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Tunnel   Listen
verb
Tunnel  v. t.  (past & past part. tunneled or tunnelled; pres. part. tunneling or tunnelling)  
1.
To form into a tunnel, or funnel, or to form like a tunnel; as, to tunnel fibrous plants into nests.
2.
To catch in a tunnel net.
3.
To make an opening, or a passageway, through or under; as, to tunnel a mountain; to tunnel a river.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tunnel" Quotes from Famous Books



... he said in tones of comradeship and encouragement. 'I'm perfectly certain nothing's going to happen. We're just going through a tunnel, and presently we shall just come out into the open air again, with the sky and the stars ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit

... note: lies near vital North Atlantic sea lanes; only 35 km from France and now linked by tunnel under the English Channel; because of heavily indented coastline, no location is more than 125 km ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... about hunting for them until at last he saw a faint light shining from out a dark cavern among the rocks. Then, though he knew how dangerous it was, he followed the light and found himself in a long, dark tunnel." ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... give you some idea of the way the ground was interlaced with subterranean passages, and this, mind you, was only one tunnel of many. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... which meant nothing to her, caught up her sunbonnet and, glancing warily about, made an exit through the back door. She ran through a long grape-arbour where great wreathing arms of Virgin's Bower aided to shut the green tunnel in from sight, then took a path where tall bushes screened her, making for the short cut which she guessed ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... obviously fitted for ranunculuses only. The two former may indifferently hold daisies, marjoram, sweet williams, and that sort. My friend in Canton is Inspector of Teas, his name Ball; and I can think of no better tunnel. I shall expect ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads; while, beyond the station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid [it was really called the 'Commodore'], and belonged to Timpson, at the coach office up ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... clean and dry. All refuse from the clean repasts of the family was scrupulously removed, and even the entrances, far out in the pond, were kept free from litter. When food was needed, a beaver would slip down into the dark water of the tunnel, out into the glimmering light of the pond, and straight to the brush pile. Selecting a suitable stick, he would tow it back to the house, up the main entrance, and into the dry, dark chamber. When all the tender bark was eaten off, the bare stick would ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... to Puget Sound will require no tunnel in the pass of the Rocky Mountains. The approaches of the Big Hole and Deer Lodge in both directions are eminently feasible, requiring little rock excavation, and with no grades exceeding eighty feet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... golden vein, and all these are timbered with heavy wooden supports to keep the earth and rock from falling in on the men. The miners work in day and night gangs, using dynamite to break up the hard rock, and sending ore up in great iron buckets, or in cars if the tunnel ends in daylight, on the hillside. Sometimes the miners strike water, and that must be pumped out to keep the mine from ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton

... single span. Mr. Layard has shown that the Ninevites knew its use at least 3000 years ago; he not only discovered a vaulted chamber, but that "arched gate-ways are continually represented in the bas-reliefs." Diodorus Siculus relates that the tunnel from the Euphrates at Babylon, ascribed to Semiramis, was vaulted. There are vaults under the site of the temple at Jerusalem, which are generally considered as ancient as that edifice, but some think ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner

... ring. Thus the communication between the two was proved. I then sought for it with my Nautilus; I discovered it, ventured into it, and before long, sir, you too will have passed through my Arabian tunnel!" ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... facing Petersburg lay the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteers, largely composed of miners from the coal regions of that state. Late in June Colonel Pleasants of this regiment had submitted a plan whereby his men were to dig a tunnel to a point directly under one of the Confederate forts, plant a gunpowder mine there and blow a breach in the defenses through which troops could be poured and the town carried by assault. The scheme was plausible, provided the tunnel could be bored ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill

... earth slid smoothly down. The Diamond Heart caved in completely, the almost finished connecting tunnel was a wreck, and the still rolling, moist gravel swept over Bep's head, filling up the Silver ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... morning Scamp raced hopefully towards the sweet-smelling tunnel of hawthorn trees that led down to the other tunnel in the rock and the tiny harbour, because, for a very small dog, the granite slip was much easier to compass than the steep ledges of Les Laches. And every morning Punch waited quietly ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... as she watched the Three Graces, who, on their side, were carefully folding up their cloaks. And the train rushed on, rushed on through deep cuttings, dashed through deserted stations ... and then, suddenly, entered a tunnel. Lily, but for the noise of the wheels, would have seen herself as she had been that night. Oh, she would never forget it! It clutched at her heart. She clenched her fists with anger. Turned out by Trampy! Insulted by her ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... the Crocodile River rushed from the lofty plateau of the high veld to the wildernesses of the fever country and filled that miniature South African Switzerland with myriads of rainbows. A long, curved, and inclined tunnel near the top of the mountain led to the undulating plains of the Transvaal—a marvellously rapid transition from a region filled with nature's wildest panoramas to one that contained not even a tree or rock or cliff to relieve the monotony of the landscape. On the one side ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas

... of the war I suppose the Channel Tunnel will be made. And quite time too! But even that will not help us. We get no food from Europe, and never shall again. Not even by linking ourselves to Europe can we place ourselves in security from Europe. Faith may remove mountains, but it will not remove Britain to the centre ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... quickly, "but you will be able to force yourself through. Inside it enlarges at once to a low tunnel, along which you will creep for a hundred yards, when you will reach open air in a dark, rocky dell, close to the edge of the precipice above the river. Descend to its bed, and, when free, use your freedom to escape from death—but much more, to escape ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne

... he indited a sonnet to the princess, who regarded him wide-eyed. The troll came back from a tunnel after he finished, and said curtly: "This way." Cappen took the girl's hand and followed her ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson

... Promenade going down like a long green tunnel, from the big white Hotel at the top to the High Street at the bottom of the basin where the very dregs of the heat ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... along the "cut-off" in the same direction, a full mile in advance. Arriving at Indian Spring, he left his horse at a Mexican posada on the confines of the settlement, and from the piled debris of a tunnel excavation awaited the slow arrival of the coach. On mature reflection he could give no reason why he had not boldly awaited it at the express office, except a certain bashful consciousness of his own folly, and a belief that it might be glaringly ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... bringing a grateful coolness, and they drove through a tunnel of light walled in by ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... in the gulches and hunters' shacks on the mountains were buried in a night and the occupants had to tunnel their way out. Deer fled from the slopes down into secluded glens which had been their safe refuge from Sierra storms before, but the white death followed them and softly folded its feathery wings about them. In the spring the ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly

... out upon the boardwalk that ran along the street. Overhead the maples and elms met, making a cool tunnel. In this green canopy nest-building was being carried on, on a great scale and with tremendous commotion. The doctor picked his way carefully along the undulating surface of the sidewalk, for the boards were damp and rotten, and liable to fly up at one end and break a limb; and though he ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith

... operations reduced to form. The author's name has for the last twenty-five years been associated with most of the great works of internal improvement in this country, and is familiar to every Massachusetts man as connected with the great railroad-enterprise of the State,—the Hoosac Tunnel. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... offensive opened, the city of Paris was surprised by being bombarded from a distance of approximately 70 miles by a new German long-range gun, which was discovered by French airmen to be concealed in a concrete tunnel in a wood behind the German lines, A number of persons were killed and wounded by the nine-inch shells from this new weapon, 54 women being killed when a shell struck a church in the suburbs of the city on Good Friday. The Allied commanders refused to regard ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... God will judge between us. You went over to the Royalist camp, and you were among the garrison that had reduced this very castle. The troops of the Parliament came up one day and summoned you to surrender. The only answer your general gave us was to order the tunnel guns to fire on the white flag. It went down. We lay entrenched about you for six days. Then you sent out a dispatch assuring us that your garrison was well prepared for a siege, and that nothing would prevail with you to open your ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... creature re-descends to the bottom of its burrow for a longer wait. If, on the contrary, the state of the atmosphere is favourable, the roof is broken through by a few strokes of its claws, and the larva emerges from its tunnel. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... smoothly. The foundations of the prison were only four feet deep, and Trenck's tunnel had reached a considerable distance when everything was again spoilt. A letter written by Trenck to Vienna fell into the hands of the governor, owing to some stupidity on the part of Gefhardt's wife, who ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... going into a long black tunnel, you see. It's downhill to Christmas, of course, and then uphill all the way to the summer holidays. But the uphill ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood

... winding up my story (for the honour of the cloth) with the statement that I was a teetotaller. Whether they believed it or not I do not know, but we had a long talk together and they told me of the work they were doing in digging a tunnel from Loos ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott

... kind uv kicked, an' said they might be durned So far ez any conversazzhyony was concerned; He'd come to Red Hoss Mountain to tunnel for the ore, An' not to go to parties,—quite another kind uv bore! But, bein' he wuz candidate for marshal uv the camp, I rayther had the upper holts in arguin' with the scamp; Sez I, "Three-fingered Hoover, can't ye see it is yer ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field

... them, a long black tunnel, focussing in a remote jewel of light. It was like the Alley of Life, cramped and dark, and at the far end of it a little door opening on heaven. And across the door the boy seemed to ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant

... cymbifolium. Tetraphis pellucida occurs in Sherrard's Park Wood, and Polytrichum urnigerum in Hitch Wood. Seligeria pusilla has been found in an old chalk-pit in Brocket Park, and S. paucifolia on chalk nodules in the Tunnel Woods near Watford. Campylopus pyriforme occurs in Berry Grove Wood, Aldenham, and C. flexuosus in Dawley's ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins

... Hamilton Fynes. If you read the report of the evidence at the inquest, you will notice the engine driver's declaration that the only time on the whole journey when he travelled at less than forty miles an hour was when passing over the viaduct and before entering the tunnel which is plainly visible from ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... to light the second wick, but looked for a safe place to set the lamp; this I found directly, within reach of my hand. My hurried glance showed that we were in a rough tunnel or shoot, sloping down rapidly into darkness—a darkness too horrible to contemplate; and, to my despair, I could not see Denham. Then, as the sight of the light revived him, I ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn

... this mother-quality. Thoreau, you remember, said that genius is essentially feminine; if he had teachers in mind his remark was certainly true. The men of much motive power are not the best teachers—the arbitrary and imperative type that would bend all minds to match its own may build bridges, tunnel mountains, discover continents and capture cities, but it can not teach. In the presence of such a towering personality freedom dies, spontaneity droops, and thought slinks away into a corner. The brooding quality, the patience that endures, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... he do? Time was precious, for daylight could not be far off. Beyond this point he had formed no plan. He had hoped to find both the tunnel and its contents but an ingenious fiction to frighten Christie into a surrender. Now it was a startling and overwhelming truth. He could not remove the powder by the way he had come. In fact, he doubted ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... 250 towers; it was closed by a hundred brazen gates, and its circumference was sixty miles. It was separated into two parts by the Euphrates. On each bank stood a beautiful palace, and the two were united by an artistic bridge, and even a tunnel was constructed by the Queen Semiramis. But the greatest curiosities were the temples of Belus and the hanging gardens. The tower of the temple was ornamented with three colossal figures, made of pure ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... part of the dairy was it possible to stand erect. The door of communication between the two rooms was so small that we could get through it only by creeping. The great thickness of the walls, 6 to 8 feet, gave this door, or passage of communication, the look of a tunnel, and made the creeping through it very real. The creeping was only a little less real in getting through the equally tunnel-like, though somewhat wider and loftier passage, which led from the open air into the first or ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie

... fire emplacement amongst the ruins underground; to get to it you have to travel through a tunnel eighteen feet long; inside it's very damp. I was working with my corporal, crouched up; we were both wet and cold, and so to cheer things up every now and again we let off a few rounds and warmed our hands on the barrel. ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene

... by lightning, which are mostly devoured by the first running, hunting fire that finds them, while the trunk is slowly wasted away by centuries of fire and weather. One of the most interesting fire-actions on the trunk is the boring of those great tunnel-like hollows through which horsemen may gallop. All of these famous hollows are burned out of the solid wood, for no Sequoia is ever hollowed by decay. When the tree falls, the brash trunk is often broken straight across into sections as if sawed; into these joints the fire creeps, and, on ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... Farallones, breeding on the lower portions of the island. The late Mr. C. Barlow says that it is found in deserted rabbit burrows and in all probability often excavates its own burrows. It also nests among the cliffs placing its eggs among the rocks in any crevice or tunnel which may offer a dark retreat during the day for they are nocturnal in their habits. The single egg which they lay is dull white in color, the inside of the shell being a pale green, which color can only be seen by holding the egg ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed

... achievement Tom invented a wizard camera and a great searchlight, which, with his giant cannon, was purchased by the United States Government. Work on his photo-telephone and his aerial warship, the problem of digging a big tunnel, and then traveling to the land of wonders, kept Tom Swift very busy, and he had just completed a wonderful piece of work when the present ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton

... had been made through the side of the hill so the tracks would be as nearly level as possible. Sometimes, when a hill is too high the railroad has to go through it in a tunnel. And a "cut" is a tunnel ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope

... its small range, east and west of the pole, would enable them most accurately to determine the star's true mid-point below the pole; that is, the true north. When they had thus obtained a slant tunnel pointing truly to the meridian, and had carried it down to a point nearly below the middle of the proposed square base, they could, from the middle of the base, bore vertically downwards, until by rough calculation they were near the lower end of the slant tunnel; or both tunnels could ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... narrow tunnel in the hill-side, with its walls and roof lined with slabs of rock, was as uncanny a spot as a man could set foot in, and Elijah shook like one with the ague, as he thrust aside the ferns and peered ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce

... Rove, the south end of the tunnel, on Saturday, September 23rd, I had my first view of the Mediterranean. It was a most beautiful sight, and the water as blue as pictured in paintings. We were rowed in a small boat across an arm of the Mediterranean to the town of Marseilles. We ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.

... eleventh century, over eight hundred years ago. Nor has the lower part of it ever needed repair. The walls are in places twenty-five feet thick, of solid stone and mortar, so that the embrasure by which each narrow window is reached is like a tunnel cut through rock, while the deep prisons below are hewn out of the rock itself. Up to what we should call the third story, every room is vaulted. Above that the floors are laid on beams, and the walls are not more than eight ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... bunch of saddle horses and brought them back. He went up on Little Thumb Butte. It's all bluffs and bowlders there. Up on the highest big cliff, at the very top, is a deep crack that winds up in a cave like a tunnel. You know ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... which they followed was little better than a tunnel cut through a grove of low rattan-palms, the delicate but exceedingly tough tendrils of which hung down in all directions. These were fringed with sharp hooks which caught their clothing and tore it, or held on unrelentingly, so that ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... some peanut politician who is scoring an opponent! There was Walker down at Durango, shot examining a coal fraud. He was a Land Office man; and his murderers have not even been punished. Then, there were the two chaps, who ran the rapids before the Gunnison Tunnel could be built; though that's been exaggerated with a lot of magazine hog-wash to make a fellow sick! Biggest job there was the engineer's work. Do you know he drove that six mile tunnel from both ends and, when the two ends ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... and see them heaped behind you, like the mighty waves of the Red Sea, parted for the Israelites to pass through. This toilsome path was evidently made by a rushing, winding torrent. Toward the close, the water not having force enough to make a smooth bed, has bored a tunnel. This is so low and narrow, that the traveller is obliged to stoop and squeeze himself through. Suddenly he passes into a vast hall, called the Great Relief; and this leads into the River Hall, at the side ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... often—smiling, black eyes; and her nephew, young Mr. Hare; [Footnote: Augustus William Hare, one of the authors of Guesses on Truth.] and, the last day, Mr. Brunel. [Footnote: Afterwards Sir Mark Isambard Brunel, engineer of the Thames Tunnel, Woolwich Arsenal, ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... helplessly on through a thick and choking mist; and you can see that if there were no ladies present he would let off a few crackers—fog-signals, as it were—just to bring himself up a bit, and let people know where he was. Then he will go on again, talking away until you fancy yourself in a tunnel, with a throbbing noise in your ears and all the daylight shut out, and you perhaps getting to wish that on the whole ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... most difficult to get, and he had wandered about, a sort of antithetical Flying Dutchman, forever putting to sea, yet never getting away from shore. He was a "49-er," and had recently been blown up in a tunnel, or had fallen down a shaft, I forget which. This sad accident obliged him to use large quantities of whiskey as a liniment, which, he informed me, occasioned the mild fragrance which his garments exhaled. Though belonging to the same class, he was not to be confounded with ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte

... do not think so. But patience! I will go and ask," he said; and, turning his back, faded from sight in the depths of the dark tunnel-like porte-cochere. ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... the military temper." And it is here that James urges, as his "moral equivalent of war," the conscription of our young men "to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax—in the immemorial human warfare against nature." All of which means, among other things, that those men and women today who are already mining coal, and washing dishes, and ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes

... beneath the surface of the earth to join the subterranean Ouysse, or the Dordogne. A ravine, sinking rapidly, becomes a deep, dark, and gloomy gully, at the end of which is a wall of rock. The stream pours down a tunnel-like passage, at the base of the rock, with a melancholy wail. Where the sides are not too steep they are covered with ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... Fox dived right into the snow and right through into the tunnel of Danny Meadow Mouse. Her two black paws actually touched Danny's tail. He was glad then ...
— The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse • Thornton W. Burgess

... communicates with the suction tunnel was open, and the water would rise and fall, full of rapid swirls and eddies, though far above the entrance of these tunnels. Through the man hole in the discharge culvert the issuance from the pipes could be seen, and its volume was beyond conception. It flowed rapidly through the culvert, and its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various

... climb the hill and cross the upper Basin before we reach our mine. This is the ore from the San Luis tunnel." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... the neighbourhood will then become very malarious and unsafe. A piece of semicircular wall on one side of the lake, indicates the whereabouts of a temple of Proserpine, or Apollo, or any god or goddess you please. We were so absurd as to pay a scudo to be taken through a vile tunnel, accompanied by two torch-bearers, and two other dirty wretches, who often carry us pick-a-back through one black hole into another, splashing us through dark pools, putting us down here and there as they pleased, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... various ingenious contrivances by means of which curious effects are produced through the operation of this principle. One, called the magic tunnel, is made double, with a space inclosed between the walls. There is an orifice communicating with this chamber at the top of the handle, which orifice is so situated that it can be opened or closed at pleasure by the thumb of the person holding it without attracting the attention ...
— Harper's Young People, November 4, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... street, a few minutes later, down a flight of steep wooden stairs they descended into a little cafe, shaped like a tunnel, the ceiling low, the bare walls soiled by rubbing elbows, dirty hands, the air blue and hot with smoke. Young men and girls packed in at small tables bent over tall glasses of Russian tea, and gesturing with their cigarettes declaimed and argued excitedly. Quick joyous cries ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole

... within the cave revealed a narrow tunnel with daylight at its farther end. The interior of the tunnel was not so dark but that the ape-man could readily see that it was untenanted at present. Advancing cautiously he crawled toward the opposite end imbued with a full realization of what it would mean if Numa should ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... the bottom of the sloping tunnel, and was lighting her candle. When it burned up, she found herself looking into a level gallery, the roof of which she could touch. It was not an excavation, but had been trenched from the surface, for it was roofed with great slabs of stone. ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald

... this black pocket we are now in. I suppose the vegetable folk were always afraid to enter this cavern because it is dark; but we have our lanterns to light the way, so I propose that we start out and discover where this tunnel in ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... thick crust of the drift, using care that the "door" he thus opened into it was only large enough for the entrance of his body. Using a snowshoe as a shovel he then began digging out the soft interior of the drift, burrowing a two foot tunnel until he was well back from the door, where he made himself a chamber large enough for his sleeping-bag. The task employed him less than an hour, and when his bed was made, and he stood in front of the door to his igloo, his ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood

... will no doubt soon attract a settlement, and in process of time a town will arise, which will be the depot for goods from the seaboard, where they will be exchanged for the produce of the upper part of the country. A canal or tunnel cut through the isthmus, will probably follow. This would be of the utmost advantage to the Province, by connecting the navigation and developing the resources of the upper country, which are said to be almost inexhaustible. The distance to cut would be nearly ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher

... practice. Think of the white road and the shifting hedgerows, and the counties that you will soon lose count of. And think what a blessing it will be for you to know that your house is not the one in which the Merstham Tunnel murder was committed. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... difficulties of society. The grand problems are, how to level the mountain, and to drain the sea: or, if we must leave the Alps to be still the throne of the thunder, and suffer even the Zuyder-zee to roll its sullen waves over its incorrigible shallows; yet to tunnel the mountain and pass the sea with a rapidity, which makes us regardless of the interposition of obstacles that once stopped the march of armies, and made the impregnable fortresses of kingdoms. But the still severer trials of human intelligence are, how to clothe, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... immediately, and prosecuted the work for several days. The rival parties could hear each other at work underground. When the Indians had proceeded about forty yards, two-thirds of the distance from the river bank, successive rainstorms had so saturated the earth that sections of their tunnel caved in, and this it was that frustrated their ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... the darkness of the tunnel at Cleveland Street, and, as they emerged into daylight on the other side, paused for a moment like intelligent animals before the spider's web of shining rails that curved into the terminus, as if to choose the pair that would carry them in safety to the platform. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... out and butchering in the bowels of the earth.... This is terribly but absolutely true. Thus a young volunteer, named D——, found, after watching for two days, that a number of men crept into a tunnel mouth every night only twenty feet from his post, and began working on a mine right under his feet. He decided to go out himself and kill them all.... He told me the story. He crept out two days ago as soon as he had seen ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... in some miraculous manner back to the United States. A little farther out from the base of the mountains, however, and we come upon wild figs, pomegranates, and other indigenous evidences of Eastern soil; and by and by our path almost becomes a tunnel, burrowing through a wealth of tiger-grass twenty feet high. The fields and little clearings which, a few miles back, were devoted to the cultivation of wheat and rye, now become rice-fields overflowed from irrigating ditches, and in which ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... were conducted to the "Roaring Magnetic Spring," which was one of the features of the place. Florida is a great place for springs of various kinds. We were all arranged on a wooden platform over the spring, which was a tunnel-shaped cavity in the blue sand of the ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic

... translate his dream into the reality that we know as the bronze doors of the Baptistry. But had there been no dreams there had been no bronze doors, and the world of art would have been the poorer. Every tunnel that pierces a mountain; every bridge that spans a river; every building whose turrets pierce the sky; every invention that lifts a burden from the shoulders of humanity; every reform that gilds the world with the glow ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... the last eruption of 1229, had forced a passage through this tunnel. It still lined the walls with a thick and glistening coat. The electric light was here intensified ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... at Chatou he saw some small boats going at great speed under the vigorous strokes of the bare-armed oarsmen, and he thought: "There are some fellows who are certainly enjoying themselves!" The train entered the tunnel just before you get to the station at Saint-Germain, and presently stopped at the platform. Parent got out, and walked slowly, for he already felt tired, toward the Terrace, with his hands behind his ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... to breakfast in a room like a smoky tunnel where the lights burned sickly. She was in a murky and suffocating humor, but Sir Joseph was strangely content for the hour and the air. He ate with the zest of a boy on a holi-morn, and beckoned her into his study, where he confided to her ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... directed, by the manuscript, to a certain spot upon the Mukattam range, immediately behind the Cairene citadel, where the removal of a few stones would disclose a choked shaft: the latter would descend to a tunnel, full of rubbish, and one of the many sidings would open upon the golden chamber. The permission of Government was secured, the workmen began, and the directions proved true—"barring" the treasure, towards which ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... o'clock that afternoon the men of the camp filed out of the tunnel, along the new road-bed, with the low sunlight in their faces. It was "Saturday night," and the whole force was in good humor. As they tramped gayly along, tools and instruments glinting in the sun, word went down the line that something unusual had been going on by the river. There ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... one. Lady Betty moved down all the comfortable things he needed, and she stayed there with him, living in the tunnel." ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm

... a tunnel which passed under the road, affording immediate communication between the park and the shore. The further end of it was dark with trees. The upper half of the door by which they had entered was a wooden grating, for the admission of light, and through it ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... very late,—or extremely early. The moon was down, though its place was in some way filled by the golden disk of the clock in the Grand Central Station's tower. The air was impregnated with the sweet and fragrant breath of the new-born day. In the tunnel beneath the street a trolley-car rumbled and whined and clanked lonesomely. A stray cat wandered out of a cross-street with the air of a seasoned debauchee; stopped, scratched itself with inimitable ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... pony had started aside at the sight of a railway train that had just come out of the tunnel, and she was engaged ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke

... fearful thing to go through the Harlem tunnel; but here there was a road cut through great, high, frowning rocks that made you feel as if you were in a dungeon. Then a long, level stretch of salt meadows with ditches cut across them, that suggested a vague idea of Holland. We did not know the ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... said reassuringly. "I have made a little tunnel and come through—merely to explain things. I thought perhaps you might be a ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry

... off to make the western gate; but the woman in brown kept on, and ere long was brought to the grand stand on the north. An arched tunnel, amply wide, ran under it, with a gate at the further end admitting directly to the arena. A soldier of the foreign legion held the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... the wall, excluding all light. After listening intently, fearful lest the slight scraping might have been overheard, I arose to a crouching position, able to feel both the sides and top of the tunnel with my fingers. Inch by inch, silently, my soft breathing the only noticeable sound, I worked forward, anxiously exploring for the break in the floor, which I knew to be only a few feet distance. Even then I reached it unaware of its proximity, ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish

... never waited to hear the end of it. He was always an impatient and irascible man, that way. At the end of two months the fact that he had been played upon with a joke had managed to bore itself, like another Hoosac Tunnel, through the solid adamant of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... have been better than this? Poor girl! the illusion even of her love was being frozen cold within her during the agony of that morning. All the while the train went thundering on through the night, now rushing into a tunnel, now crossing a river, and at every change in the sounds of the carriages she almost hoped that something might be amiss. Oh, the cold! She had gathered her feet up and was trying to sit on them. For a moment or two she had hoped that her movement ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope

... an hour to wait in the little harbor, its great cliffs rising all about me, with only a tunnel bored through them to form an entrance to the green island within. My rage had partly fumed itself away before ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... of the horizontal round bars, E and F, under an acute (more or less) angle, d, to the side frame of a rock drill carriage, or to the alignment of the tunnel, substantially as and ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... pleasure of overlooking and criticising each other and our respective households. We may sit at the windows and converse across the street in fine weather, or flatten our noses on the glass, and make faces at each other when the weather is bad. Besides, we can have a tunnel cut under the street and thus have subterranean communication at any time of the day or night—and what a charming place that would be for the children to romp in! Of course, we would require to have it made of bricks or cast-iron to ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne

... of the day, after they left St. Louis, the train began to wind through the foothills of the Alleghenies. Bellaire, Grafton and other towns were left behind, and they were soon whirling up the steep mountain, higher and higher, through tunnel after tunnel, nearer and nearer to Washington every minute. As they were pulling out of a little mining town built on the mountain side, a sudden jar stopped the train. There was some little excitement and a scramble for information. Some part of the engine was disabled, and it would be necessary ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... Having proceeded for some distance, until the sheer hillside seemed to loom over me like the wall of a tower, I paused, peering about in the ever growing darkness. I was aware of a physical chill; certainly no ray of sunlight ever penetrated to this tunnel through the firs. Could I have mistaken the path and be proceeding, not towards the house, but away from it, and into the gloom of the woods? Or perhaps the deserted lodge was that of some ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... engineers of the United States Conservation Department, who had been trying to determine if it was feasible to dam the river at this place. The plan was to flood the hole of Brown's Park and divert the water through the mountains by a tunnel to land suitable for cultivation and in addition, allow the muddy water to settle and so prevent the vast amount of silt from being washed on down, eventually to the mouth of the Colorado. The location seemed admirably suited for this stupendous project. But holes drilled ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... which had remained with the British, to have a place of honor in cooperation with the Australian Corps on September 29 and October 1 in the assault on the Hindenburg line where the St. Quentin Canal passes through a tunnel under a ridge. The Thirtieth Division speedily broke through the main line of defense for all its objectives, while the Twenty-seventh pushed on impetuously through the main line until some of ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... of the Allied Powers, of a real enthusiasm even among the destitute and unemployed. The Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed into enrolment offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement. At every convenient place upon the line on either side of the Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the feeling in the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by grim anticipations, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... push on for London?—Hurra! what say you? let's have a peep at St. Paul's I Don't you want to see the queen? Have you no longing to behold the duke? Think of Westminster Abbey, and the Tunnel under the Thames! Think of Hyde Park, and ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... spot a little inland lake; Where browsing sheep or grazing cattle fed, The wondrous waters new dominion spread; Where rows of houses stood through many a street Now rows of ships present a little fleet. Nay, we had made, had Nature not refus'd, Had Father Thames not begg'd to be excus'd, A pretty tunnel underneath his bed, And left him running, grumbling, over head; Had scratch'd a track out, like a grubbing mole, Through a long, dark, and damp and dirty hole— Like rats in sewers, had flounder'd through the mud, Instead of sailing, duck-like, o'er the flood; But bubbling springs chok'd ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... of the detention quarters had been the right one. Given a pickax and a shovel, and an uninterrupted period of, say, a week, he might be able to tunnel under one of the log walls. But otherwise he could not see any other way of getting free—save to walk out through the cell door. Drew threw himself on the bunk and tried to think logically and clearly, but his tired body won over his mind and ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton

... without precedent. Is not practically every large American engineering enterprise without precedent? Was not the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, without precedent? Were not the first steamboat and the first locomotive without precedent? Were not the Hoosac Tunnel and the Brooklyn Bridge feats of American engineering ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden

... tropics played in that naked ward as bleak as a winter's gale in an old barn at home. "Don't you let him start his hollering, mister," hailed from afar the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came ringing between the walls like a quavering call down a tunnel. The clawing hand hauled at my shoulder; he leered at me knowingly. "The ship was full of them, you know, and we had to clear out on the strict Q.T.," he whispered with extreme rapidity. "All pink. All pink—as big as mastiffs, with an eye on the top of the head and claws all round their ugly mouths. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... along tho street, and adopted various contrivances for getting dryshod up to their first floors; and in some places canoes were floating in the street. The city looked like this some two hundred years ago, when Martinez the engineer tried an unfortunate experiment with his draining tunnel at Huehuetoca, and flooded the whole city for five years. It was by the interference, they tell us, of the patroness of the Indians, our Lady of Guadalupe, who was brought from her own temple on purpose, that the city was delivered from ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... persons should be buried in Westminster Abbey? Origin of every fairy-tale. Who made our proverbs and ballads? Cold baths v. hot or Turkish. Home Rule. Should the Royal Academy be abolished? and who should be the next R.A.? Should there be an Academy of Literature? or a Channel Tunnel? Was De Lesseps to blame? Should we not patronise English watering-places? Should there be pianos in board schools? or theology? Authors and publishers; artists and authors. Is literature a trade? Should ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... is damper, and in the mountain the little fingers pierce a tunnel. A gigantic work which the boot of a passer-by will soon destroy. What passer-by respects a baby's mountain? Hence the young rascal avenges himself. See that gentleman in the brown frockcoat, who is reading the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' on the bench; ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz

... I had the pleasure of spending an evening in your company at my relative's (Mr. G. Withington) house at Pendleton. As I was then Engineer to the Victor Emmanuel Railway, and had made a survey of the Mout Cenis for the purpose of the Tunnel, I consulted you as to the application of the machinery for that work. You suggested the driving of drills in a manner similar to a piston-rod, with other details. On my return to Savoy, I communicated these ideas to Mr. Bartlett, the contractor's agent, and I recommended ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... it was splendid!' continued Geraldine. 'We went to the theatre or the opera every night, and lived on the fat of the land in the best hotel in Europe, and saw everything—even the Tower and the Mint and the Thames Tunnel and the Tate Gallery. We ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett

... camels could be made to go down the deep and slippery roads. The gorge was five miles in length. The track, for the first part, ran through a deep ravine of perpendicular walls; which narrowed in places to a few yards, overhanging the path until they seemed to meet, and form a tunnel, through which it ran. Had an attack been made on the column, as it struggled with its difficulties through this portion of the pass, the result would have been disastrous; for it would have been impossible to place troops on the heights, to cover the ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty

... that I was no longer wanted in it. They issued a half-sheet Visiter, with "the Devil" as editor and proprietor. His salutatory informed his readers, that he was in full possession and was going to have a good time; had taught the Visiter to lie, and was going to tunnel the Mississippi. Those were bright boys, and they had a jolly week. Mr. Shepley's card appeared, as per agreement, and thus far the terms of release for the printing company complied with, and the contract with the Dictator filled. But ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... road from Naples to Puteoli clung to the edge of the rocky promontory of Posilipo, finally piercing the outermost rock by means of a tunnel now misnamed the "grotto di Sejano." Most of the road is now under twenty feet of water: See Guenther, Pausilypon. To see the splendid ridge as Vergil saw it from the road one must now row the length of it from Naples to Nesida, sketching in an abundance of ilexes and ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... you belong to?" Taffy nodded toward the mine-chimneys on the sky-line high on their left, which hid the sea, though it lay less than half a mile away and the roar of it was in their ears—just such a roar as the train makes when rushing through a tunnel. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... that he was dying fast. If I said he looked tired, he felt better than he had done all the week. It was impossible to please him—impossible to win a smile or a gracious word. Never have I met a human being so twisted and warped in mind. To go into his room is like entering a black tunnel—one leaves it with the feeling of breaking bonds. The matron of the Home is a brisk, capable woman, with a face full of kindly strength; we generally met and exchanged a few words on stairs or landing, and it was easy to see that her patience was wearing thin. There ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... wild lavender, thyme and rosemary. It was intersected with two rushing, beautifully clear streams. I cannot conceive where all the water comes from in that arid land. In sun-baked Nyons, water could be got anywhere by driving a tunnel into the parched hillsides, when sooner or later an abundant spring would be tapped. These French trout were either ridiculously unsophisticated, or else very weary of life: they simply asked to be caught. I got quite a heavy basket, to the great joy of the ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... "It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... of Fork Run, a small mountain-river, and ascends that stream to the summit-level, seventeen hundred feet above tide-water. It then pierces the main range of the Alleghanies, passing under Tuckahoe and Katis Mountains by a tunnel nearly eight miles long, and emerges into the valley of the Greenbrier River on the western mountain-slope. Its water-line pursues its course by slack-water navigation down the Greenbrier to New River, and down New River to Lyken's Shoals on the Kanawha, eighty-five miles above its mouth. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... Charlestown, and at Concord Junction, and at Ayer—so the Pony Engine did really gain on it a little; and when it began to be scared it gained a good deal. But the first place where it began to feel sorry, and to want its mother, was in Hoosac Tunnel. It never was in a tunnel before, and it seemed as if it would never get out. It kept thinking, What if the Pacific Express was to run over it there in the dark, and its mother off there at the Fitchburg Depot, in Boston, looking for it among the side-tracks? It gave a perfect shriek; ...
— Christmas Every Day and Other Stories • W. D. Howells

... always has just such a turn in his tunnel, and who knows perfectly when he is safe, crouched just below the roots, looking up with steady little eyes, like two black beads, at his savage pursuer, and listening in a kind of dumb terror to ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long

... it seemed as though there weren't no way out; but with the help of the light, he found at last a little, low tunnel that opened out of the hole; and then he found another opposite to it. And the one he reckoned must run up under Vitifer into the thickness of the hill; while t'other pointed south. Then, thinking ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts

... Hants, situated in a winding valley about seven miles from Basingstoke. The South-Western railway crosses it by a short embankment, and, as it curves round, presents a good view of it on the left hand to those who are travelling down the line, about three miles before entering the tunnel under Popham Beacon. It may be known to some sportsmen, as lying in one of the best portions of the Vine Hunt. It is certainly not a picturesque country; it presents no grand or extensive views; but the features are small rather than plain. The surface continually swells ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh

... Allah for the undoing of that unclean dog Ibrahim Mahmud—for, returning and riding on his white camel (a far-famed pacer of speed and endurance) under the great gateway of the Jam's fort—high enough for a camel-rider to pass unstooping and long enough for a relwey-tunnel—he came upon Mahmud Ibrahim and his friends and followers (for he had many such, who thought he might succeed his father as Vizier) doing a thing that enraged my brother very greatly. Swinging at the end ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren



Words linked to "Tunnel" :   delve, railroad tunnel, turn over, perforate, carpal tunnel, dig, penetrate, tunnel vision, rabbit warren, hole, underpass, carpal tunnel syndrome, machine, car, motorcar



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