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Underground   Listen
adjective
Underground  adj.  
1.
Being below the surface of the ground; as, an underground story or apartment.
2.
Done or occurring out of sight; secret. (Colloq.)
Underground railroad or Underground railway. See under Railroad.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Underground" Quotes from Famous Books



... affinity to the mysteries and to the Orphic modes of worship. To a certain extent they are un-Greek; at any rate there is hardly anything like them in other Greek writings which have a serious purpose; in spirit they are mediaeval. They are akin to what may be termed the underground religion in all ages and countries. They are presented in the most lively and graphic manner, but they are never insisted on as true; it is only affirmed that nothing better can be said about a future life. Plato seems to make use of them when he has reached the limits of human knowledge; ...
— Gorgias • Plato

... looked round the walls, and beheld old Sechard's empurpled countenance filling up a square opening above a door hitherto hidden by a pile of empty casks in the cellar itself. The cunning old man had brought David and Kolb into his underground distillery by the outer door, through which the casks were rolled when full. The inner door had been made so that he could roll his puncheons straight from the cellar into the distillery, instead of taking them ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... mine in that day when I make up my jewels.' In that day, when we shall be permitted to see the polished gems in the keeping of the Holy One, we shall realize that no work for the Master has been done in vain. Here we toil amid the damp and fog and darkness, often underground, with no lamp save the promise of God, which is "a lamp to our feet, and a light to our path;" there we shall be with Him and behold His glory. Here, the sadness, the weariness, the discouragement, the "Why, Lord?" and "How?" there, the "Well done!" "Enter thou!" questions answered, ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm

... may call his underground life. And as I sat, evening after evening, facing him at dinner, a curiosity in that direction would naturally arise in my mind. I am a quiet and peaceable product of civilization, and know no passion other than the passion for collecting things which are rare, and must remain exquisite ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... postal system of our country was made recently when the first of the pneumatic tubes which are to carry mail underground from one office to another ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 51, October 28, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... of flowers that festoon one of the arches are cut in such relief that they do but just adhere to the stone on which they grow. The pillars are massive, and the arches very low, the effect being a twilight, which at first leads the spectator to imagine himself underground; but by and by I saw that the sunshine came in through the narrow windows, though it scarcely looked like sunshine then. For many years these crypts were used as burial-ground, and earth was brought in, for the purpose of making graves; so that the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want them. They are out of place. As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn from underground. Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... unused wells or underground sewers without first lowering a lighted candle which will go out at once if the air is very impure, because of lack of oxygen to ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... and worried, had taken an unreasoning dislike to his servant Bas. He was thankful to have a stranger about him, a man who was as miserable as he himself had been a very little while ago; who, like himself, had lived in cellars and in underground burrows, and lived on the scraps of food which ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... indeed. Chlodowech died in 511; his race went on ruling, Catholic in name but very far from obedient to the Church's laws. The tale of their successors, their wars and their crimes, is one which belongs to social or political history, not to the history of the Church. The Church's life was lived underground in the slow progress of Christian ideas. Chlothochar, sole ruler of the Franks, died in 561. How little had the half-century accomplished. Then came an age of division, murders, horrors, in which the names of great ladies stand out as at least the equals of their lords in crime. Predegund, who ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton

... but Heron and the slave knew that, under the flooring, instead of a cellar, there was a vast reservoir connected with the ancient aqueducts constructed by Vespasian. Many years since Argutis had helped his master to construct a trap-door to the entrance to these underground passages, of which the existence had remained unknown even to Glaukias during all the years he had inhabited the place. It was here that Heron kept his gold, not taking his children even into his confidence; and only a few months ago Argutis had been down with him and had found the old ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... such question," was the response. "He must, that's the way to put it. Confound it, he shall! And the next thing for him to do is to take a few visits with me to the underground regions, where he can get such slight shocks to his literary system as will enable him to take up the ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter

... the size and number of the sewers in the streets and avenues surrounding the Terminal should be reduced to a minimum, on account of the difficulty of caring for them during construction and also to reduce the probability of sewage leaking into the underground portion of the work after its completion. With this in view, the plan was adopted of building an intercepting sewer down Seventh Avenue from north of 33d Street to the 30th Street sewer, which, being a 4-ft. circular conduit, was sufficiently large to carry all the sewage coming from east of Seventh ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Site of the Terminal Station. Paper No. 1157 • George C. Clarke

... from his department. He went up into the mining region near Grass Valley in the Sierras where he had already studied with Waldemar Lindgren, and became a regular miner, a boy-man with pick and shovel working long hours underground or sometimes on the surface about the plant. But always he had his eyes wide open and always he was learning. He preferred the underground work because he wanted first to know more about the actual occurrence of the ore in the earth than about the mill ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... ebbing lower at each drawing back, left still more mud and sand. Now it is believed that when this had gone on for a time, the waters of the river, unable to find a channel, began to overflow up into the deserted streets, and especially to fill the underground passages and drains, of which the number and extent was beyond all the power of words to describe. These, by the force of the water, were burst up, and the houses ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... tale of exploration and adventure in the Valley of Kings in Egypt. Once the whole party became lost in the maze of cavelike tombs far underground. ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman

... Northern States. Naturally the slaves who dared the perils of escape were either the most energetic or the most wronged, and sympathy for them at the North was active and resourceful. Along their most frequented routes of flight were systematic provisions of shelter and help, known as "the underground railroad." The Federal Constitution required their return, but this task had been left to State laws and courts, and was performed slackly, if at all. The total number of fugitives was not large nor the pecuniary loss heavy, but the South ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... States. To put it another way, all the rain and snow that falls between New York State and Montana sooner or later makes its way into the Mississippi River, except for the rain that is used up by plants and animals or that is evaporated before it reaches the river or that drains by underground seepage to the ocean. So you see what a vast amount of water it must carry. Now, boys," he continued, "what kind of banks has the river around ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... of exports consists of petroleum products made from refining imported crude. Construction proceeds on several major industrial projects. Unemployment, especially among the young, and the depletion of oil and underground water resources ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... Dermot's face. The earth underfoot was sodden and slushy. Little streams began to trickle, for the water from the mountains ten miles away that sinks into the soil at the foot of the hills and flows to the south underground, here rises to the surface and gives the whole forest its name—Terai, that ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... I fixed it firm up there I am proud, Facing the hail and snow and sun and cloud, And to stand storms for ages, beating round When I lie underground." ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... find Mr. Buckminster's most interesting account of the destruction of Goldau. And in one of these same volumes he will find the article, by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, doubtless, which was the first hint of our rural cemeteries, and foreshadowed that new era in our underground civilization which is sweetening ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... never found. Finally, mother took her obdurate son and me and came to New York with us, and we lived on the little income which she had of her own. Her hope was that as soon as Philip was old enough she could make him understand, and go back with him and get that large sum lying underground—lying there yet, perhaps. But in less than a year the little boy was dead and the secret was gone ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... dead leaves on the surface of the ground far above, and thus the water becomes saturated with carbonic acid gas, and so dissolves the limestone until the granite is reached, and the granite forms the bed of these underground rivers. It all seemed to me very wonderful, but it struck Jack on his scientific side, and he has been experimenting ever since. He says he'll be able to build a city with ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr

... too clever for us, I am afraid, and London with its tubes, its underground stations and taxi-cabs is a ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... The underground passage has fallen in; only the entrance being now visible and accessible Old Gill says, "I as the last man iver in it; and I got caught there with the wall fallin' in, and they were twinty fower hours ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase

... him a singular one. For while he was sitting there chatting, it happened that the poor under-dogs inside the mountain were in the midst of one of those experiences which make the romance and terror of coal-mining. One of the boys who were employed underground, in violation of the child labour law, was in the act of bungling his task. He was a "spragger," whose duty it was to thrust a stick into the wheel of a loaded car to hold it; and he was a little chap, ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... not have got your majority, I grant, Terence; but wherever they shut you up, it is morally certain that you would have been out of it, long before this. I don't think anything less than being chained hand and foot, and kept in an underground dungeon, ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty

... salary by the sum of five pounds a year, and was taken at that into a driving establishment in Clapham, which dealt chiefly in ready-made suits, fed its assistants in an underground dining-room and kept them until twelve on Saturdays. He found it hard to be cheerful there. His fits of indigestion became worse, and he began to lie awake at night and think. Sunshine and laughter seemed things lost for ever; picnics and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... the transformation of Welbeck enters upon a new stage with the succession, in 1854, of the Marquis of Titchfield (William John Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck) as fifth Duke, born in 1800. He it was who designed and had constructed the mysterious underground apartments and tunnels for which the Abbey and its environs are famous. There were miles of weird passages beneath the surface of the earth, one tunnel alone being nearly a mile and a half in length, stretching towards Worksop, while ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard

... silence over the memory of the dead. Such never speak of them but when compelled, and then almost as if to utter their names were an act of impiety. Not In Memoriam but In Oblivionem should be the inscription upon the tombs they raise. The memory that forsakes the sunlight, like the fishes in the underground river, loses its eyes; the cloud of its grief carries no rainbow; behind the veil of its twin-future burns no lamp fringing its edges with the light of hope. I can better, however, understand the hopelessness of the hopeless than ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... comes up to the surface an' got weathered away down to the pay ore. Leastwise, this was her dad's theory. He told her everything he thought as they shacked erlong together, I reckon, an' she remembers it. He figgers this sylvanite lies under this porphyry reef, sabe? Porphyry snakes underground, sometimes fifty feet thick, sometimes twice that, an' hard as steel. Matter of luck where you hit it how fur you have to go. Cost too much time an' labor an' money for the crowd that made up the rush ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... yet, one of its charms consists in its being unhackneyed. For, long after, its recollection rests upon the mind, like a marble dream. But, like Niagara, it cannot be described; perhaps even it is more difficult to give an idea of this underground creation, than of the emperor of cataracts; for there is nothing with which the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... large underground cell together at night because of its sleeping accommodation. We were shut in separate cells during the day, which prevented interchange of conversation and inter-amusement during the day except in the ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... is an earthquake country; there has been nothing more serious than a slight trembling since long before the abbe died; and I have a feeling that something more serious is about to happen. Underground thunder is always an ominous symptom.—Ah! There it is again. Run into the garden. I will ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall

... the time when an object is dropt from the top to the time when it strikes the water beneath. Passages lead from the water's edge to the Rathaus, by which prisoners came formerly to draw water, and to St. John's Churchyard and other points outside the town. The system of underground passages here and in the Castle was an important part of the defenses, affording as it did a means of communication with the outer world and as a last extremity, in the case of a ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... by preventing the water from being again easily taken up by the air, prolong the duration of the fog. Make this oil a marketable commodity, and another twenty years will see London without a chimney; underground shafts will be run alongside the sewers; into these shafts by means of a down draught all the products of combustion from our fires will be sucked by local pumping stations, and the oil condensing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various

... the Underground offer a prize of twenty pounds to their most polite employee. We have always felt that the conductor who pushes you off a crowded train might at least raise his hat to you as he moves ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various

... son's hospitality, with annual gifts of clothing and provisions. The slaves, too, had heard of Gerrit Smith, the abolitionist, and of Peterboro as one of the safe points en route for Canada. His mansion was, in fact, one of the stations on the "underground railroad" for slaves escaping from bondage. Hence they, too, felt that they had a right to a place under his protecting roof. On such occasions the barn and the kitchen floor were utilized as chambers for the black ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... render deep &c adj.; deepen. plunge &c 310; sound, fathom, plumb, cast the lead, heave the lead, take soundings, make soundings; dig &c (excavate) 252. Adj. deep, deep seated; profound, sunk, buried; submerged &c 310; subaqueous, submarine, subterranean, subterraneous, subterrene^; underground. bottomless, soundless, fathomless; unfathomed, unfathomable; abysmal; deep as a well; bathycolpian^; benthal^, benthopelagic^; downreaching^, yawning. knee deep, ankle deep. Adv. beyond one's depth, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... were turned low in the body of the house. The curtain went up. As it did so a cold draught drew from regions behind the stage, laden with that indefinable odour of gas, glue, humanity, flagged stair and alleyways, paint, canvas, carpentry, and underground places the sun never penetrates, which haunts the working part of every theatre. Poppy smiled as she snuffed it, with a queer mingling of enjoyment and repulsion. For as is the smell of ocean to the seafarer, of mother- earth to the peasant, of incense to the ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... weight of the slave system. Most of the installations remained, badly run down but repairable. Shatrak transferred as many of his technicians as he could spare to the Mizar and sent her to recondition the shipyard and render the underground city inhabitable again so that the satellite could be used as a base for his ships. He decided, then, to send the Irma back to Odin with reports of the annexation of Aditya, a proposal that Aditya-Alif be made a permanent ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper

... material which conceals it from view, we should possess within a few minutes' drive from the Porta Portese a reproduction of the famous mines of El Masarah, with beds of rock cut into steps and terraces, with roads and lanes, shafts, inclines, underground passages, and outlets for the discharge of rain-water. When a quarry had given out, its galleries were filled up with the refuse of the neighboring ones—chips left over after the squaring of the blocks; so that, in many cases, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... Mrs. Hasler, Miss Lilly A. Mackel, Mrs. Levy, and other lady prisoners had all been more or less prominent in Southern society at Washington, and had made trips over the underground railroad between Alexandria and Richmond. Also an English lady, Mrs. Ellena Low, who had been arrested at Boston, with her son, who had crossed the ocean bearing a commission in the Confederate army. Miss ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... do have his health torrablish, though he lives in a underground sort of a place; and they fine servants puts ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... surface was molten lava. Much of its water was gone. There were some pockets of resistance left, of course, but they did not last long. Equally of course the Stretts themselves, twenty-five miles underground, had not been harmed ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith

... that point of the European coast nearest to the site of Atlantis at Lisbon that the most tremendous earthquake of modern times has occurred. On the 1st of November, 1775, a sound of thunder was heard underground, and immediately afterward a violent shock threw down the greater part of the city. In six minutes 60,000 persons perished. A great concourse of people had collected for safety upon a new quay, built entirely of marble; but suddenly ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... under the brow of "The Scherpenberg," with Mount Kemmel over to the right honeycombed with dugouts, it was difficult to believe that, locked in a death grapple, not three miles away, were thousands of soldiers living underground like moles, and that at any moment the air might be filled with shells ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... country was found, the want of surface water held out no encouragement for the grazier to follow up the explorers' footsteps. The reclamation of this country it was evident would have to be a work of time, and would be dependent greatly on the facility with which the underground supplies could be tapped. That these supplies exist, the pioneer work carried on, on the outskirts of the desert, has proved beyond a doubt; how far they will be carried into the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... be a particularly quiet city, especially after business hours. The evening delights and amusements would seem to consist of the underground concert-rooms, where the long and silent drama is enjoyed over wine and tobacco. A peep into one of these places showed the evident disfavour in which the priesthood is held, a nun and a priest being introduced on the stage for the exposure of the ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... smoking. More pleasing was the sight of matting spread right round the temple below its eaves, in order that weary pilgrims might sleep there, and the spectacle of travel-stained women tranquilly sleeping or suckling their infants before the shrine itself. There is a pitch dark underground passage below the floor round the foundations of the great Buddha, and if the circuit be made and the lock communicating with the entrance door to the sacred figure be fortunately touched on the ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... which makes him hostile to the next whites, however well intentioned, who come into his neighbourhood. It may be some years yet before the natives will seek work at the mines to the extent desired, for they dislike underground labour. They were reported in 1899 to be still deaf to the mine-owners' blandishments, although the average wage is L2 a month; and the want of labour is assigned as a cause why many mines said to be promising have made little progress. ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... fairies to avert the terrible catastrophe, and besought them to tell her what to do. They consulted together, and at last told the Queen that they would build a palace without any windows or doors, and with an underground passage, so that the Princess's food could be brought to her. And she was to be kept ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac

... By strict command from Pluto, hell's great monarch, And fair Proserpina, the queen of hell, By full consent of all the damned hags, And all the fiends that keep the Stygian plains, Hath sent me here from depth of underground To summon thee to appear ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... for having no stint in the hospitality of the night. Mrs. Mountain was fain to bustle away with her keys to the sacred vault where the Colonel's particular Bordeaux lay, surviving its master, who, too, had long passed underground. As they went on their journey, Mrs. Mountain asked whether any of the gentlemen had had too much? Nathan thought Mister Broadbent was tipsy—he always tipsy; be then thought the General gentleman was tipsy; and he thought Master George was ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... die or, literally, of being dead. It may appear as being in Heaven or Hell. A theoretically important group is that which includes the patients who, in addition, speak of being in situations such as under the water or underground, which we have mythological and psychological evidence to believe are formulations of a rebirth fantasy. Not rarely, preoccupation with death is expressed in sudden ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... supposed to be a very strange and wonderful lake, the islands of which were covered with woods and flowers, through which roamed all kinds of game, and whose waters were sucked down in a great awe-inspiring whirlpool into an underground passage under the mountains and valleys to the distant sea. Another myth, or rather pair of myths, in which geographers placed sufficient faith to give a place on the maps of the time, was the great Buenaventura River, and that semi-tropical Mary's Lake, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... door is opening. Here the whole world opens its door, its front door, in these Greek representatives of the best culture the earth knew. But Jesus' vision never blurs. He understands; He alone. The only route to Greece and the whole outer world is the underground route, the way through ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon

... interjected the negro. For answer, the sheriff took a key from the shelf, and led him out of the back door to where, down a few steps, there was another door leading into an underground cellar. ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden

... moment he awaited with impatience, for it was then that something would happen, if anything was to happen. As the last stroke died away he thought he heard footsteps underground, and saw a light appear behind the iron gate leading to the mortuary vault. His whole attention was fixed ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... A medium-sized underground room. Seven steps lead down to it on the Right (rather far back). The stairs are shut off by a door on top. A second door which is barely visible is in the background on the Left. A number of simple wooden tables with chairs around them fill nearly ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... of the sun into the deep underground shafts and galleries, and passing from the pure air of heaven to a pestilential atmosphere, excessive labor and bad food soon robbed them of strength and often of life. If they survived this, a species of asthma usually carried them off during the year. We may ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... requisition papers. Rumors of all kinds prevailed, and squadrons of police were placed in line guarding closely every inch of the way from the jail to the court room. It was intended at first to convey the prisoners from the jail to the court room through the underground passage way, or tunnel, which has been prepared for just such cases of emergency. For this purpose the tunnel was cleared of every obstacle, but when all was in readiness, it was discovered that the ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown

... in the Alexandrian and Roman times widens into a lake or sea, and then disappears underground to reappear after many ages in a distant land. It begins to flow again under new conditions, at first confined between high and narrow banks, but finally spreading over the continent of Europe. It is and is ...
— Meno • Plato

... presence, the gods first gave them forms and endowed them with superhuman intelligence, and then divided them into two large classes. Those which were dark, treacherous, and cunning by nature were banished to Svart-alfa-heim, the home of the black dwarfs, situated underground, whence they were never allowed to come forth during the day, under penalty of being turned into stone. They were called Dwarfs, Trolls, Gnomes, or Kobolds, and spent all their time and energy in exploring the secret recesses of the earth. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... Party, tasked with the creation of a visible organization whenever this is possible, but with an invisible structure of missionaries, recruiters, controllers, policemen and agents, since any bourgeois state must, once it discovers the party's true aims, forbid it and drive it underground. To the Christian dream of an eternal life in heaven or hell, the communist movement has its promise of a millenary on earth contrasted by the immediate annihilation of any ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... American girl, the daughter of one of Governor Claiborne's friends. Her father told him very pointedly that since the owners of Pirate's Haven seemed to be indulging in law breaking, such a marriage was out of the question. Aroused, Richard made a secret inspection of certain underground storehouses which had been built by his pirate great-grandfather and discovered that Rick had put them in use again for the very same purpose for which they had been ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton

... divided and so fighting at a disadvantage, and intent upon their own wall, did not come out to interrupt them, they left one tribe to guard the new work and went back into the city. Meanwhile the Athenians destroyed their pipes of drinking-water carried underground into the city; and watching until the rest of the Syracusans were in their tents at midday, and some even gone away into the city, and those in the stockade keeping but indifferent guard, appointed three hundred ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides

... He had passed the wagon tire to the teacher, when he began pulling out the wounded cobra, and asked him to insert it again without an instant's delay. This was done, and returning with the hand-glass, the missionary once more conveyed the rays into the underground chamber. ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis

... he went—down underground in the Boutiques or the Gouliots; or lying on the Eperquerie among the flaming gorse and cloudlike stretches of primroses; or standing on Longue Pointe while the sun sank in unearthly splendours behind Herm and Guernsey; ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... cannot be doubted when we find, on the one hand, that "roots can become directly transformed into leaf-bearing shoots," and, on the other hand, that in some plants certain "apparent roots are only underground shoots," and that nevertheless "they are similar to true roots in function and in the formation of tissue, but have no root-cap, and, when they come to the light above ground, continue to grow in the manner of ordinary leaf-shoots."[56] ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... to create between the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality. Numbers of the rabbit-witted ladies and gentlemen do really think, in spite of themselves and their experience, that so long as a shop has hundreds of different doors and a great many hot and unhealthy underground departments (they must be hot; this is very important), and more people than would be needed for a man-of-war, or crowded cathedral, to say: "This way, madam," and "The next article, sir," it follows that the goods are good. In short, they hold that the big businesses ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... of any incongruity. She was charmed with her home, from its big garrets to the great wine-bins in its underground cellars; and while Hyde wandered about the fens with his fishing-rod or gun, or went into the little town of Hyde to meet over a market dinner the neighbouring squires, she was busy arranging every room with that scrupulous nicety and cleanliness which had ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr

... for trains on the Underground, an official is reported to have said that things would be much better if everybody undertook not to travel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various

... made my way to Ypres and found my son at his battery headquarters under the Cloth Hall Tower. It was a most romantic billet, for the debris of the ruins made a splendid protection from shells, and the stone-vaulted chambers were airy and commodious, much better than the underground cellars in which most of the men were quartered. The guns of the battery were forward in a very "unhealthy" neighbourhood. The officers and men used to take turns in going on duty there for twenty-four hours at a time. They found ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott

... others may have served as crypts, for purposes of religious ceremony, also a harbour of refuge for priests and monks, lastly as workshops. Provins may therefore be called not only a town but a triple city, consisting, first, of the old; secondly, of the new; lastly, of the underground. Captivating, from an artistic and antiquarian point of view, as are the first and last, all lovers of progress will not fail to give some time to the modern part, not, however, omitting the lovely walls round the ramparts, before quitting the region of romance for ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... had sent Reddy Fox into the house and told him to stay there until she returned home, he had not wanted to mind, but he knew that Granny Fox meant just what she said, and so he had crawled slowly down the long hall to the bedroom, way underground. ...
— The Adventures of Reddy Fox • Thornton W. Burgess

... issue, you could give cogent reasons for all the burning faith that is in you. But how about your friends and acquaintances? How many of them can cope with you in discussion? How many of them show even a desire to cope with you? Travel, I beg you, on the Underground Railway, or in a Tube. Such places are supposed to engender in their passengers a taste for political controversy. Yet how very elementary are such arguments as you will hear there! It is obvious that these gentlemen know and care very little about 'burning questions.' What they do ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... Led underground, they found themselves proceeding along a frosty passage lit every few yards by a great chunk of diamond. Their dim glow seemed to be refracted from some central ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... Of course when the underground water reaches the surface it evaporates. If we want to keep it for our crops, we must prepare a trap to hold it. Nature has shown us how this can be done. Pick up a plank as it lies on the ground. Under the plank the soil is wet, while the soil not covered by the plank is dry. Why? Capillarity ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett

... straightened out. After a little manoeuvring we found our trenches, and as the Germans began shelling the highway immediately in our rear, following the transport waggons along the road, it did not take us long to dig in. Some one remarked that the Germans have underground telephones along ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... Old Lady of Chertsey, Who made a remarkable curtsey; She twirled round and round, till she sank underground, Which distressed all the ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear

... have gone on by yourself, and you might have waked one of Pasht's cats,[Footnote: Note iii] and it would have eaten you. I was very glad you were not there. But after all this, I suppose the imagination of the heavy granite blocks and the underground ways had troubled me, and dreams are often shaped in a strange opposition to the impressions that have caused them; and from all that we had been reading in Bunsen about stones that couldn't be lifted with levers, I began to dream about stones that ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... "Mediterranean of Oxford Street" was by this time running at full tide. People were pouring out of the Tube and Underground stations and clambering on to the motor-buses. But in the rush nobody hustled or jostled me. A woman with a child in her arms was like a ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... never forget. It was one afternoon when she and Hermione accompanied by Marcus leaving Alyrus sleeping in the antechamber, had slipped out by a side entrance, joining the other Christians in the shadowy passageways of the underground cemeteries. ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark

... looked in to see how my mule was faring. He was standing in a crib at the foot of some underground stairs, with a huge horse trough before him, the size and shape of a Chinese coffin. He was peaceful and meditative. When he saw me he looked reproachfully at the cut straw heaped untidily in the trough, and then at me, and asked as clearly as he could if that was ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... footsteps. He stepped into a cab and ordered the man to drive to St. John's Wood. But at Baker Street he alighted and dismissed the cab. He had only a hand-bag with him, and, carrying this, he took the underground train to High Street, Kensington. When he arrived there he drove in another cab to his old hotel, "The Guelph," opposite the Park. When alone in his bedroom Giles smoked a complacent pipe. "If any one did try to follow me," he said to himself, ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume

... attitude to this girl it is more difficult to write. On the one side the human element—those associations directly connected with the senses—her actual face and hands, physical atmosphere and surroundings—those had disappeared; they were dispersed, or they lay underground; and it had been with a certain shock of surprise, in spite of the explanations given to him, that he had seen what he believed to be her face in the drawing-room in Queen's Gate. But he had tried to arrange all this in his imagination, and it had fallen into shape and proportion again. In short, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... 1861, we were fated to see some of the horrors of slavery. Suffering makes one wondrous kind; mother had suffered so much herself that the misery of others ever vibrated a chord of sympathy in her breast, and our house became a station on "the underground railway." Many a fugitive slave did we shelter, many here received food and clothing, and, aided by mother, a great number reached ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore

... Londoners. The centre house in the terrace was taken by Garrick, who remained there until his death, about seven years later. The arches were at first left open, but formed a refuge for the vicious and destitute, who made a regular city of the underground passages. They were subsequently filled in, and now are brewers' vaults, with only the high-vaulted roadway left open to form a passage for the drays and vans. Beneath the terrace is a curious little strip of ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... viii., p. 392.).—Such buildings underground as those described as Picts' {209} houses, were not uncommon on the borders of the Tweed. A number of them, apparently constructed as described, were discovered in a field on the farm of Whitsome Hill, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various

... our part of the world, and one of his boys had become very dear to me. This boy later on had got into trouble, and rather than tell anyone about it, had shot himself. So my eyes had been opened to things that are usually hidden from my sex; for the sake of my own sons, I had set out to study the underground ways of the male creature. I developed the curious custom of digging out every man I met, and making him lay bare his inmost life to me; so you may understand that it was no ordinary pair of woman's arms into which Claire Lepage was ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... by which such of us benefit, as either themselves or their landlords pay a small contribution. They have given us some red buildings at one end and on the Hill a queer little round tower containing the staircase leading to the underground reservoir, a wonderful construction of circles of brick pillars and arches, as those remember who visited it before the water was let in. And, verily, we may be thankful that our record has so few events in it, no terrible disasters, but that there has ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge

... found a lineman's "test set." With this he made his way to the roof of the building, "cut in" on the line to Phoneton and reported to Williamson, whose batteries were still in condition. Over this meagre equipment messages were exchanged by means of the underground wires of the company, which held up until after the noon hour Tuesday before the cable in which they were incased gave way. The break, however, was south of Dayton, and Phoneton was still in touch with ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall

... said Joe, very carefully, "naturally have their fuel stored in different tanks in different places, as airplanes do. The pilots switch on one tank or another just like plane pilots. In the underground storage and fueling pits, where all the fuel for the pushpots is kept in bulk, there are different tanks too. Naturally! At the fuel pump, the attendant can draw on any of those ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... patrols are being sent forward. We have driven Mama Lumra [a nickname for the enemy] several miles across country. He has planted his feet again but it is not the same Mama Lumra. His arrogance is gone. Our guns turn the earth upside down upon him. He has made himself houses underground which are in all respects fortresses with beds, chairs and lights. Our guns break these in. There is little to see because Mama Lumra is buried underneath. These days are altogether different from the days when all our Army was ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling

... out," said Turner, pausing before a jut in the wall of the room. "A flue was here, you see, but we've bricked it up. They took up the hearth, let themselves down into the basement, and then dug through the wall, and eighty feet underground into the yard of a deserted building over the way. If you'd like to see the place, step down ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... self-government. Partly because England had delayed granting Oregon self-government, the settlers of the Columbia had set up their own provisional government and turned that region over to the United States. We are surely far enough away from the episodes to state frankly the facts that similar underground intrigue was at work in both Red River and British Columbia, fostered, much of it, by Irish malcontents of the old Fenian raids. Once more Canada's national consciousness roused itself to a bigger problem and wider outlook. ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... were mostly underground, so that there was nothing really to suffer except casual passengers, beasts, and empty buildings. Few shells fell in town, and of the few many were half-charged with coal-dust, and many never burst at all. The casualties in Ladysmith ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... A battle with a fellow like that! A row in a public garden, and with a porter's daughter on his arm! What a position for Arthur Pendennis! He drew poor little Fanny hastily away from the dancers to her mother, and wished that lady, and Costigan, and poor Fanny underground, rather than there, in his companionship, and ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of the drains was obstructed which runs about eleven feet underground. When three holes had been dug and as many places in the drain tapped in vain, prayer was offered that in the fourth case the workmen might be guided to the very spot where the stoppage existed—and the ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson

... Government take any direct steps to ameliorate the overcrowding on the Underground railways. But, as it was stated that large quantities of leather are still being purchased on Government account, there are hopes that more accommodation for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The chipmunk, on the shingly shagbark's bough, Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound 40 Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... reached her with muffled sound, as she made her way in the dark underground, and as she came to the place where there was the contrived gleam of light and outer air, the lightning turned the narrow space into ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... cousin! Buried alive, man. Hark! you can hear him digging underground." The great sturdy fellow, who bore some resemblance to ruddy-haired Beardy, sufficient in the distance and under the circumstances of his excitement to warrant Abel's misapprehension, stared at the snow prisoner for a few moments as if he believed ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn

... picking a hard little yellow apple here and there from the boughs over my head, and at last I found a cellar all grown over with grass, with not even a bit of a crumbling brick to be seen in the hollow of it. No doubt there were some underground. It was a very large cellar, twice as large as any I had ever found before in any of these deserted places, in the woods or out. And that told me at once that there had been a large house above it, an unusual house for those old days; the family ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... big underground room, the sort of basement dining-room one finds in certain of the cafes in Soho, and its decorations and furniture were solid and comfortable. There were a dozen men in this innocent-looking saloon when the girl entered. They were standing about talking, or sitting at the tables ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace



Words linked to "Underground" :   belowground, Underground Railroad, hole-and-corner, hugger-mugger, subsurface, hush-hush, subway system, metro, railway system, railroad line, tube, Underground Railway, cloak-and-dagger, railway, Maquis, railroad, secret, subway, clandestine, revolutionary group



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