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Tunnel   /tˈənəl/   Listen
Tunnel

verb
(past & past part. tunneled or tunnelled; pres. part. tunneling or tunnelling)
1.
Move through by or as by digging.  Synonym: burrow.
2.
Force a way through.



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"Tunnel" Quotes from Famous Books



... hinged on the under surface. In the dark hole which was before him there was an iron ladder. Down he went, into the utter blackness. His outstretched hands apprised him that he was at the beginning of a walled tunnel, through which he groped in a half-upright position. He reached an iron door, and remembering his direction calculated that this must be at the rear entrance of the old garage on West Fifty-fifth Street. It opened, as he swung a heavy iron bar, fitted with a curious mechanism ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... their work on the grand scale that nature has indicated. Excepting only the Houses of Parliament in London, our national capitol at Washington is the most spacious and imposing national edifice in the world. By the unparalleled feat of a subterranean tunnel two miles out under the bottom of the lake, Chicago obtains her water. The work of constructing a railroad tunnel across the Detroit river is already commenced, and the traveler will soon pass, in his steam palace, under the bed ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith

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

... control measures improving air and water quality; because of heavily indented coastline, no location is more than 125 km from tidal waters Note: lies near vital North Atlantic sea lanes; only 35 km from France and now being linked by tunnel under the English Channel ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... interesting use of the narrow-gauge line, and the wagons with double equilibrium tipping-box, was made by the Societe des Chemins de Fer Sous-Marins on the proposed tunnel between France and England. The line used is that of 16 in. gauge, with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were still some houses at the tunnel. ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... he whispered, reassuringly, passing his arm unchidden about her slight waist. "Don't be frightened, dear! It wasn't a man cut in half. It was the upper half of a man who was wiggling down into a tunnel hidden by that smother of underbrush .... And here I was just wondering why people should bother to come all the way through this path, instead of skirting the woods! Answers ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune

... he emerged from the tunnel-like passage he raised his head in astonishment. A din of voices, an outbreak of laughter and revelry, burst in a flood of sound upon his ears. He turned his face in the direction whence the sounds came, and saw three open windows, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... enlightened policy which adopts all beneficial improvements, appliances or modes of administration that will add either to the public safety, comfort, or convenience. It is safe to say that had the nation been operating the railways, there would have been no Fourth Avenue tunnel horror; and Chauncey Depew and associates would not now be under indictment, as the government would not have continued the use of the death-dealing stove on nearly half the railways in the country in order to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... sounded and those left on the platform watched the train till it rushed into the tunnel, and then they turned and went on to the opposite platform to take ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford

... that time, yet afterwards I learnt much about them. Out of such excavations comes that black Purbeck Marble which you see in old churches in our country, and I am told in other parts of England as well. And the way of making a marble quarry is to sink a tunnel, slanting very steeply down into the earth, like a well turned askew, till you reach fifty, seventy, or perhaps one hundred feet deep. Then from the bottom of this shaft there spread out narrow passages or tunnels, mostly six feet high, but sometimes only three or four, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... this paper is to describe the preliminary work for and the preparation of that portion of the site for the Terminal Station in Manhattan, of the New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was constructed under the direction of the Chief Engineer of the East River Division, including the disposal of material excavated from all parts of the Terminal construction and the tunnels on ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Site of the Terminal Station. Paper No. 1157 • George C. Clarke

... hath reached me, O auspicious King, that Al-Maamun attempting to pull down the Pyramids, expended his mint of money, but succeeded only in opening up a small tunnel in one of them, where in it is said he found treasure to the exact amount of the monies he had spent in the works, neither more nor less; whereat he marvelled and taking what he found there, desisted from his determination. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

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

... Hoosac Tunnel route to Niagara, because, as Basil said, their experience of travel had never yet included a very long tunnel, and it would be a signal fact by which the children would always remember the journey, if nothing else remarkable happened to impress it upon them. Indeed, they were ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... been cleared away since to make room for the approach to Greenwich Tunnel—it was then the entrance to a grain depot in connection with the Milwall Docks. A curious brick well it resembled, in the centre of which a roadway wound downward, corkscrew fashion, disappearing at the bottom into darkness under a yawning arch. The place possessed the curious property of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... its forest tunnel, eluding the embrace of tangled shadows, swiftly gliding from sombre swamps and hurrying towards the sunlit plain, its phantom weeds of widowhood exchanged for its bridal robe of light; so doth this tale of ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles

... talked and agreed that the Cemetery was depressing. They also arranged for a ride next day out from the Cemetery through the Mashobra Tunnel up to Fagoo and back, because all the world was going to a garden-party at Viceregal Lodge, and all the people of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

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

... one. The highest and most valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a London railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse kindliness and honesty, and the lover in 'Maud' could actually persuade himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love's name. Has the poet, for whom Nature means only ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

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

... there are features of this diversion of traffic to new channels which the lay mind will miss and only the traffic specialist appreciate. For instance, there is the question of grade over the mountains. The Canadian Pacific Railroad meets this difficulty with its long tunnel through Mount Stephen. The Grand Trunk declares that it has the lowest mountain grade of all the transcontinentals. The Great Northern uses electric power for its tunnels, and Los Angeles will tell you how its ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... one outside the hole to whom I might apply for admission I walked boldly in, and having followed a long, dark tunnel for some distance, I suddenly ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum

... exactitude, and, according to Professor Flinders Petrie, have been worked by means of tubular drills fitted with the points of emeralds or some equally hard stone. It was left for the nineteenth century to re-discover the instrument when the Mont Cenis tunnel was half completed. The copper for the bronze tools employed by the workmen was brought from the mines of Sinai, where the Egyptian kings had kept an armed garrison for many generations; the tin mixed with the copper must have come from India and the Malayan Peninsula, ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce

... tumult of smoke; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed across the dim grey of the embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel, which, with the last, seemed to swallow down train, smoke, and sound in ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... this at intervals. One hot summer day he went thus reluctantly to town; the rattle of the train, the heated crowd of passengers, the warm mephitic air that blew into the carriage from the stifling, smoke-grimed tunnel—all these seemed to him insupportably disgusting. But the sight, the sound, the very smell of London itself, was like a dreadful obsession; he wondered how he could ever have endured to live there. The streets lay in the steady sun, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the cause of her reply. A tunnel opened into the rock, seemingly near the centre. It was perhaps ten feet in height and with a width slightly greater. Could it be she meant he should enter that black forbidding passage? He asked the question and she replied that such ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis

... shipping of the Roman world, now all but abandoned to a few fishermen; there it turned inland, skirted the Lucrine water, and presently reached the shore of Lake Avernus, where was the entrance to the long tunnel piercing the hill between the lake and Cumae. On an ill-kept way, under a low vault of rock dripping moisture, the carriage with difficulty tossed and rumbled through the gloom. Basil impatiently trotted on, and, as he issued into sunlight, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... gone on in this placid manner for maybe an hour, we suddenly came to a stupendous cliff—that is, for those parts—rising almost sheer from the water for about a thousand feet. Of itself it would not have arrested our attention, but at its base was a semicircular opening, like the mouth of a small tunnel. This looked alluring, so I headed the boat for it, passing through a deep channel between two reefs which led straight to the opening. There was ample room for us to enter, as we had lowered the mast; but just as ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

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

... leafy tunnel they floated, oars shipped; she, cheek on hand, watching the fire-flies on the water; he, rid of his ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... inhuman way that it had struck Leo, whereon the horse trembled and burst into a sweat as though with fear, making no further attempt to escape or to disobey. Then it took one side of the bridle in its swathed hand and, Leo clinging to the other, we plunged into the tunnel. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard

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

... passed on to Montmedy, at which latter place we witnessed the immediate effects of a fearful railway accident, a collision in a tunnel between a trainful of French prisoners and one of recruits for the Prussian Guards. The scene in the darkness and smoke, with the stalwart, long-bearded Landwehr men, who formed the garrison of the town, holding blazing torches of ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... there was an Indian chief who had three daughters; and they lived in a lodge by the side of the Ottawa River—not in a wigwam, mind you, but a good old Huron lodge, like a tunnel, made of two rows of young trees bent into arches and tied together at the top, with walls of birch-bark. Oh! it was an honorable old lodge, with more cracks in the birch-bark than you could count, all patched and smeared ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various

... succeed unless every foot, nay, almost every inch of our progress be secured by an arch of masonry before we attempted the excavation of another. Now language is to the mind precisely what the arch is to the tunnel. The power of thinking and the power of excavation are not dependent on the words in the one case or on the mason-work in the other; but without these subsidiaries neither could be carried on beyond its rudimentary commencement. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... had been standing there but a few minutes when the strange sound first became audible. For a moment Blake thought it was merely the rumbling roar of an express approaching far down the tunnel. Then he realized that no subway train could possibly produce a sound effect so oddly disturbing ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells

... possibly twelve feet in diameter and fifteen feet in height to the surface of the ledge. By locating the kiln near the abrupt wall of an abandoned quarry, ventilation was given from below by a connecting tunnel some twenty feet in length. Layers of wood and limestone were placed within until the interior was filled, when it was fired, and after burning for a few hours the draft was cut off below and above, and the heat retained until the limestone ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... below tunnel prices," Johnny laughingly assured him. The gray shawl with the pink relief came up just then, and all four of them immediately bought it ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester

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

... But he was determined to get that woodchuck, and he began to dig away at Mr. Woodchuck's hole. You see, Mr. Woodchuck was smaller than Tommy Fox, and since the underground tunnel that led to his home was only big enough to admit him, Tommy was obliged to make it larger. Though Mr. Woodchuck's hole was under a shady oak tree, Tommy found digging to be somewhat warm work, so he took off ...
— The Tale of Tommy Fox • Arthur Scott Bailey

... inspires confidence in timid passengers. I glide out of the station, and there he is again with his flags in his hand at his post in the open country, at the level crossing, at the cutting, at the tunnel mouth, and at every station on the road until our destination is reached. In regard, therefore, to the railway servants with whom we do come into contact, we may surely have some natural sympathy, and it is on their behalf that I this night appeal to you. I ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

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

... mountain song-sparrows, the white-crowned sparrows, the green-tailed towhees, and Audubon's and Wilson's warblers. Up, up, for many miles the double-headed train crept, tooting and puffing hard, until at length it reached the highest point on the route, which is Tennessee Pass, through the tunnel of which it swept with a sullen roar, issuing into daylight on the eastern side, where the waters of the streams flow eastward instead of westward. The elevation of this tunnel is ten thousand four hundred and eighteen feet, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser

... any private man or body of men will invest property in a canal, a tunnel, or a bridge, but from an expectation that the outlay will be profitable to them. No work of this sort can be profitable to private speculators, unless the public be willing to pay for the use of it. The public will not pay of their own accord for what yields no profit ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... and passed into the tunnel-like entrance, built of closely interlaced Arctic willow. A dozen paces or more brought them to a hanging curtain of skins. The woman raised this, and held it while Steve passed beyond. A few paces farther on was a second curtain, and An-ina paused ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... a telephone-message came from Ville d'Avray. A gang of railway-men had found a man's body lying at the entrance to a tunnel after a train had passed. The body was hideously mutilated; the face had lost all resemblance to anything human. There were no papers in the pockets. But the description answered ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc

... look at it in this way. What business has a man to think of things right in front of you, poke his head, as it were, into your light? What right has he to set up dams and tunnel out swallow-holes to deflect the current of your thoughts? Surely you may remove these obstructions, if it suits you, and put them where you will. Else all literature will presently be choked up, and the making of books come to an end. One might as well walk ten miles out of ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... longer wanted in it. They issued a half-sheet Visiter, with "the Devil" as editor and proprietor. His salutatory informed his readers, that he was in full possession and was going to have a good time; had taught the Visiter to lie, and was going to tunnel the Mississippi. Those were bright boys, and they had a jolly week. Mr. Shepley's card appeared, as per agreement, and thus far the terms of release for the printing company complied with, and the contract ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... do not make their own holes, but use those already made by other animals. Mr. Gould, however, is of opinion that kingfishers drill their own holes. The tunnels always slope upwards, as I said; at the further end of the tunnel is an oven-like chamber where the nest is made. The fish-bone nest is thought by Mr. Gould to be really a nest, and intended to keep the eggs off the damp ground. However, there is difference of opinion on this point, and I reserve my own. We will see ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton

... all industry involved waste. That millions of pounds had been spent in experiments in evolving the machines we were using to-day. He also mentioned that he remembered, when in America, that millions of dollars were spent in attempting to tunnel under the Hudson River, at New York, and that many failures were met with before ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... I. "A tunnel fifteen kilometres long is a mere nothing! There will be no English Parliament to oppose it as there is to oppose that between Dover and Calais! It will all be done some day, all—and that ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne

... delicate art put into such a piece of work; he had not boasted when he said that he was a cook. Not only did he cook it to the exquisite point of perfection, but he ate it, bone and all— combining the zest of a cannibal with the epicure's finer relish—and poured near a litre of wine down his tunnel of a throat, before he deigned to regard whether I lived or was dead. His next act was to recite the rosary aloud, on his knees, with intense fervour; and his next—after three prostrations in honour of the Trinity—to untie the cord about his middle ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... all borings in the river were located. The river borings were all wash-borings made from a pile-driver boat. After the results were plotted on the map, contour lines were drawn to indicate the rock surface, and profiles along the tunnel lines were plotted from the contours; as the borings were preliminary to the final location of the tunnels, and in many cases at some distance from the tunnel lines, considerable divergence from the actual rock surface was expected, and realized in a few places, yet on the whole the ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Alfred Noble

... places, for every morning a band of minor offenders is marched out of prison by an overseer to sweep the streets. Sometimes an upper room is built to overlook, if possible, the roadway; it is supported on palm-rafters, forming a kind of tunnel underneath. Everywhere are immense blocks of chiselled stone worked into the ephemeral Arab clay as doorsteps or lintels, or lying about at random, or utilized as seats at the house entrance; they date from Roman or earlier times—columns, too, some of them adorned with the lotus-pattern, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

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

... bring about the changes observed in the experiments of Chap. VI. Occasionally you would see a very strange sight indeed—a great snake-like creature, over three miles long and nearly half a mile round, would rush along devouring everything before it and leave behind it a great tunnel down which a mighty river would suddenly pour, and what do you think it would be? What you now call an earthworm and think is four inches long, going through the soil leaving its burrow along ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell

... for a court | | inclosed on three sides and the other on the lot line in a | | five-story tenement, not less than 12x24 ft., "well ventilated" | | meaning either entirely open on one side to the street or yard, or | | else having a tunnel at the bottom connecting with the street or | | yard. | | | | FAIRLY VENTILATED—With window opening on a shallow yard or on a | | narrow court, open to the sky at the top, or else with 5x3 inside | | window (15 ft. square) opening on a well-ventilated room ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... attention, when we look out into light-filled space, is claimed by the objects of the illuminated world, in all their manifold colours and forms. Nevertheless the effect of pure light on our consciousness can be observed during a railway journey, for instance, when we leave a tunnel that has been long enough to bring about a complete adaptation of the eyes to the prevailing darkness. Then, in the first moments of the lightening of the field of vision, and before any separate objects catch the attention, we can notice how the light ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... on the firing line trenches by blind saps, which are constructed by a special earth borer. When this secret tunnel reaches the enemy's trench, an assault is delivered amid a shower of hand grenades. The stormers endeavor to burst their way through the opening and then try to work along the trench. Machine guns are quickly ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... the projector of this road, which was begun in 1869 and completed in 1871. Vitznau at Lucerne is the starting point. The ascent, which is at first gradual, soon increases one in four. After a quarter of an hour the train passes through a tunnel 240 feet in length, and over an iron bridge of the same length, by means of which the Schnurtobel, a deep gorge with picturesque waterfalls, is crossed. At Station Freibergen a beautiful mountain scene presents itself, and the eye rests upon the glittering, ice-covered ridge of the Jungfrau, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various

... society, that is, if we can manage to procure our enjoyment as well in groups as alone. These groups will unite into larger groups if the happiness of all demands a larger undertaking than a single group can secure, such as a great railway, a submarine tunnel, and the like. In some cases it may be necessary that a whole people, or even the whole of humanity, should be in one group, but only up to a certain point, and only until this point is reached. Naturally no individual is bound to a group, nor one group to ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake and Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff arms and plunged again into the drifts. They made a tunnel through the snow to the hen-house, with walls so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and forth in it. We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at the solid lump of ice ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... two on the platform, and perhaps a glimpse of the stars, with promise of a clear morning; and so generally keep awake past Mont Bard, remembering the happy walks one used to have on the terrace under Buffon's tower, and thence watching, if perchance, from the mouth of the high tunnel, any film of moonlight may show the far undulating masses of the hills of Citeaux. But most likely one knows the place where the great old view used to be only by the sensible quickening of the pace as the train turns down the incline, and crashes through the trenched ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... against the big stub. A few armfuls of spruce boughs shingled over this roof, and a few minutes' work shoveling snow thickly upon them to hold them in place and to make a warm covering; then a doorway, or rather a narrow tunnel, just beyond the stub on the straight side of the semicircle, and their commoosie was all ready. Let the storm roar and the snow sift down! The thicker it fell the warmer would be their shelter. They laughed and shouted ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long

... vital North Atlantic sea lanes; only 35 km from France and now linked by tunnel under the English Channel; because of heavily indented coastline, no location is more than 125 km ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

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

... foundations of the prison were only four feet deep, and Trenck's tunnel had reached a considerable distance when everything was again spoiled. A letter written by Trenck to Vienna fell into the hands of the governor, owing to some stupidity on the part of Gefhardt's wife, who had been intrusted to deliver ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... this activity it was soon found necessary to have men in advanced positions in the tunnels to listen to the mining operations of their opponents. As soon as such operations were discovered, a countertunnel was driven in that direction and a mine exploded, thereby destroying the enemy's tunnel and burying his sappers. Sometimes, however, the men in the countertunnel cut through to the other excavation and engaged in a hand-to-hand conflict beneath the surface of the earth. Then primitive methods were used. Though mining had taken place on other sections of the western front, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... dazed pause I staggered to the broken window and looked out. There was Beauty, with a perpendicular tail like a young fir-tree, going like great guns in exactly the wrong direction. We had just come through a long tunnel, and the last I saw of my aunt's pet demon was as he dived headlong into its Hades-like mouth. And I had to take home first prize for him from ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various

... Corinthian peristyle interspersed with bronze statues of ancient sages, on the garden side,—all of which stand upon the scene of his former garden parties, as the name of the avenue beyond the plain end of the Library on the Prospekt—Great Garden Street—reminds us. Not far away is the site of the tunnel dug under the Prospekt by the revolutionists, which, however, was fortunately discovered in time to prevent the destruction of one of the fairest parts of the city, and its most valuable buildings. With the next block we enter upon the liveliest, the most characteristic portion of the Nevsky ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... at twenty-four or twenty-five years of age leaves the Ecole Centrale, or the Ecole des Ponts, or Ecole des Mines, has never assisted in the working of a mine, in the heating of a blast furnace, in the piercing of a tunnel, in the laying-out of a dike, of a bridge or of a roadway. He is ignorant of the cost and has never commanded ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... on the mainland, and lies dark within its four stone walls. The road to it is by a tunnel of trees that make a shade velvety black even when the moon is turning all the sea silver. The churchyard is very old, and has no monuments of importance: only green headstones bent sideways and sunk to their neck and shoulders in the earth. A postern gate, with ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan

... "I'll shore be plumb happy to spread that coyote marshal all over his cussed pound! Say, come with me; I'm going down there right now an' get that cayuse, an' if the marshal opens his mouth to peep I'll get him, too. I'm itching for a chance to tunnel a man like him. Come on an' see ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford

... also, at Raleigh, North Carolina, but the extent of their operations is unknown. Two small stamping mills in the northwestern portion of South Carolina, near the mountains, which were erected to make blasting powder for the neighboring tunnel, were visited, but I found that they could be made available only to ...
— History of the Confederate Powder Works • Geo. W. Rains

... screech, accompanied by a whiff of cinder-flavoured steam, heralded the Down Express as it plunged out of the cliff-tunnel, flashed across an intervening space, and was lost among the chestnuts and larches. A metallic rattle and scroop told that the official in the box on the other side of the Castle bluff had opened the points. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people's sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... said Gen. Forrest has blown up Tunnel Hill; if so, Sherman must be embarrassed in getting supplies of ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... immense mass of rock above it seemed likely to crush downwards upon the passage, and the engineers thought that their best course would be to remove the hill from above it. Three and a half tons of gunpowder were placed at intervals in the tunnel, and connected by wires with a galvanic battery placed a long distance off. The operation of firing the mine was made a public occasion, and Lady Belmore agreed to go up to the mountains and perform the ceremony of removing the hill. When all was ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland

... a number of shares in the Coyote Tunnel at Mugginsville, in '54, I thought I'd take a run up there and see it. I stopped at the Empire Hotel, and after dinner I got a horse and rode round the town and out to the claim. One of those individuals whom newspaper ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

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

... a hare, when hard pressed by the harriers, enter a tunnel under a field gateway; but here instinct rather fails her; for, too often, it is only avoiding one mode of death by courting another. If there is water in the ditch, running through the tunnel, the obstruction caused by her body makes the water rise, and she is drowned; or, if ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

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

... come out of it all, some day, as one does from a tunnel? Will it be all at once, without our doing or asking, We shall behold clear day, the trees and meadows about us, And the faces of friends, and the eyes we loved looking at us? Who knows? Who can say? It will not do to ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough

... but few trains—none yet on our branch road—so we had to go to Esbly. It took two hours to get to Paris—hardly more than twelve miles. We simply crawled most of the way. We crept through the tunnel this side of Lagny, and then stood on this side of the Marne, and whistled and shrieked a long time before we began to wiggle across the unfinished bridge, with workmen hanging up on the derricks and scaffoldings in all sorts of perilous positions, and all sorts of grotesque ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich

... frequently got knocked in with heavy trench mortars, and required constant repairing. Work in the trenches, therefore, normally consisted more of general upkeep, than of any extensive new work. Three companies were in the line, with the fourth in support, living mostly in "Stansfield Tunnel." Battalion Headquarters was in a dug-out in "Stansfield Road." Company Commanders were:—(A) Capt. Andrews, (B) Lieuts. Tomlinson, Lomer and Day in succession, followed a little later by Capt. Turner, (C) Capt. A. Bedford, (D) Capt. Simonet. We only had two tours in these trenches at this ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman

... the path was a mere tunnel amongst solid blocks of wood and greenery; in the open beyond, it was a slim alley between grass-blades eight feet high; and the only air which nourished them as they marched was hot enough to scorch the lungs as it was inhaled. And if in addition to all this, it ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... picturesque? We knew that much of the darkness, the blackness of darkness, was adamantine rock; some of it an inky flood—a veritable river of death—rolling close beneath us, but quite invisible most of the time; and the night itself a profound mystery, through which we burned an endless tunnel—like ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... tiny hand, and Dark shook hands with him. Then Dark left, went down into the basement and entered an underground door in its eastern wall. He had to crawl through the tunnel driven through the sand under ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay

... what this weapon may be in twenty years' time in the hands of a country in the position of the United States. Great Britain, if she is not altogether mad, will cease to be an island as soon as possible after the war, by piercing the Channel Tunnel—how different our transport problem would be if we had that now!—but such countries as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, directly they are involved in the future in a war against any efficient naval power with an unimpeded sea access, will be isolated ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells

... improving her trade and industry; and whenever it shall have reached her wharves every mile added to its extent or to that of any of its branches will add directly and largely to the commerce and wealth of this city. In time this Road will connect with those of France and Germany, by a tunnel through some one of the Alps (Mount Cenis is now under consideration), but, even without that, whenever it shall have reached the immediate base of the Alps on this side and been responded to by similar extensions of the French and Rhine-valley Railroads ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... was practically an underground dwelling, and the entrance was through a snow tunnel. From a single seal-gut window a dim light shone, but there was no other sign of human life. I groped my way into the tunnel, bent half double, stepping upon and stumbling over numerous dogs that blocked the way, and at the farther end bumped into a door. ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... eleven feet square was sunk round the spring to a depth of thirty feet. The stream seemed to come from a lateral direction, and a tunnel was excavated for a distance of thirty feet. At this point the earth gave way, and the water and gas flowed in so suddenly that the workmen hardly escaped with their lives, leaving their tools behind ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn

... as a device for making a kind of tunnel for one's mind in a library—for working one's way through it—is useful and necessary to all of us. Certainly, if a man insists on having infinity in a convenient form—infinity in a box—it would be hard to find anything better to have it in than ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... in the tunnel in process of construction at Union Hill by the New York, Ontario, and Western Railroad Company, which took place on Tuesday afternoon, was happily attended with no loss of life or serious injuries to the men employed in the shaft, it reads a new lesson as to the firing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... Greenwich, so that there was no getting at anybody. At last we got it done at Lincoln's Inn and sent it off. The fact is, nobody knows his business, and the Chancellor least of all. The King continues very active; he went after the Council to Buckingham House, then to the Thames Tunnel, has immense dinners every day, and the same people two or three days running. He has dismissed the late King's band, and employs the bands of the Guards every night, who are ready to die of it, for they get no pay and are prevented earning money elsewhere. The other night the King ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... covered it over with sticks and reindeerskins to keep out the drifting snow. Stepping incautiously upon this frail roof I fell through just as one of the startled men was coming out in his shirt and drawers, holding a candle above his head, and peering through the darkness of the tunnel to see who would enter. The sudden descent through the roof of such an apparition as I knew myself to be, was not calculated to restore the steadiness of startled nerves. I had on two heavy kukhlankas which swelled out my figure to gigantic proportions; ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... place that upper town. Little dark alley-ways, very narrow, climbing steeply between two rows of silent, mysterious houses whose roofs touch to make a tunnel. Low doorways and small windows, opaque and barred, and then, to right and left, little shops within whose deep shade fierce "Teurs" with piratical faces, glittering eyes and gleaming teeth, smoke their hookahs and converse in low tones, as if planning ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet

... road ended abruptly in a wide glade, where stood the shanty occupied by the miners, a shed for the donkeys employed in dragging out the coal, and, finally, the ruinous tunnel leading horizontally into a disused mine. The wooden tram-way on which the coal-car had formerly run still remained; and cautiously walking upon this causeway through the quagmire of mud, Miselle and Mr. Williams penetrated some distance into the mine, but saw nothing more wonderful than mould and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... with images of wood, cast into a brass color; and a very fair landing-place at the top. But this to be, if you do not point any of the lower rooms, for a dining place of servants. For otherwise, you shall have the servants' dinner after your own: for the steam of it, will come up as in a tunnel. And so much for the front. Only I understand the height of the first stairs to be sixteen foot, which is the ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon

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

... and before them was a long corridor with tall window openings near the ceiling which gave admittance to the sunlight. After the gloom of the tunnel, Dalgard blinked. But he was aware of movement at the far end, just as he heard the hissing scream ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... outer gate, and I entered the long avenue of sycamores, which ran in the direction of the house, arranged vault-wise like a high tunnel, traversing opaque masses, and winding round the turf lawns, on which baskets of flowers, in the pale darkness, could be ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... itself hopelessly lost in a jungle growth so dense that one could penetrate it only by cutting a tunnel through, and for hours we hacked and hacked and made microscopic progress. At last the head of the column came to an abrupt drop of a couple of hundred feet which seemed an effectual bar to all further progress. The cliff ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon

... where the capybaras had gnawed their way through the dense growth and then hastily had turned back to start a new one—just as a woodpecker chiseling a hole through a wall and dismayed at seeing daylight ahead, leaves the laboriously excavated tunnel and quickly ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller

... for the North at Capetown you start on the first lap of what is in many respects the most picturesque journey in the world. Other railways tunnel mighty mountains, cross seething rivers, traverse scorching deserts, and invade the clouds, but none has so romantic an interest or is bound up with such adventure and imagination as this. The reason is that at Capetown begins the southern end of the famous seven-thousand-mile Cape-to-Cairo ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... the houses stood on elevated piles and were independent of the floods which rose in Lake Tezcuco by the overflowing of other lakes on a higher level. But when the foundations were on solid ground it became necessary to provide against the accumulated volume of water by excavating a tunnel to drain off the flood. This was constructed about one hundred years after the invasion of the Spaniards, and has been described by Humboldt as "one of the most stupendous ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... which should support the roof of our cave. It was situated on a mound at the edge of the woods. First a passageway, or ditch, was dug at the bottom, and then we begun tunneling in the side of the mound under the roots of the tree. For a while the ground above held, and our tunnel had reached a length of about four feet, when suddenly, without the slightest warning, the sandy soil gave way and we were engulfed. Bill, who was furthest within the cave, was almost entirely covered, while I was buried to the shoulders. A crowd of boys ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond

... but the performer. She shook back the hair from her face, raised her eyes, crossed her two hands upon her chest, waited a few seconds until a swift passenger train on the track behind the fence had smothered its roar in the tunnel depths, then began to sing "The Holy City." Even Sister Agatha felt the tears spring as she listened. A switch engine letting off steam drowned the last words, and there was no applause. Flibbertigibbet looked about ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... tunnel dug by sappers of the Royal Engineer Corps. This tunnel leads from your trench to that of the enemy's. At the end or head of the tunnel a great quantity of explosives are stored which at a given time are exploded. It is ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey

... which the subject excited did not escape the British Government. Before many days had elapsed, the Secretary of the Home Department, accompanied by Mr. Brunel, the constructor of the Thames Tunnel, made his appearance in the engine-room where the new motive power was in operation. Mr. Brunel, who was at that time somewhat advanced in years, conceived at the outset an erroneous notion of the nature of the new power, which he would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

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

... rewarded. Behind a huge pyramidal rock they found a hole in the mountain-side, like the mouth of a great tunnel. Climbing up to this orifice, which was more than sixty feet above the level of the sea, they ascertained that it opened into a long dark gallery. They entered and groped their way cautiously along the sides. A continuous rumbling, that ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

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

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

... book by the late E. George Squier, entitled "Peru. Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas." In that volume is a marvelous picture of the Apurimac Valley. In the foreground is a delicate suspension bridge which commences at a tunnel in the face of a precipitous cliff and hangs in mid-air at great height above the swirling waters of the "great speaker." In the distance, towering above a mass of stupendous mountains, is a magnificent ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham



Words linked to "Tunnel" :   hollow, machine, rabbit warren, perforate, hole, catacomb, penetrate, carpal tunnel, automobile, underpass, motorcar, shaft, burrow, turn over, auto, warren, subway, dig, car, passageway, cut into, delve



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