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Cavernous   /kˈævərnəs/   Listen
Cavernous

adjective
1.
Being or suggesting a cavern.
2.
Filled with vascular sinuses and capable of becoming distended and rigid as the result of being filled with blood.  Synonym: erectile.  "The penis is an erectile organ"



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"Cavernous" Quotes from Famous Books



... appalling slant long enough for Beale to drop on his hands and knees and begin to crawl as if he meant to fly on all fours out of the engine-room, and for Mr. Rout to turn his head slowly, rigid, cavernous, with the lower jaw dropping. Jukes had shut his eyes, and his face in a moment became hopelessly blank and gentle, like the face ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad

... by an enormous wall of perpendicular rock, covered with thick vegetation. The stone, which is of resplendent whiteness, appears only here and there between the foliage. It is difficult to imagine a more picturesque spot. It recalled forcibly to my remembrance the valleys of Derbyshire, and the cavernous mountains of Muggendorf, in Franconia. Instead of the beeches and maple trees of Europe we here find the statelier forms of the ceiba and the palm-tree, the praga and irasse. Numberless springs gush from the sides of the rocks which encircle the basin of Caripe, and of which the abrupt slopes ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... vocal tract. Raise it too high, and you bring it so close to the hard palate that the mouth becomes too small for free, resonant voice-emission. The tone becomes wheezy. Let the tongue lie too flat, and the mouth-cavity becomes too large and cavernous for tense, vibrant voice-emission. The tone becomes too open. Let the base of the tongue move back too far, and it will tend to close the pharynx and to check free egress from the pharynx into the mouth, making the tone muffled. Raise the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... Challenger of it, who put it down to the cerebral excitement caused by my fever. Again and again I glanced round swiftly, with the conviction that I was about to see something, but only to meet the dark tangle of our hedge or the solemn and cavernous gloom of the great trees which arched above our heads. And yet the feeling grew ever stronger in my own mind that something observant and something malevolent was at our very elbow. I thought of the Indian superstition of the Curupuri—the dreadful, lurking ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... chimney to the darkest recesses of the cellar in quest of my vanished treasure. I began with a queer old triangular cupboard that occupied one corner of the kitchen. And in the deepest and dustiest corner of the top shelf of that cavernous old cupboard, what should I find but the cricket ball that I had lost the previous summer? My excitement was so great that I almost fell off the table on which I was standing. As soon as the flicker of my candle fell on the ball I distinctly remembered putting ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham

... peat knoll, where an extra supply of fuel had been left under shelter during the previous autumn. Quite half of it still remained, and the "fause-hoose," or cavernous pit left from the digging out of the peats, afforded the best of cover. From it Stair would be able to follow the spy with his rifle all the way to the posts of the Preventive men which had been established on the rising ground above the edge of the Wild. A portable semaphore stiffly ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... thirst had burned in his throat and the jagged lances been broken off at the hilt in his flesh, while above-head the carrion birds wheeled, waiting their meal; hours of unceasing, unsparing slaughter, when the word was given to slay and yield no mercy, where in the great, vaulted, cavernous gloom of rent rocks, the doomed were hemmed as close as sheep in shambles. Hours, in the warm flush of an African dawn, when the arbiter of the duel was the sole judge allowed or comprehended by the tigers of the tricolor, and to aim a dead shot or to receive one was the only alternative ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... hope began to glimmer in the depths of my cavernous fear. It was long ere it swelled into confidence; but, although I was then in somewhat feeble health, my strength never gave way. For a whole week I did not once undress, and for weeks I was half-awake all the time I slept. The softest whisper ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... shimmering hair of the enormous ruff. Then the great brute settled down close against the blanket and, raising his head, eyed Connie indifferently, and as if to emphasize his indifference he opened his huge jaws in a prodigious yawn—a yawn that exposed the interior of his cavernous mouth with its ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... could see nothing, I remembered the narrow landing at the top of the stairs, and, stretching out my arms, I felt for the boarding on either hand, guiding myself by it, and began to descend, when something rising, as it were, out of the cavernous darkness before me made me halt and draw back in ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... a shake as though to arouse himself from his thoughts, and after listening a moment or two to make sure that no one was nigh, he walked softly to the fireplace, and stooping, peered up the chimney. Above him yawned a black cavernous depth, inky with the soot of years. Hans straightened himself, and tilting his leathern cap to one side, began scratching his bullet-head; at last he drew a long breath. "Yes, good," he muttered to himself; "he who jumps ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle

... in a way, the type of fireplace that our Colonial ancestors built—great cavernous openings and generous flues, with the result that the more wood was piled upon the blaze the more they blistered their toes and at the same time chilled their backs. For it is evident that when we secure such ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor

... receiving bundles of iron rods that fell clanging into their place. Wagons rattled past over the uneven pavement, and below along the river locomotives whistled. Above all was the bass overtone of the city, swelling louder each minute with the day's work. A picture of a fair palace in the cavernous depths of a Sienna street came over the young man with a vivid sense of pain. Under his breath he muttered to himself, "Fierce!" Then he glanced with compunction at the gentle old face by his side. How had he kept so perfectly sweet, so fine in ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... slowly vanishes down its cavernous jaws; faint yells are heard at intervals—then nothing but a dull champing sound; after which, dead silence. The Monster smiles, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various

... with strange cavernous eyes, lay in the room to which we were presently taken. I stood at the foot of the bed, directly in his line of vision, but he did not seem to recognize me. He looked through and ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote

... His shoulders spoke of a strength but little impaired by the years. Ghostly gray beard, ghostly gray hair, haunting eyes that gleamed, all added to the strange and weird impressiveness of the man as he stood before Aldous. And when he spoke, his voice had in it the deep, low, cavernous note ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... Astronomical Society in December, 1894,[452] availed to shatter the consensus of opinion which had so long been maintained on the subject of spot-structure.[453] It has become impossible any longer to hold that it is uniformly cavernous; and what seem like actually protruding umbrae are occasionally vouched for on unimpeachable authority.[454] We can only infer that the forms of sun-spots are really more various than had been supposed; that they are peculiarly subject to disturbance; and that the level of the nuclei may rise ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... closet was a joy to behold; a room of itself, light and airy, with the smoothest of cedar shelves and deep cavernous drawers for blankets ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs

... stopping now and then to exchange a greeting or a farewell, and much hampered, as it seemed, in so doing, by a pronounced and disfiguring short-sight. He was a strongly built man of more than middle height. His iron-gray hair, deeply carved features, and cavernous black eyes gave him the air of power that his reputation demanded. On the other hand, his difficulty of eyesight, combined with the marked stoop of overwork, produced a qualifying impression—as of power teased and fettered, a Samson ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... called, the latter being named in honor of the stubborn old military hero who beat back the British soldiers at the close of the war of 1812 on the glorious field of Chalmette near New Orleans. Fort Jackson was a huge star of stone and mortar. In its massive walls were great cavernous bomb-proofs in which the soldiers were secure from bursting shells. It stood back about a hundred yards from the levee, and its casemates just rose above the huge dike that keeps the Mississippi in its proper channel. When the river was high from the spring floods of the north, a steamer floating ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... purulent, serous fluid; the disease, however, extended up the organ as far as its middle before its actions ceased; the sloughs were then cast off, when it was found that part of the gland and a portion of the cavernous body had followed the integument in the general wreck, subjecting the patient to intolerable pain during micturition. After the recovery from the fever, the remaining portion of the gland and the mutilated parts of the cavernous body were ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... voluminous bursts of fractured English from Perdosa. Pulz had nothing to offer, but watched from his pale green eyes. The light shifted and wavered from one to the other as the ship swayed: garments swung; the empty berths yawned cavernous. I could imagine the forecastle filled with the desperate men who had beaten off the Oyama. The story is told that they had swept the gunboat's decks with ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... and Mrs. Albert Sessions were awaiting them at the end of the long cavernous walk from the ferry-boat, and New York immediately became a blur of cabs, cobblestones, bales of cotton, long vistas of very dirty streets, high buildings, surface cars, elevateds, shop windows that seemed dark and foreign, and everywhere such a rush of people as made her feel insecure, cling ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... to her feet and strapping the ammunition belt and revolver about her waist, she stole on tiptoe to the doorway and peered out; the silent, cavernous passage ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish

... bearing. Seldom had I seen so fine a figure. Within six months I saw that man reduced almost to a skeleton by solitary confinement, wearily trailing one limb after the other, and looking out despairingly from cavernous, moribund eyes. Well did Lord Fitzgerald (I think) in a recent speech in the House of Lords describe this torture as the worst ever devised by the brain of man. His lordship added that the Governor ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote

... The poor wretch was swathed in furs; snow-shoes on his feet, and a long staff lent his drooping figure support. His whole attitude told its own tale of exhaustion. But a closer inspection, one glance into the fierce-burning eyes, which glowered from the depths of two cavernous sockets, would have added a sequel of starvation. The eyes had a frenzied look in them, the look of a man without hope, but with still that instinct of life burning in his brain. Every now and again he raised one mitted hand ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum

... the house, who lived in a dark cavernous hole on the first floor, was slowly dying of a consumption, the sufferings of which were imbittered by the chill dampness of his abode. His hollow voice and hacking cough, however, could not veil the grateful ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... and his chorus. His chant is cavernous, abysmal,—booms from his chest like the sound of a drum beaten in the bottom of a well.... Ti manmaille-l, baill moin lavoix! ("Give me voice, little folk,—give me voice!") And all chant after him, in a chanting like the rushing of many ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... was over I ran to where he lay with Umslopogaas standing over him, as it seemed to me, utterly exhausted, for he supported himself by the axe and tottered upon his feet. But Rezu was not yet dead. He opened his cavernous eyes and glared at the Zulu with ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... was being seen off by exactly thirty-seven of her late neighbours in Rivington Street. And two men in the second cabin were being seen off by detectives, surely the crowning compliment a great nation can bestow. The cavernous Customs sheds were congested with friends and relatives, and Sam Marlowe, heading for the gang-plank, was only able to make progress by employing all the muscle and energy which Nature had bestowed upon him, and which during the greater part of his life he had ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... on the rocks Like a mythical mermaiden belle, And comb out my watery locks, Then dive to my cavernous cell. ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... hollow; scoop, scoop out; gouge, gouge out, dig, delve, excavate, dent, dint, mine, sap, undermine, burrow, tunnel, stave in. Adj. depressed &c v.; alveolate^, calathiform^, cup-shaped, dishing; favaginous^, faveolate^, favose^; scyphiform^, scyphose^; concave, hollow, stove in; retiring; retreating; cavernous; porous &c (with holes) 260; infundibul^, infundibular^, infundibuliform^; funnel shaped, bell ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... talked in scoffing menaces from outside the door, or clutched him by the throat from behind his chair, and yelled some hideous secret into his ear, which his scared and scattered wits, when he started into consciousness, could never collect again. And this fellow, with whose sneering cavernous talk—with whose very knock at the door or thump at the partition-wall he was as familiar as with his own wife's voice, and the touch of whose cold convulsive hand he had felt so often on his cheek or throat, and the very suspicion ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... landscape. As I paused to gaze, I saw to the right, gliding quickly through the air, what appeared a small boat, impelled by sails shaped like wings. It soon passed out of sight, descending amidst the shades of a forest. Right above me there was no sky, but only a cavernous roof. This roof grew higher and higher at the distance of the landscapes beyond, till it became imperceptible, as an atmosphere of ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... whose finely-cut face and cavernous eye-bones suggested a carving in old ivory, bowed himself almost to the ground before the girl who had saved his admired Captain Sahib from the possibility of a ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... posteriorly, from consolidation of the lungs. A decided leathery, frictional sound is detected over a considerable portion of the thoracic surface. As the disease advances, and gangrene, with the production of cavities in the lungs, ensues, loud, cavernous rales are heard, which are more or less circumscribed, occasionally attended by a decided metallic noise. When one lobe of the lungs is alone affected, the morbid sounds are confined to one side, and on the healthy side the respiratory murmur is uniformly ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings

... words in a voice no longer nasal, but deep—more than deep—a voice made purposely hollow and cavernous—"what! has the miracle of Pentecost been renewed? Have the cloven tongues come down again? Where are they? The sound filled the whole house just now. I heard the seventeen languages in full action: Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... at the destruction of his friends, that he cared neither for the size of the dragon's jaws nor for his hundreds of sharp teeth. Drawing his sword, he rushed at the monster, and flung himself right into his cavernous mouth. This bold method of attacking him took the dragon by surprise; for, in fact, Cadmus had leaped so far down into his throat, that the rows of terrible teeth could not close upon him, nor do him the least ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... the darkest hue of the orange leaf, and deepened yet again into gravest brown, then faded into orange, then into brightest gold, and culminated in the delicate pink of a new-blown rose. Where portions of the meadow had sunk, and where other portions had been broken up like an ice-floe, the cavernous openings of the one, and the ragged upturned edges exposed by the other, were hung with a lace-work of soft-tinted crystals of sulphur that changed their deformities into quaint shapes and figures that were full of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... lines that were graven upon it. His cheek-bones were prominent, his mouth was concealed by a huge gray mustache, and his cheeks were sunken, while his forehead projected, and was fringed with heavy eyebrows, from behind which his dark eyes glowed with a sort of gloomy lustre from cavernous depths. Over his whole face there was one pervading expression that was more than despondency, and near akin to despair. It was the expression of a man whose life had been a series of disheartening failures, or of one who had sinned deeply, or of one who had suffered unusual and protracted anguish ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille

... whip-cords with the crackle of fire. Jean whistled and I signalled back; but there was soon such a pounding of rains it drowned every sound. For all the help one could give the other we might have been a thousand miles apart. I looked back. M. Radisson's fire threw a dull glare into the cavernous upper darkness. That was guide enough. Jean could keep his course ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Roman Catholic chapel in London. He was a gaunt figure, extremely emaciated and hollow-cheeked, with a very bad cough, and as he stood in the pulpit, coughing hoarsely, he beat his breast with his hand and forearm, till it sounded like the reverberation of a huge cavernous drum." Grove went on to describe how the time was one of great spiritual excitement in the Church of England and in the Roman Church,—a time when people thought that Rome was going to reassert her ascendancy over English minds. During the very week or month in which the sermon was ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... four years!—and here sat Dicky Fontenoy, haranguing on the dull clauses of a technical act, throat hoarse with the speaking of the last three weeks, eyes cavernous with anxiety and overwork, the creator and leader of a political party which did not exist when Tressady left England, and now bade fair to hold the balance of power in English government! The surprises of fate and character! Tressady pondered ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... of cavernous habitats have small eyes (see Dobzhansky, 1951:284). Some nocturnal animals (for example, owls) have large eyes. The brush mouse has large, protuberant eyes; it lives in the deep crevices and fissures of the cliffs on which ...
— Natural History of the Brush Mouse (Peromyscus boylii) in Kansas With Description of a New Subspecies • Charles A. Long

... in regard to me was a subject upon which I frequently speculated. There was at intervals an alert gleam of intelligence in those cavernous eye-sockets, as if the sudden remembrance of some old experience had illumined them. He had been a great traveler, and had known strange vicissitudes in life; his stage career had brought him into ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... cripple, smitten with some disease that affected his powers of locomotion. He was excessively thin. Don Luis also saw his pallid face, his cavernous cheeks, his hollow temples, his skin the colour of parchment: the face of a sufferer ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc

... wolf trotted leisurely along just ahead. But whichever way Father Jose turned, the mountain always asserted itself and arrested his wandering eye. Out of the dry and arid valley, it seemed to spring into cooler and bracing life. Deep cavernous shadows dwelt along its base; rocky fastnesses appeared midway of its elevation; and on either side huge black hills diverged like massy roots from a central trunk. His lively fancy pictured these hills peopled with a majestic and intelligent race of savages; ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte

... 25 A.D., Strabo, an eminent historian of the time, wrote: "About these places rises Vesuvius, well cultivated and inhabited all round, except at its top, which is for the most part level, and entirely barren, ashy to the view, displaying cavernous hollows in cineritious rocks, which look as if they had been eaten by fire; so that we may suppose this spot to have been a volcano formerly, with burning craters, now extinguished for ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... a dead spring; and as I stood, shaken with thoughts as the flowers are with the winds, Aunt Jane came around from the back of the house, her black silk cape fluttering from her shoulders, and a calico sunbonnet hiding her features in its cavernous depth. She walked briskly to the clothes-line and began patting and smoothing the quilts where the breeze ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... the clearing he could see Danny Stern and his crew, tiny beneath the cavernous sunbeam-shot overhang of giant leaves. Danny was standing up at the controls of the 'dozer, waving his arms. His crew was struggling to get a log set so he could shove it into place with the 'dozer. They were repairing a break in the barricade—the place where one of New Earth's ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby

... battle-axes of the ancients, commonly called "celts," are also ascribed to their manufacture. But, like the Gothic duergar, their skill is not confined to the fabrication of arms; for they are heard sedulously hammering in linns, precipices, and rocky or cavernous situations, where, like the dwarfs of the mines mentioned by George Agricola, they busy themselves in imitating the actions and the various employments of men. The Brook of Beaumont, for example, which passes in its course ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous

... Fatty Harris' room and thence into the outlawed night. They stole over the crinkling snow, burying their noses in their sweaters, until, having climbed several fences, they arrived behind a shed of particularly cavernous appearance. ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson

... of logs. It is of solid masonry, and is sixty years older than the walls which surround it. The wide fireplace has a surface of fifty square feet, and is the most interesting piece of architecture in all Canada. The snowflakes of almost three hundred winters have fallen into its cavernous depths since these stones and mortar were laid. When Champlain stood by its hearth, as its first blaze, lighted by tinder and flint, roared up to the sky—William Shakespeare was still writing his sublime lines, Queen Elizabeth had lain but twelve ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway

... coming to rest at the church doors. Lawrence drifted tranquilly on. He had slipped a cable; he was free and ready for the open sea. Following at random any turning that offered, he came out suddenly upon Verocchio's black horseman against the black sky. The San Zanipolo square was deserted; the cavernous San Zanipolo tenanted by tombs. Stone figures, seated, a-horse, lying carved in death, started out from ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... what lay beyond, with which I twisted and turned the knob. It moved, but nothing seemed to happen, and then I discovered the trouble. I pushed the knob vigorously to one side, and the whole mantel swung loose from the wall almost a foot, revealing a cavernous space beyond. ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... galleries of fretted niches, tier above tier; the pictured foulnesses, the painted lusts, the divinities of abomination. And, yawning in the sloping precipice of sculpture, beneath a frenzied swarming of gods and Gopia,—a beetling pyramid of limbs and bodies interlocked,—the Gate, cavernous and shadowy as the mouth of Siva, devoured ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... sepulchre without stopping to look at the parked machines or even the marvelous statue that stood above it, for what did we care about machines or statues now? As we approached we were astonished to hear low and cavernous growlings. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard

... consists of nine different sorts of wood, and the spectators cast into the flames a kind of toad-stool (Baeran) in order to counteract the power of the Trolls and other evil spirits, who are believed to be abroad that night; for at that mystic season the mountains open and from their cavernous depths the uncanny crew pours forth to dance and disport themselves for a time. The peasants believe that should any of the Trolls be in the vicinity they will shew themselves; and if an animal, for example a he or she goat, happens to be seen near the blazing, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... the moment, Arbalik himself rose to address the assembly. He was a fine specimen of an Eskimo—a good-looking young savage; slim and wiry, with a nose not too flat, and only a little turned up; a mouth that was well shaped and pleasant to look at, though very large, and absolutely cavernous when in the act of yawning; and his eyes looked sharp and eager, as if always on the outlook for some passing bird, with a ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne

... as dark and cold as city snow could make it—a dingy whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fireplace; a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water, and a vapid, ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... padded after him along a dusty hallway, up a flight of stairs that was little more than a ladder, and into the cavernous loft of the old barn which had been transformed ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst

... little, but not much, more sociable, for, although Nigel's active mind would gladly have found vent in conversation, he experienced some difficulty in making headway against the discouragement of Van der Kemp's very quiet disposition, and the cavernous yawns with which Moses displayed at once his desire for slumber ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne

... which marked the southern boundary. Along the brick sidewalk stretched a line of ageing wooden pickets and about midway in their extent hung the wooden gate with the screak. The house was frame, low and wide-stretching, with an inviting verandah about a cavernous front door that was dark and rarely open. People used the side door into the ell sitting room, and the brick walk leading in a curved sweep to this doorway was free from grass. A high wooden lattice separated the front lawn from the backyard and sheds and stables, and about this lattice sprawled ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... had pulled out all these coarser hairs, leaving nothing on his brows but the soft and closely pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all such cases. This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes, which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse; but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more ordinary and less individual aspect. From a good-natured but shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and his costume into a well-fed and well-grown, but not very colossal, commercial gentleman. Hugo was ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... and the procession moved away. They came after a short journey to a natural opening leading to the heart of the plateau. The apes and gorillas, with the exception of the red leader, remained outside. The remainder of the party pushed through a tortuous tunnel until they reached a cavernous opening directly beneath the plateau. Vertical openings in the walls furnished light and air. The white chieftain spoke in a strange tongue to his followers, and they instantly prepared three couches in a far corner of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... greatness—a very carnival of wild and drunken waves; the waters hurled upward in huge masses of white. Sometimes they unite more gently, and together sweep grandly and gracefully along parallel with the shore; and the cavernous hollows stretch out from the shore so that you look into the trough of the sea and realize what a terrible depth it is. The roar, meanwhile, is horrible. You are stunned by it as by the roar of a great waterfall. You see a wave of unusual magnitude rolling in from far beyond the wild revelry ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley

... that power! How I longed to be able to compress my form into utter littleness; to ride the bold dragonfly; swing on the tall bearded grass; follow the ant into his subterraneous habitation, or dive into the cavernous depths ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... women, and children) in this secret cave, which is narrow, but of great subterranean length, with an exceedingly small entrance. It opens from the broken face of a steep bank along the shore; and, as the whole coast is cavernous, their particular retreat would have been sought for in vain by strangers. So the Skye-men, finding the island uninhabited, presumed the natives had fled, and satisfied their revengeful feelings by ransacking and pillaging the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... tried it and found it on the latch. He entered and scuffled up the walk, ankle deep in fallen leaves. His footfalls as he crossed the porch sounded startlingly loud by contrast; he even fancied a note of indignation in the cavernous echoes of the knocker on the front door. He waited with a thumping heart, aware that he was venturing where even fools would fear ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance

... though rather distant view of the falls. When approaching the platform I was positively startled by a vast shrieking clang which suddenly burst on the ear and seemed to fill the air. This I afterwards found had come from the semi-cavernous gorge of rock about half a mile away, into which fall the waters of the Rajah and Roarer rapids, and though I afterwards heard somewhat similar sounds issuing from these falls, I never heard again anything approaching ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... She liked this quiet, cavernous old barn of a place down under the Globe stage; liked it when she had it to herself before the two sewing women came and later, when, with a couple of sheets spread down on the floor she cut and basted according to her cambric patterns, keeping ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... did; nor would they believe the twins' assertions that the dark Mausoleum, with its cavernous rock chambers and granite vaults, was the most impressive thing they had seen in Egypt. "You say that to be aggravating, because we weren't there," I heard Lady Biddell snap, over the grumbling of ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... quickly, and he presently reached out and drew a reading-lamp towards him. The flame he kindled flickered upward, throwing weird shadows upon his lean, brown face, making the sunken hollows of his eyes look cavernous. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... more fantastic impression faded; in a full light the figure took on more conventional colors, as of an ordinary gentleman who happened to have come out without a hat and without very studiously brushing his hair. But the massive stature remained, and something deep and even cavernous about the setting of the eyes redeemed his animal good looks from the commonplace. But March had no time to study the man more closely, for, much to his astonishment, his guide merely observed, "Hullo, Jack!" and walked past him as if he had indeed been a signpost, ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton

... through the entire length of the penis, opening by its proximal extremity into the urinary bladder, and serving for the passage of the urine from the bladder to the exterior of the body. The main substance of the penis is composed of three cavernous bodies, the paired corpora cavernosa penis, and the single corpus spongiosum, or corpus cavernosum urethrae. These consist of what is known as erectile tissue, a spongy mass within whose lacunar spaces a large ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll

... who haunt this floor, 2 And thou, the Unconquered Beast, That hugely liest at rest By the dim shining adamantine door, —Still from thy cavernous lair Gnarling, so legends tell, A tameless guard of Hell,— Mayest thou this once thy vigilance forbear, And leave large room for him now entering there. Hear us, great Son of Darkness and the Deep; On thee we call, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

... Yes, the chief of the orchestra was present, and he sat before a piano on the edge of the maelstrom, in what we should call the High Bailiff's pews—but they call them the stalls—while the mushroom himself went back to the cavernous depths of the body, which in a theatre they have properly christened the pit, and this morning it ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... cavalry clustered round a well frantically devising means to reach the cavernous depths, while the other half were fighting like tigers to keep off the Turks a few miles away! It was nothing out of the ordinary for a squadron or battery to take five hours to water their horses; and it added a piquancy to the situation that you were never quite sure when a marauding ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... vaults where the light of day had never shone, past hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps, and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three, linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here and there, especially at first, the ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... growing stronger, they said, doing quite passively the things they asked of her toward her restoration; she recognized them all, but she expressed neither wish nor emotion, lying chiefly with closed eyes in the cavernous depths of the great invalid chair where they laid her each day, yet responding by some movement if they called her name—rarely with any words; nothing roused her from ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... none the less intimidating. He had a great beak of a nose, but the mouth below could not be seen. It was hidden by the mustache and the enormous square beard. His face was colorless, almost as white as hair and beard; there seemed to be no shadow or tint anywhere except the cavernous recesses from which the man's eyes gleamed and sparkled. Altogether he was certainly "a ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... shrinks to small proportions when she is a mile or more distant at night. She becomes indivisible, a mere atom in the immensity of the black waters; it demands an effort of the imagination to credit her with wide decks, streets of cabins, and cavernous holds. In one respect the exhibition of the port and starboard lights served them most excellently. Guanaco Hill was directly astern of the ship; they had absolutely no trouble in maintaining a straight line for their destination, all that ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... rough logs, laid side by side, served for a bridge over this stream. On that side of the road where the brook entered the wood, a group of oaks and chestnuts, matted thick with wild grape-vines, threw a cavernous gloom over it. To pass this bridge was the severest trial. It was at this identical spot that the unfortunate Andre was captured, and under the covert of those chestnuts and vines were the sturdy yeomen concealed who surprised him. This has ever since been considered a haunted stream, and fearful ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... cavernous waste shore Cast in the unstilted Cyclades, Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot

... begins to diminish. The French assert that they have borrowed it from us, and from the school of MRS. RADCLIFF, &c. &c. They also assert, that the policy of the royalist-party was not unconnected with this propagation of cavernous, cadaverous adventures, ideas, and illusions, intended, they say, by the impression of a new moral terror to infatuate their countrymen again with the dull and soporific prestiges of popery. They see with joy that the taste for pleasure has assumed the ascendency, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... the room to look at Marsham. He was lying still and breathing heavily. His thick fair hair, always slightly gray from the time he was thirty, had become much grayer of late; the thin handsome face was drawn and damp, the eyes cavernous, the lips bloodless. Even in sleep his aspect showed ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... ought to have seen what I saw on my way To the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day: Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb, Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum In the cavernous pail of the first one to come! And all ripe together, not some of them green And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!" "I don't know what part of the pasture you mean." "You know where they ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost

... suddenly sunk from the heavens. The pines, of magnificent height and girth, were so closely set that far overhead, where the branches began, was a heavy roof of foliage, impervious to the sunshine, brooding, dark and sullen as a thundercloud, over the cavernous world beneath. There was no undergrowth, no clinging vines, no bloom, no color; only the dark, innumerable tree trunks and the purplish-brown, scented, and slippery earth. The air was heavy, cold, and still, like cave air; the silence as blank and ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston

... those cavernous eyes Pale flashes seemed to rise, As when the northern skies Gleam in December; And, like the water's flow Under December's snow, Came a dull voice of woe From the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... sullen silence. Soon he paused before a quiet house, one of the many which housed in cavernous depths uncounted clerks and other small fry of the city. "Good-night to you," said Peter Niburg. Then, rather tardily. "And my thanks. But for you I should ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... cask, handed me a large glass of brandy and a piece of white bread, at the same time taking my money. I drank and passed the glass to Zebede, who emptied it. We had as much difficulty in getting out of the crowd as in entering. Hard, famished faces and cavernous eyes were on all sides of us. No one moved willingly. Each thought only of himself, and cared not for his neighbor. They had escaped a thousand deaths to-day only to dare a thousand more to-morrow. Well might they mutter, "Every one for himself, ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann

... Lobo and his mate selected their den and raised their family that season. There they lived all summer and killed Joe's cattle, sheep, and dogs, but laughed at all his poisons and traps and rested securely among the recesses of the cavernous cliffs, while Joe vainly racked his brain for some method of smoking them out, or of reaching them with dynamite. But they escaped entirely unscathed, and continued their ravages as before. "There's where he lived all last summer," said Joe, pointing to ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton

... shading, the tubby lines of the little tug were softened and altered; its paint-cracked deck and wheelhouse silvered and mellowed. The twin wire cables stretching back to the tow became two glistening silver ropes. At their ends, cavernous gloomy and grimy despite the moonlight, wallowed the high bulky hull of ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... in the summer morning Under a cavernous yew; The sun was gently climbing, And the scents rose after ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... places, its rains deeply seated in thick forests, and its lonely hills covered with rock, and thinly wooded by the eternal palm-tree; hills which, in consequence of the broken nature of the ground, and their cavernous recesses, are difficult of access. It is in these fastnesses that the hyenas find secure retreats, and the Parsees construct their ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts

... which ever and anon flattened him against the chalk or drove him miles inland up some cavernous cave. Be that as it may, ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed

... mainly of blood vessels or blood spaces and are observed on the skin of man, where they are called "birthmarks" or "mother marks." Cavernous angiomas are seen in cattle, affecting the liver and the mucous membrane of the nasal septum. In the liver they appear as smooth, flat, nonprojecting tumors of a dark-red or purple color and of about the size of a silver 10-cent piece. They ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... the ——-s in a buggy, and I on Birdie, left Colorado Springs, crossing the Mesa, a high hill with a table top, with a view of extraordinary laminated rocks, LEAVES of rock a bright vermilion color, against a background of snowy mountains, surmounted by Pike's Peak. Then we plunged into cavernous Glen Eyrie, with its fantastic needles of colored rock, and were entertained at General Palmer's "baronial mansion," a perfect eyrie, the fine hall filled with buffalo, elk, and deer heads, skins of wild animals, stuffed ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... and Benigno, and Fernandez and Francisco, and Benito. Benito was a tall, swarthy man, with immense gray moustachios, and hair as harsh as tropical grass and gray as ashes. When he could spare his cigarette from his lips, he would tell you in a cavernous voice, and with a wrinkled smile that he ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... one of the handles, and the sudden jolt at such a high speed was so violent that our faithful guide and friend was shot off backwards, and ere Omar could clutch him he had disappeared with a shriek of despair into the cavernous darkness. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... the coverlet savagely. Milo, with horror in his shining face, gently removed her hand, then stood before her with bowed head, his cavernous chest heaving wildly. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... near him, and he begged from it just as he had done from the rooks: the little creature would have run the risk of being itself swallowed had it attempted to deliver a packet of flies into that cavernous mouth. I went nearer, moving cautiously, until I was within about four yards of him, when, half turning, he opened his mouth and squawked, actually asking me to feed him; then, growing suspicious, he hopped awkwardly away in the grass. ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... frequents. Opening wide its colossal mouth, a cavity often more than fifteen feet in length, and so deep from upper to lower jaw that the flexible sheets of whalebone, sometimes ten feet long, hang straight without touching its floor, it takes a great gulp of water. Then the cavernous jaws slowly close, expelling the water through the whalebone sieve, somewhat as a Chinese laundryman sprinkles clothes, and the small marine animals which go to feed that prodigious bulk are caught in the strainer. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... the penis is flaccid. By a complex nervous mechanism based on vascular paralysis due to nervous phenomena called inhibition and dynamogeny, the nervous irritations cause an accumulation of blood in the spaces of the cavernous bodies which become so gorged with blood as to form stiff and hard rods. The size of the penis is thereby increased considerably and its stiffness allows it to penetrate the vagina of the female. At the same time and by the same mechanism the verumontanum swells so as to close the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... was now discernible by her own torchlight, approaching out of one of the cavernous passages. Miriam came forward, but not with the eagerness and tremulous joy of a fearful girl, just rescued from a labyrinth of gloomy mystery. She made no immediate response to their inquiries and tumultuous congratulations; ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... outrunning the constable (were I to say he was a literary man, some critics would vow that I intended to insult the literary profession), once sent me his address at a little public-house called the "Fox under the Hill," down a most darksome and cavernous archway in the Strand. Such a man, under such misfortunes, may have a house, but he is never in his house; and has an address where letters may be left; but only simpletons go with the hopes of seeing him.—Only ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... daybreak, and a few minutes later rolled up before the Persian custom-house in the valley below. There was no evidence of the proximity of a Russian frontier, except the extraordinary size of the tea-glasses, from which we slaked our intolerable thirst. During the day we had had a surfeit of cavernous gorges and commanding pinnacles, but very little water. The only copious spring we were able to find was filled at the time with the unwashed linen of a Persian traveler, who sat by, smiling in derision, as we upbraided him for his disregard of the ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... threatened to intercept them. But luckily the bandsmen, who set the pace, moved slowly, and by taking hands and running the children reached the platform in time, skirted its darker side, and dived under its scarlet draperies into the cavernous darkness beneath ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... a royal fountain: My harp shall tell how from yon cavernous mountain, Topt by the brown ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.

... describing nature are not yet invented. "Endeavour," he says, "to describe a mountain in such a manner that it may be recognised. When you have spoken of its base, its sides, its summit, you will have said all! But what variety there is to be found in those swelling, lengthened, flattened, or cavernous forms! It is only by periphrasis that all this can be expressed. The same difficulty exists for plains and valleys. But if you have a palace to describe, there is no longer any difficulty. Every moulding has its ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre

... a gasp! A dim bulk showed in the translucent depths of the wall. It rushed toward me, took form. A fish, a huge, blind fish, its cavernous mouth stretched wide. It came straight for me, just above. In a second it would leap through. A scream of terror trembled in my throat. Then it hit the edge of the translucent green wall—and vanished! Was I dreaming? Had Jim hit ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... with a half-laugh and obeyed, as if he felt the uselessness of a struggle. He was not more than twenty-five years old, and his eyes were cavernous with want. He had the face of a man who might have belonged to a better class. When he had uttered the exclamation invoking the infernal regions he had ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... native town I know a pine and oak clad hill, round-topped, with a bold, precipitous front extending halfway around it. Near the top, and along this front or side, there crops out a ledge of rocks unusually high and cavernous. One immense layer projects many feet, allowing a person or many persons, standing upright, to move freely beneath it. There is a delicious spring of water there, and plenty of wild, cool air. The floor is of loose stone, now trod by sheep ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs

... "rose like the steam of rich distilled perfume" from the earth in front of them, and made a mouth at him. Juniper did not run, as might have been expected; he stood for a moment peering into the brute's cavernous jaws, and then flew! He absented himself with such extraordinary nimbleness that after he was a mile distant his image appeared to be standing there yet; and looking back he saw it himself. Baffled of his dwarf, the bear thought he would ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... sale and merchandise, and there, no doubt, the booths before the lower stories, with all their merchandise displayed, and the salesmen seated at the head of the few deep steps which led into the cavernous depths within, would be full of fine dresses and jewellery, and the gold and silver which, some one complains, was worn away by the fine workmanship, which was then more prized than solid weight. ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... of green waving fairy trees, That carpeted the earth for lowly feet, Bending unto their tread, lowliest of all Earth's lowly children born for ministering Unto the heavenly stranger, stately man; That he, by subtle service from all kinds, From every breeze and every bounding wave, From night-sky cavernous with heaps of storm, And from the hill rejoicing in the sun, Might grow a humble, lowly child of God; Lowly, as knowing his high parentage; Humble, because all beauties wait on him, Like lady-servants ministering for love. And he that ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... terrified. He kept a little distance between them as he walked, and when she looked at him he looked away. She had a vision of herself as an ogre—whiskers sprouted all over her face, her ears bulged and swaggled, her voice became a cavernous rumble, her conversation sounded like fee-faw-fum—and yet, her brothers were not afraid of her in the least; they pinched her ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... cloud of little swallows darted from the cavernous entrance on our approach, divided into flocks, soared, wheeled, flew right and left, and finally returned in a body as swiftly as they came, to the sides of the long dark tunnel, which were festooned ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... ground where once had stood both the Amberson Hotel and the Amberson Opera House. From there he drifted to the old "Amberson Block," but this was fallen into a back-water; business had stagnated here. The old structure had not been replaced, but a cavernous entryway for trucks had been torn in its front, and upon the cornice, where the old separate metal letters had spelt "Amberson Block," there was a long billboard ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... its shroud there hung the grave's green mould, About it hung the odor of the dead; Yet from its cavernous eyes such light was shed That all my life seemed gilded, as with gold; Unto the trembling new love '"Go," I said "I do not need thee, for I have ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... gloom in the chasm thickened. The sun had passed beyond the southwestern forests, and through the narrow rift between the mountain walls there fell but the ebbing light of day, dissolving itself into the shadows of dusk as it struggled weakly in the cavernous depths. For a few minutes this swift fading of day into night gripped the adventurers in its spell. What did the lonely solitudes of that chasm hold for them? Where would they lead them? To Rod's mind there came a picture of the silver fox and a thought of his dream, ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood

... I do, of course." Her thoughts wandered off through strange by-ways. At times, they would pass some black cavernous entrance to unknown labyrinths, and the frightened thoughts would hurry by. Sometimes they would be led decorously along a smooth highway, pacing quietly; sometimes they would rise to the sunlight and spread their wings, and then ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... often not less than a third of universal space. When he has added figure to figure in the endeavour to picture the multitudinous disarray of the fallen Angels on the lake, one line suffices to reduce the whole spectacle to its due dimensions beneath that cavernous tent of darkness:— ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... cavernous spot, in spite of the Sahara-like heat of the great pile. In the very heart of it two gigantic masses of rock had put their shoulders together, like Gog and Magog, so that under their ten thousand tons of weight was a crypt-like tunnel as ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... rhetoric of all Roman art may have added these embellishing touches, and cite, in confirmation thereof, the last two lines of the previous verse, mentioning animals that could hardly have slaked their thirst with any convenience at a cavernous spring such as he describes. Caverns, moreover, are not always near the summits of hills; they may be at the foot of them; and water, even the Thames at London Bridge, always leaps downhill—more or less. Of more importance is old Chaupy's ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... held by a sailor. Slowly the chaplain read the beautiful service. The ship was stopped. Not a sound was heard and the midnight moon was hidden by clouds. "Therefore we commit this body to the deep," was pronounced. The plank was raised and the body was swallowed up in the cavernous ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... where he was, and emerged from their shade to speak to her. I did not approach her solitary figure without trembling; for this gloomy end to her determined walk, and the way in which she stood, almost within the cavernous shadow of the iron bridge, looking at the lights crookedly reflected in the strong tide, inspired ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... time of mystery in Snowy Gulch—that little cluster of frame shacks lost and far in the northern reaches of the Caribou Range. Shadows lie deep, pale lights spring up here and there in windows, with gaping, cavernous darkness between; a wet mist is clammy on the face. At such times one forgets that here is a town, an enduring outpost of civilization, and can remember only the forests that stretch so heavy and dark on every side. Indeed the town seems simply ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... swung at a sharp angle and simultaneously checked the speed. Under scant momentum they slid from moonlight and the clean air of night into a close well between two walls, and then suddenly beneath an arch and into a cavernous chamber filled with the soft murmuring ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... "You must wait a minute, old chap," he continued, pulling out his knife, with which he divided the small pumpkin in four, each portion being quietly taken and drawn through, to disappear in the monster's cavernous interior, to be followed by several more bananas, Peter dealing out his gifts deliberately so as to make more of what in its entirety was a mere snack ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... gathering up such poor belongings as had escaped the wreckings of the revenue force. Now and then a glitter from the fragments of the copper still and the sections of the coils of the worm marked the course their ravages had taken, and all the chill, cavernous air was filled with the sickly odor of singlings and the fermenting mash adhering to the broken staves of the great riven tanks, called the beer-tubs. The moonlight came into this dark place at the further end, for this was one of the ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... or wonderful piece of mechanism, no more grandly conceived and wonderfully perfected bit of God's handicraft is to be found than the Male and Female Sexual Organs. It is a wonder to those who have made these parts (with their elastic vessels, cavernous sinuses, network of nervous ganglia and fibrillae, chain of lymphatics, periodical ovulation, timed pubescence, and perfected, co-ordinate functions) a study, that they stand abuse and excess so well; that the fierce blasts of lust and passion that sear and scorch them and well-nigh ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown

... solid and without any Corinthian grace, but with dignity and composed majesty. He gave a simple statement of facts concerning the formation of our united government; and towards the close, he now and then thundered, and his great cavernous eyes lightened, as he eloquently showed how noble and wonderful it was, and how astonishing the sagacity and insight of those young patriots had been in the memorable Congress. The old Lion walked the stage with a sort of repressed rage, when he referred to those persons who cried out, "Down with ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... he whispered, as the girl rose from her bench, laid aside her cavernous black bonnet and advanced, took the oath administered by the sheriff and stood ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... from the ill-smelling paraffin lamp the large, dimly seen folds of the bedclothes were tossed to and fro by the convulsions that agitated the whole body. Another hour passed away, marked by the cavernous breathing of the woman as she crept to the edge of death. At last there came a sigh, deeper and more prolonged; and with it ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... faintness came over her. She sobbed as she threw herself against the stubborn door and pounded upon its panels with her hands. Something dreadful seemed to be crawling up from behind, out of the cavernous hole that was always night. The paroxysms of fear and dread finally gave way to despair, and despair is ever the parent of pluck. Impatiently she again undertook the task of lighting the lantern, fearing to breathe lest she destroy the wavering, treacherous flame that burnt ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon

... to the cloister of a college; not the gray, classic cloisters which lie along the banks of the Cam or the Isis,—huge, battered hulks, on whose weather-stained decks great captains of learning have fought away their lives,—nor yet the cavernous, quadrangular courts that sleep under the dingy ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... love us? the grey skulls hissed in his face; Were our lips not red? Were these cavernous eyes not bright? Yet us, whom the soft flesh clothed with such roseate grace, Our lovers would loathe if we ever returned to ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... The churches were so vast, so solid, so venerable, and time-eaten; the dwellings so gray, and of such antique architecture, and in the large towns, like Rouen, rose so high, and overhung with such quaint projections the narrow and cavernous streets; the thatched cots were so mossy and so green with grass! The very hills about them looked scarcely as old, for there was youth in their vegetation—their shrubs and flowers. The countrywomen wore such high caps, such long waists, and such short petticoats!—the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... Hollow, cavernous noises resounded on all sides. Draughts of air rushed along the ventilating galleries, and the wooden swing-doors slammed beneath their violent gusts. In the lower tunnels, trains of trucks kept passing along at the rate of fifteen miles ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne

... Catacombs of Rheims; but all these are built in situ and meant to remain steady, and there is no limit to the size of a Barrel that has not to travel. The point about this enormous Receptacle of Bacchus and cavernous huge Prison of Laughter, was that it could move, though cumbrously, and it was drawn very slowly by stupid, patient oxen, who would not be hurried. On the top of it sat a strong peasant, with a face of determination, as though he were at war with ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... pronounced cavernous condition in this vicinity. At a number of places, even extending to a distance of 2 miles from Onyx Cave, the passage of a wagon produces a rumbling sound, indicative of a cavity at no great depth. There are also ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... on to some difficult-looking pile, at other times we crept in under the cavernous-looking places, where, at high tide, the sea rushed and roared. Wearying of this, we explored the edge where high-water left its marks, to examine the curious shells washed up, and the varieties of sea-weed driven ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn

... aperture, where the curtain fell away from the pillar, into the room beyond. It was small and cosy, and a fire burned in the grate, before which sat poor dear God the Father in a big arm-chair. Divested of his godly paraphernalia, he looked old and thin, though an evil fire still gleamed from his cavernous eyes. On a table beside him stood some phials, one of which had seemingly just been used. God the Son stood near, looking much younger and fresher, but time was beginning to tell on him also. The Ghost flitted about in the form of a dove, now perching on the Father's ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote

... how many men there were dwelling thus together in this lonely retreat, perched like an eagle's nest among the frozen heights of Caucasus, he had managed to find his way, guided by the sound of the music, through various long corridors and narrow twisting passages, into the cavernous grot where he now stood, feeling infinitely bored and listlessly dissatisfied. His primary object in entering the chapel had been to get a good full view of the monks, and of their faces especially,—but at present this was impossible, as from the position he was obliged to occupy behind them their ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... forget it. He could do nothing but whistle, and stare to that extent, that his eyes, compared with what they now became, had been in former times quite cavernous and sunken. Day after day, two, three, four times a week, this Baby reappeared. The Major continued to stare and whistle. To all other intents and purposes he was alone in Princess's Place. Miss Tox had ceased to mind what he did. He ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... long limbs moved uneasily under the white robe, the enormous, bony hands contracted, and in the cavernous eyes the great lids were slowly lifted. A ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... yell of terror that echoed through the cavernous woods, Pedro sprang to his feet, while his hand reached for the stiletto that he always carried. But quick as he was, he was not as quick as the bear, for, with a motion like lightning and a grip like steel, Black Bruin pinioned his arms to his sides ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... country sausage, rump steak and spring chicken," said Mr. Bacon, in a cavernous voice, getting it over with while the list was fresh in his memory. "Fried and boiled potatoes, beans, succotash, onions, stewed tomatoes and—er—just a moment, please. Fried ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... not so striking now, for in most of the places, as he peered down through the gloom and mist, the water was above the overhanging, cavernous holes, and the peculiar eye-like aspect of the one particular spot which had fascinated him so deeply was ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn

... attention. As soon as the lid was open, and the boy's hand thrust in, they ran up his fingers, and then along his arm to his shoulder, wonderfully active and enterprising with their sharp little noses, one even venturing right up the boy's head after a pause by one ear, as if it looked like the cavernous entrance to some extremely ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn

... greater degree of intensity may be imparted to the colour, and perhaps a little more solidity. In landscapes it is of much service for the most vigorous portions of foregrounds and the trunks of trees, as well as for painting cavernous rocks or deep recesses in architecture. Compounded with burnt lake and a little Prussian blue, it gives ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... successive years. After such gales, the castings present a gently inclined and smooth, or sometimes furrowed, surface to windward, while they are steeply inclined or precipitous to leeward, so that they resemble on a miniature scale glacier-ground hillocks of rock. They are often cavernous on the leeward side, from the upper part having curled over the lower part. During one unusually heavy south-west gale with torrents of rain, many castings were wholly blown to leeward, so that the mouths of the burrows ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin

... has become severed from the adjacent ridge, of which it no doubt, formed a part, is matter of curious inquiry. Has nature done this by gradual recession, or by the slow upheaval of the land? On inspection, this rock is found cavernous, slightly crystalline, with its strata distorted in every conceivable direction. In its crevices grow a few cedars and vines. As the visitor approaches it by the road side its effect is grand and imposing; still more so, perhaps, ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... shops glitter, wink or frown at the passer-by. Many of them have western plate-glass windows and stucco fronts, hiding their savagery, like a native woman tricked out in ridiculous pomp. Some, still grimly conservative, receive the customer in their cavernous interior, and cheat his eyes in their perpetual twilight. Many of these little shops are so small that their stock-in-trade flows over on to the pavement. The toy shops, the china shops, the cake shops, the shops for women's ribbons ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... of them all are the catfish. These are monstrous creatures, these catfish of Reelfoot—scaleless, slick things, with corpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins like javelins and long whiskers dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads. Six and seven feet long they grow to be and to weigh two hundred pounds or more, and they have mouths wide enough to take in a man's foot or a man's fist and strong enough to break any hook save the strongest and greedy enough to eat anything, living or dead or putrid, that the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... resting his elbows on his knees, propped his chin on his hands, and stared at the smoke curling heavily up into the cavernous chimney, where the soot hung long and black. It was very lonely. Willie Denner, of course, had long ago gone to bed, and unless the lawyer chose to go into the kitchen for company, where Mary was reading ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... seething tremolos of the bass, yet the deep emotion of the player, the ecstasy and world-estranged madness in which he was, lent the scene a melancholy and a solemnity which would have had its effect even without the greenish cellar and the cavernous pallor ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann



Words linked to "Cavernous" :   hollow, expansive, cavern, physiology



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