, after ascending but a few feet, their further advance against the enemy was precluded by an unclimbable precipice. The moment that the first shots were fired companies doubled straight at the points whence the firing seemed to have proceeded, and commenced to scale the hill. Soon, however, they came upon a perpendicular wall of rock, from the summit of which the Boers were plying their rifles at ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... he saw before him a precipice, as it were without bottom. He was a patrician, a military tribune, a powerful man; but above every power of that world to which he belonged was a madman whose will and malignity it was impossible to foresee. Only such people as the Christians might ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... proceeded to quote opinions from native newspapers on the Bill. The 'Tsala ea Batho', of Kimberley, said: "We are standing on the brink of the precipice. We appealed to certain members of Parliament against the suspension clause in Mr. Sauer's Land Bill, and the result of our appeal has been an agreement between Sir Thomas Smartt and the Minister to the effect ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... enthusiastic as to try that adventure again, now that its perils are understood; and no employer is so reckless as to urge him. The true variety of O. Hallii stands in much the same case. To obtain it the explorer must march in the bed of a torrent and on the face of a precipice alternately for an uncertain period of time, with a river to cross about every day. And he has to bring back his loaded mules, or Indians, over the same pathless waste. The Roraima Mountain begins to ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... are the speed and the spray— The dark lakes that welter them forth, Tree and heath nodding over their way— The rock and the precipice grey, That bind the wild streams of ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... midway up the lake, on the east. It is the show-piece of the region,—the best they can do for a precipice, and really admirably done. Kinneo is a solid mass of purple flint rising seven hundred feet upright from the water. By the side of this block could some Archimedes appear, armed with a suitable "pou sto" and a mallet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... a better road they followed the course of the river, which thundered down the face of the precipice in four great waterfalls, connected by as many sullen pools, whose cavities had been hollowed out in the course of centuries from the rock. The second of these ledges proved so insurmountable that at one time Leonard thought ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... or eyrie, is high up on the ledge of some precipice, where hardly any enemy can come. Of course it is a very large nest; but it is not carefully or nicely built. It is a rough affair, like the rook's nest; a lot of sticks and twigs, and heath or grass, with a more comfortable hollow in the middle, which is padded ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... longest: but what can one frail pebble do against a river? "How pretty cows look in a landscape," I said; for you know, even if you must come down, it is better to roll down an inclined plane than to drop over a precipice; and I thought, since I saw that descent was inevitable, I would at least engineer the party gently through aesthetics to puns. So I said, "How pretty cows look in a landscape, so calm and reflective, and sheep harmoniously ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... force, as they had five times as many men as he, and shoot his ship full of holes at their leisure from the shore. But Garibaldi was a sailor, and he had the true pilot's intuition for finding the channel. Suddenly, as the pursuing ships rounded a bend, from the height of a commanding precipice a deadly stream of shot and shell was poured down through the defenseless decks. And the gunners on the ships could not elevate their cannon to get the range. Garibaldi had taken his best cannon from his ship and masked this battery on shore. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... concluded he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I understood his idea. Crenshaw had travelled the road before, but I never had. We had travelled several miles on the mountain, when he passed near a great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head and tumbled him from ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... dwelling in a cave, and had built a strong stone wall before its mouth. They harried the country all round, and carried all their booty to their cave. King Sigurd landed on this island, and went to the cave; but it lay in a precipice, and there was a high winding path to the stone wall, and the precipice above projected over it. The heathens defended the stone wall, and were not afraid of the Northmen's arms; for they could throw stones, or shoot down upon the Northmen under their feet; neither did the Northmen, under ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... With or 'gainst Ellide's form, Meet good timbered sides, defending Menaced ship, defying storm. Like an evening meteor sweeping, Joyful glides she through the night, Like an Alpine roebuck leaping Over precipice and height. ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... grander every moment; the brook was working its way deeper below the level of the road, while here and there in this sombre defile a splash of yellow aspen gleamed like living gold on the face of the precipice. The wild and beautiful gorge interested him in spite of himself; it disengaged his thoughts alike from his personal grievance, and from his dissatisfied contemplation of his own lack of proper vindictiveness. There was nothing grand like this in the neighborhood of ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... and the Verre d'Eau; but they might with much greater truth be ascribed to the author of Antony and la Tour de Nesle. Scribe invents and eludes where Dumas invents and dares. The theory of Scribe is one of mere dexterity: his drama is a perpetual chasse-croise at the edge of a precipice, a dance of puppets among swords that might but will not cut and eggs that might but will not break; to him a situation is a kind of tight-rope to be crossed with ever so much agility and an endless affectation of peril ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... and sat up, tingling. She felt as she had sometimes felt as a child, when, on the edge of sleep, she had dreamed that she was stepping of a precipice and had woken, tense and alert, to find that there was no danger after all. But there was a difference between that feeling and this. She had woken, but to find that there was danger. It was as though some inner voice was calling to ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... for his head. He was a powerful and active young man, and a desperate struggle commenced between them. They continued for several minutes in this death-wrestle, during which time they had imperceptibly drawn close to the edge of tremendous precipice which bounded the road. Smyth already heard just below them the wild screaming of some ravens, who had been disturbed by the encounter; when he made a desperate effort on the very brink of the precipice—tore from his assailant's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... other circumstances Julia would have contemplated with rapture. From the side of the hill, down which they were winding, a vale appeared, from whence arose wild and lofty mountains, whose steeps were cloathed with hanging woods, except where here and there a precipice projected its bold and rugged front. Here, a few half-withered trees hung from the crevices of the rock, and gave a picturesque wildness to the object; there, clusters of half-seen cottages, rising from among tufted groves, embellished the green margin of a stream which meandered in the ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... interview, the commencement of which we first indicated. Yet it must be confessed that, though the bravest of men, his courage faltered as he entered the accustomed ravine. He stopped and looked down on the precipice below; he felt it utterly impossible to meet them; his mind nearly deserted him. Death, some great and universal catastrophe, an earthquake, a deluge, that would have buried them all in an instant and a common fate, would have been hailed by ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... should be lost, they alone would be to blame? Stumbling over roots, dodging trees and rocks, they plunged wildly along until finally they saw a light spot ahead and a moment later came out suddenly upon the edge of a precipice, from which they could look straight down into a deep valley below. The goats were there before them huddled together an the brow of the cliff, bleating piteously. Bello sat on his haunches with his tongue hanging out and looked at the scenery! Seppi ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... slipped and fell over a precipice on the north side of the island a few weeks ago, and broke ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... right, Victor; I have felt for some time that when France was on the verge of a precipice it was not the time for her nobles to be marrying. Noblesse oblige. If we were two peasants we might marry and be happy. As it is we must wait, even though we know that waiting may never come to an end. I have a conviction, Victor, that our ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... trembling, flickering one of Henry there was more than any ordinary challenge could have conveyed. Mrs. Carter must have felt at the first immediate confrontation of the strange little figure that her feet were on the very edge of some most desperate precipice. The long room and the passages beyond must have quivered. At that very first moment, with some stir, some hinted approach, Henry called, with the desperate summoning of all his ghostly world, upon his ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... from this spot, there is a grand view of the Val di Bove. The foreground consists of lava, forming the face of an enormous precipice, at the bottom of which is seen a lovely valley, gradually sloping down towards the coast, embracing the three several regions of the mountain, to which the purple wave of the Mediterranean forms a noble boundary: nothing can be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... the volcano for the first time on a rainy day. On top, I suddenly found myself at the end of the world; it was the edge of the crater, completely filled with steam. As I walked along the precipice, such an infernal thundering began just under my feet as it seemed, that I thought best to retire. My next ascent took place on a clear, bright day; but the wind drove sand and ashes along the desert, and dimmed the sunshine to a yellowish gloomy light. ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... hang helpless from the bed; While with quick sighs, and suffocative breath, Her interrupted heart-pulse swims in death. —Then shrieks of captured towns, and widows' tears, Pale lovers stretch'd upon their blood-stain'd biers, 65 The headlong precipice that thwarts her flight, The trackless desert, the cold starless night, And stern-eye'd Murder with his knife behind, In dread succession agonize her mind. O'er her fair limbs convulsive tremors fleet, 70 Start in her hands, and struggle ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... hear me. The fellow's seal-like ability as a swimmer was, of course, well known to me, but I must confess I trembled for his life in such a weltering whirl of rock-torn sea as boiled among the crags at the base of that precipice. He, however, evidently knew what he was going to do, and, though taking risks which would have certainly been fatal to an ordinary swimmer, was quite ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... a moment, revolving his son's pathetic speech. It was true he had been cross, and had said more than he had meant to say. He had not wished to hinder Dick's innocent enjoyments; but if he were unknowingly picking flowers at the edge of a precipice, was it not his duty as a father to ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... their way up, using the utmost precaution to avoid any noise. There was no longer any need for concealment, and as the foremost of the assailants began to climb the great boulders at the foot of the precipice, a dozen arrows from the bush above alighted among them; killing three and wounding several others. Sir John Kerr shouted to his men to follow him, and began to clamber up the hill. Several arrows struck him, but he was ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... of the mountain, as a hill four or five hundred feet above the river is called, is a place which was the scene of an awful accident. The precipice wall of the gorge of the Niagara is very close to the road, but hidden from it by stunted firs and bushes. Colonel Nichols, an officer well known and distinguished in the last American war, was returning one winter's night, when the ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... members of the Sierra Club party visiting the Mountain, climbed the Kautz glacier, and finding their way barred by ice cascades, reached the summit by a thrilling rock climb over the cliff above the South Tahoma glacier. This precipice (see p. 37) they found to be a series of rock terraces, often testing the strength and nerve of the climbers. In Sunset Magazine for November, 1895, Mr. Glascock has told the story of ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams |
