"Rift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... peculiar construction, Harmouth High Street acts as a funnel for the off-shore breezes; they rush through it as they rush through Windy Gap, that rift in the coast before which the wary fisherman slackens sail. Just such an air was careering seawards when Mr. Pilkington was about to perform the difficult feat of folding his paper backwards. It smote one side of the broadsheet and tore it from his grasp, making it flutter like a sail escaped ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... stint and without price. Foreigners are struck with the immense consumption of water as a beverage in this country. They do not realize the aridity of our summer climate, which makes it sometimes as much of a luxury here as it is in the desert. A rill of living water, let it issue from a mossy rift in the hillside or the mouth of a bronze lion, comes to us often like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. We lead fevered lives, too, and this is the natural relief. Fountains are among the first decorations that show themselves in public or private ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... cattle passed, bellowing and thrashing the water,—an awful mob of steers in panic. Presently in this circle there was a rift where a bull, infuriated by the crowding, swam by, fighting to clear a place around him. He was a tremendous creature, glistening black, active and dangerous as a wild beast. He charged the cattle around him, driving them ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... takes To be the fairest wight that lived yit; 265 Which to expresse he bends his gentle wit, And thinking of those braunches greene to frame A girlond for her dainty forehead fit, He pluckt a bough;[*] out of whose rift there came Small drops of gory bloud, that trickled down ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... stretched out on the open ground to wait for daylight. De Spain was wakeful, and his eyes rested with curiosity on the huge bulk of Music Mountain, rising overwhelmingly above him. Through the Gap that divided the great, sentinel-like front of El Capitan, marking the northern face of the mountain rift, from Round Top, the south wall of the opening, stars shone vividly, as if lighting the way into ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... not land. Under the guidance of Matlack they swept slowly around the lower end of the lake; they looked over the big untenanted camp-ground there; they stopped for a moment to gaze into the rift in the forest through which ran the stream which connected this lake with another beyond it, and then they rowed homeward, keeping close to the farther shore, so as to avoid the ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... activity is local and relatively easily protected. Agriculture is the most important sector, with livestock normally accounting for about 40% of GDP and about 65% of export earnings, but Saudi Arabia's recent ban on Somali livestock, because of Rift Valley Fever concerns, has severely hampered the sector. Nomads and semi-nomads, who are dependent upon livestock for their livelihood, make up a large portion of the population. Livestock, hides, fish, charcoal, and bananas are Somalia's principal exports, while sugar, sorghum, corn, qat, and ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the address was like this: "Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry 18th Company, 5th Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121." by which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army knows the sector and the numbers of the regiment in that sector. By the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on any one of his millions, ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... This figure of himself and Soames was trying to find a way out through the curtains, which, heavy and dark, kept him in. Several times he had crossed in front of them before he saw with delight a sudden narrow rift—a tall chink of beauty the colour of iris flowers, like a glimpse of Paradise, remote, ineffable. Stepping quickly forward to pass into it, he found the curtains closing before him. Bitterly disappointed he —or was it Soames?—moved on, and there was the chink again through the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... floats aloft in the air, And the gray coyote trots about here and there, And the buzzard sails on, And comes back and is gone, Stately and still like a ship on the sea; And the rattlesnake slides and glitters and glides Into his rift in ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... they reached the big cemetery on the edge of Lexington. Through a rift in the trees the Major pointed out the grave of Henry Clay, and told him about the big monument that was to be reared above his remains. The grave of Henry Clay! Chad knew all about him. He had heard Caleb Hazel read the great man's speeches aloud by ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... The clouds were passing rapidly over the moon, and at long intervals a rift between the clouds let enough light through to brighten ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Yet it may be it is all for the best. Our national wound was too deep to be lightly healed. When the President issued his Emancipation Proclamation my heart overflowed with joy, and I said: 'This is the first bright rift in ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... disseverance; scission; rescission, abscission; laceration, dilaceration^; disruption, abruption^; avulsion^, divulsion^; section, resection, cleavage; fission; partibility^, separability. fissure, breach, rent, split, rift, crack, slit, incision. dissection anatomy; decomposition &c 49; cutting instrument &c (sharpness) 253; buzzsaw, circular saw, rip saw. separatist. V. be disjoined &c; come off, fall off, come to pieces, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the "Sea Bee," instead of dashing against the cliffs, appeared to pass directly into them as though they were but shadows of a solid substance, and in another minute had shot, like an arrow from a bow, through a rift barely wide enough ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... companions save a gorilla-like half-breed, whose animal instinct of love and fidelity fell about the poor boy like a protecting garment. Then comes this bright spot in his life away in Hili-liland, like a momentary rift in the clouds of a stormy day. For Pym the sun shone with a heavenly effulgence, whilst the obstructions of a dire destiny were for a time removed; but when again the clouds closed between him and the brightness of existence, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... upon the craggy clift Bewrayed this herb unto the mountain goat, That when her sides a cruel shaft hath rift, With it she shakes the reed out of her coat; This in a moment fetched the angel swift, And brought from Ida hill, though far remote, The juice whereof in a prepared bath Unseen ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... painted mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and red, and the rift in the clouds was a kingdom of gorgeous light; the earth and its petty inhabitants died away, and in the crimson flame I could almost see Lucifer standing in his glory, god-like and young; Lucifer in all ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... than the aged grandame. It was pleasing, and yet it was sad, to see how well we can make up our mind to what is inevitable. And such a sight brings up to one a glimpse of Future Years. The cloud seems to part before one, and through the rift you discern your earthly track far away, and a jaded pilgrim plodding along it with weary step; and though the pilgrim does not look like you, yet you know the ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Sabine was won over by this gaiety and put her handkerchief up to her lips. And in the vast and solemn room their laughter sounded a note which struck Fauchery strangely, the note of delicate glass breaking. Assuredly here was the first beginning of the "little rift." Everyone began talking again. Mme du Joncquoy demurred; Mme Chantereau knew for certain that a marriage had been projected but that matters had gone no further; the men even ventured to give their opinions. For some minutes the conversation ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... it from his lips heard the Tall One's answer; for at that moment his horse reared and sheered away before a spear-prick, and into the rift a handful of English rushed with shouts ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... of Esau's axe the sound flow across the river, struck the rock there and was thrown back to our side, and then over again, so that we counted five distinct echoes growing fainter as they ran up the terribly dark, jugged rift, till they died away. ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... words, that they themselves in former incarnations, possessed certain marvellous powers to which in the present degenerate days they can lay no claim; and in this significant admission we may detect a rift, a real distinction of kind, between the living and the dead, which in time might widen out into an impassable gulf. In other words, we may suppose that the Central Australians, if left to themselves, might come to hold that the dead return ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... steep slope for about five hundred feet, and passing through a gap enters a narrow valley, shut in by walls of rock absolutely perpendicular and of great height. Half a mile further this valley turns abruptly to the right, and becomes a mere rift in the mountain. This extends another half mile, the walls gradually approaching until they are only two feet apart, and the bottom rising steeply to a pass which leads probably into another valley, but which I had no time to explore. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... person, the ordinary mortal must walk to the door of the New Inn, his luggage being dragged "down-along" on sledges and brought "up-along" on donkeys. In a word, Clovelly is not built like unto other towns; it seems to have been flung up from the sea into a narrow rift between wooded hills, and to have clung there these eight hundred years of its existence. It has held fast, but it has not expanded, for the very good reason that it completely fills the hollow ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... everything seemed drenched as with flame, and turning his gaze once more toward the sun, he saw that it had nearly disappeared. Only a blood-red rim peered spectrally above the gold and green horizon-and immediately overhead, a silver rift in the sky had widened slowly in the centre and narrowed at its end, thus taking the shape of a great outstretched sword that pointed directly downward at the busy, murmuring, glittering city beneath. It was a ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments. And out on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of modern warfare—two or three of our own planes, low down; and then a white insect very, very high—now hidden behind a cloud, now appearing again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch it all like a play. The bombs, if they drop 'em, ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... away as the crow flies. We had often looked at this spot, with a telescope, from the veranda of our studio, watching the hunting and sight-seeing parties ride up the bed of the stream. We rather feared the drifting clouds and mists would hide the fire from view, but now and then a rift appeared, and we knew if they were looking they could see its light. Camp No. 51 was made close to Bright Angel Creek, that evening, Thursday, October the 16th, two months and eight days from the time we had embarked ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... had resumed everyday aspects. The sun concentrated its rays on my head through a rift in the jungle, and the stone, stained dull red, lay in its cell, while rootlets fringed with tawny slime wavered ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... veins in the breccia ruddy! One would suppose that the marble bled. What matters the water? A hope I have nursed, That the waterless cup will quench my thirst.' —Better have knelt at the poorest stream That trickles in pain from the straitest rift! For the less or the more is all God's gift, Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite seam. And here, is there water ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... exasperated that he could not avoid the discussions which his father, with a weak man's obstinacy, forced upon him. Some unhappy, baneful power seemed to drive Colonel Parsons to widen the rift, the existence of which caused him such exquisite pain; his natural kindliness was obscured by an uncontrollable irritation. One day he ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... the path became drier and firmer, and the light of the moon, falling through a ragged rift in the scurrying clouds, showed a line of sand banks and strips of tussock-land emerging from the marshes as the marshes approached ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... the blown beech-trees, about which the rooks drifted in picturesque confusion. Now they soared like hawks, or on straightened wings were carried down a furious gust across the tumultuous waves of upheaved yellow, and past the rift of cold crimson that is tossed like a banner through the ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... the glacier was now clearly visible. It looked like some marble staircase meant to be trodden only by immortals. Ever broadening and ascending until it filled the whole width of the rift between the hills, it seemed to mount upward to infinity. The sidelong rays of the sun, peeping over the shoulders of Forno and Roseg, tinted the great ice river with a sapphire blue, while its higher reaches glistened ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... together I was more amazed than ever at the fact of their extraordinary affection for each other, their perfect amity which had lasted so many years without a rift, which nothing could break, as people ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... was deep in slush and mire, and the water soaked through his leggings and moccasins again, but he paid no attention to it now. His new courage and strength lasted. Glancing up at the heavens he beheld a little rift in the western clouds. A bar of light was let through, and his mind, so imaginative, so susceptible to the influences of earth and air, at once saw it as an omen. It was a pillar of fire to him, and ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... him and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned and disinherited, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... had made in the course of our explorations which enabled us to understand how the fate that had overtaken the drowned city had fallen upon it. Close by the northern border of the valley we saw, high up above us, a vast rift more than a thousand feet wide in the face of the cliff; and below this the ground was torn into a deep wild channel, and everywhere huge fragments of rock were scattered over the ground. Here it was, then, that the water had poured in—bursting forth from a lake above—by which ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... necessary to ensure the fertility of the earth and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited with powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in the land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the temporal spheres has not yet widened too far, they are supreme in civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they are kings as well as gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots deep down in human ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... than he expected. He was never so tired again as that first day after St. Anne. He did not eat much or sleep much, but he felt well. The worst was that the breach between his will and his mind seemed to grow continually wider: he had a sense of the rift being like a chasm stretching farther and farther, the one side from the other. At first his mind worked clearly but disobediently; then he began to be aware of a dimness in its record of purposes ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... of yesterday's making—she intensely happy too, but in another way, for was not her bridegroom of yesterday her husband of twenty years ago—cruelly wrenched away, but her husband for all that. Still, there was always that little rift within the lute that made the music—pray Heaven not to widen! Always that thought!—that he might recollect. How could he remember the messe des paresseux, and keep his mind a blank about how he came to ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... unpromising, and is clouded all over. The desert is as level as a floor; not a mound as high as a kneeling camel. The sun sinks in the west. Like a red-hot cannon-ball it shines through a rift between dark clouds, and a shaft of dazzling red rays streams over the desert, the surface of which shines like a purple sea. To the north the sky is of a dark violet colour, and against this background the camels stand ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... 'Gan thunder, and both ends of heav'n: the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixt, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their stoney caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... line thundered steadily down on them; then it swayed violently, as two or three of the brutes immediately in front fell beneath the bullets, while their neighbors made violent efforts to press off sideways. Then a narrow wedge-shaped rift appeared in the line, and widened as it came closer, and the buffaloes, shrinking from their foes in front, strove desperately to edge away from the dangerous neighborhood; the shouts and shots were ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... peep of dawn widened into a silver rift, and the silver rift streamed into a bar of gold, and the gold broke up into long strands of blush pink and pale blue like festal banners hanging in heaven's bright pavilion, and the "White Eagle" flew on swiftly, steadily, securely, ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls and the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and never ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... play one part And do one thing. Since death divides the pair, 'Tis well that I depart and thou remain Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh: Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more, So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh, Bend yet awhile, a very flame above The rift I drop into the darkness by— And bid remember, flesh and spirit once Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake. Never be that abominable show Of passive death without a quickening life— Admetos only, no ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... on the steamship Baroda, moving down the Red Sea, once thought to be an arm of the Indian Ocean, but which we now know to be only a portion of "the great rift valley,"—the longest and deepest and widest trough on the earth's surface, which extends from the base of Mount Lebanon and the Sea of Galilee, through the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, the dried up wadies, the Red Sea, and the chain of lakes and Nyanzas discovered in recent years in the heart of ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... of ethnic Somalis; territorial dispute with Somalia over the Ogaden Climate: tropical monsoon with wide topographic-induced variation; some areas prone to extended droughts Terrain: high plateau with central mountain range divided by Great Rift Valley Natural resources: small reserves of gold, platinum, copper, potash Land use: arable land: 12% permanent crops: 1% meadows and pastures: 41% forest and woodland: 24% other: 22% Irrigated land: 1,620 km2 (1989 est.) Environment: geologically active Great Rift ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... with a deluge of delicious shade. A number of persons were reclining on the grass under it, and one of them, a very handsome Christian boy, spoke to us in Italian and English. I scarcely remember a brighter and purer day than that of our departure. The sky was a sheet of spotless blue; every rift and scar of the distant hills was retouched with a firmer pencil, and all the outlines, blurred away by the haze of the previous few days, were restored with wonderful distinctness. The temperature was hot, but not sultry, and the air we breathed ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... house's form within was rude and strong, Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift, From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung, Embossed with massy gold of glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift. That heavy ruin they did seem to threat: And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, Enwrapped in foul smoke, and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... were activity itself, and they slashed and trampled down and hauled and lowered till the whole party found themselves upon a broad stony shelf at the very edge of a sharply-cut rift, whose sides showed that it must have been split from the opposite side by some convulsion of Nature, so exactly was the ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... climbed the Scar Foot the western sky was toning down to grays, while beyond, and seen through an oval-shaped rift in their sombre colours, lay a distant streak of amber that, moment by moment, slowly disappeared under the closing lids of evening cloud—the eye of weary day wooed to slumber by the hush of illimitable sweeps of moor. Even so would Amanda fain have closed ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... the mouth, and rapid. From the top of a neighboring cliff, four hundred feet high, it could be seen trending back into the mountains some thirty or thirty-five miles. The mountains, devoid of snow, were seen under favorable circumstances through a rift in the clouds, and appeared brown and naked, with smooth rounded tops. During a tramp of some miles over a muddy way, composed of argillaceous clay and black pebbles, I observed fragments of quartz and granite. Several specimens ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... A rift in the clouds showed our friends of the midnight watch—the Great Bear and Cassiopeia—twinkling merrily as though it had never ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... to a point where, over a stony fall veil'd with brown bracken, it plunged into a narrow ravine. Standing on the lip, where the water took a smoother glide before leaping, we saw the line of the ravine mark'd by a rift in the pines, and through this a slice of the country that lay below. 'Twas a level plain, well watered, and dotted here and there with houses. A range of wooded hills clos'd the view, and toward them a broad ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... young, and, though not unsocial by nature, he was glad to be among strangers for the time. They climbed hither and thither over the rocks, and lifted their streaming faces for the views which the guide pointed out; and in a rift of the spray they really caught one glorious glimpse of the whole sweep of the Fall. The next instant the spray swirled back, and they were glad to turn for a sight of the rainbow, lying in a circle on the rocks as quietly and naturally ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... crunched acorns 'neath the boughs of elms. Nor is the method of inserting eyes And grafting one: for where the buds push forth Amidst the bark, and burst the membranes thin, Even on the knot a narrow rift is made, Wherein from some strange tree a germ they pen, And to the moist rind bid it cleave and grow. Or, otherwise, in knotless trunks is hewn A breach, and deep into the solid grain A path with wedges cloven; then fruitful slips Are set herein, and- no long time- behold! To heaven upshot ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... breezes lift Their melancholy tones; 'Tis evening: through each passing rift The stars, like precious stones In lustrous beauty (clouded soon), Sweet incense to the sight, Attend their white-robed mistress moon, Queen of romantic night. Anon, as the cloud hosts fly Before the wind across the sky, The court of the ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... the squire, adding with characteristic scrupulousness, 'if apple's female.' I asked her whether she had heard from Temple latterly. 'No; dear little fellow!' cried she, and I saw in a twinkling what it was that the squire liked in her, and liked it too. I caught sight of myself, as through a rift of cloud, trotting home from the hunt to a glad, frank, unpretending mate, with just enough of understanding to look up to mine. For a second or so it was pleasing, as a glance out of his library ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... men, it wore them out, it stripped them of their strength and their manhood, it wrecked their courage and it broke their hearts. The canon sucked them in and swallowed them. This canon is nothing more nor less than a rift in a great basaltic barrier which lies athwart the river's course, the entrance to it being much like the door in a wall. Above it the waters are dammed and into it they pour as into a flume; down it they rage in swiftly ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... his way into the dusk of the evening, and night came swiftly to fellowship the judge's fears. A single moonbeam found its way into the place, making a thin rift in the darkness. The judge sat down on the three-legged stool, which, with a shake-down bed, furnished the jail. His loneliness was a great wave ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... you dare climb? You seem literally to push away the clouds and gaze straight through that dome which marks the farthest limit of my imaginings! You seem to tear it with your hands, and look through!—you put your lips to the rift and whisper with the angels!—and you always bring a little something back which does men good! Oh, Jane, Jane! How ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore." Cheeky!—but not so much amiss. Poetry, and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,—and no pulpit would have held Keats's wings,—the body and mind together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... truth presented a strange and embarrassing dilemma, as we have remarked. In the war itself, moreover, began the stern cleavage between the North and the South. At the moment the rift was not clearly discerned, but afterwards it was to widen into a chasm. Massachusetts bore more than her share of the struggle, and in the South the combination of Tory sentiment and the aristocratic ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... encouragingly for his intended efforts. He descended into the chasm of the rivulet, crawled up on a heap of crumbling brick-work, and gained a hole above it, which he immediately began to widen, to admit of his passage through. Inch by inch, he enlarged the rift, crept into it, and found himself on a fragment of the bow of one of the foundation arches, which, though partly destroyed, still supported itself, isolated from all connection with the part of the upper wall which it had once sustained, and ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... was a rift between the two friends. Paul did not tell Stanley what had happened at the meeting, but left him to find out. He heard all about it from Waterman—the easy-going, ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... what I saw not at the time,—that my weakness came upon me fr-rom my own lack of str-rength to make an effort. I was cr-rushed by a gr-rief when I left my land to come to America. I allowed it to paralyze my will. I let myself dr-rift, not caring enough about what became of me to exert myself to ward off poverty. Poverty never had been mine,—I did not r-realize it, but I did know well the meaning of self-r-respect and honor, and it was base of me to permit my will so ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... silver pioneer netted in the rift, Leaning over Maori Hill, dreaming in the lift, Dropped her starry memories through the passioned ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... their feet, lay the great earth rift that made Palo Duro. It stretched before them an impenetrable ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... secured the order to furnish material for nature work for the grades. Life suddenly grew very full. There was the most excitingly interesting work for every hour, and that work was to pay high school expenses and start the college fund. There was one little rift in her joy. All of it would have been so much better if she could have told her mother, and given the money into her keeping; but the struggle to get a start had been so terrible, Elnora was afraid to take the risk. When she ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... parliament and in popular literature. In all forms of literature, but especially in the Shakespearean drama, the keynote of the age was the evolution of a national spirit and technique, and their emancipation from the influence of classical and foreign models. In domestic politics a rift appeared between the monarchy and the nation. For one thing the alliance, forged by Henry VIII between the crown and parliament, against the church, was being changed into an alliance between the crown and church against the parliament, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... to think it all very ordinary. She was more concerned about the wind, to which they had become once more exposed as they reached the end of the rift. On they pressed, five or six steps at each attempt, stopping to rest twice the length of time they actually traveled. It was necessary now to cling to the rock with both hands, and once Cunora lost her grip, so that she would have been blown to one side, or else have slipped backward, ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... perilous scrambling Sundown managed to keep within sight of Chance, who had picked up Fernando's tracks leading from the cottonwoods. The dog leaped over rocks and trotted along the levels, sniffing until he came to the rift in the canon wall down which the herder had toiled on his grewsome errand. Chance climbed the sharp ascent with clawing reaches of his powerful forelegs and quick thrusts of his muscular haunches. Sundown followed as best he could. He was keyed to the strenuous ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... dim, and soon they mounted into total darkness, so that the Wizard was obliged to get out his lanterns to light the way. But this enabled them to proceed steadily until they came to a landing where there was a rift in the side of the mountain that let in both light and air. Looking through this opening they could see the Valley of Voe lying far below them, the cottages seeming like ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... opened in a deep narrow crevasse, a long rift, evidently slashing back into the cliff, beneath the road on which I had been treading. I could see the moonlit water vanishing into a sort of gleaming lane between the vast overhanging walls. In a few moments I was near the entrance, but, as yet, I could not touch ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... passages where absolute darkness, unrelieved by the stars of midnight, always reigns, the great Auditorium appeared before us softly flooded with daylight diffused from a broad white beam slanting down in long straight lines from the entrance as from a rift in heavy clouds; only this rift displayed around its edges a brilliant border of vegetation that the rough rocks cherish ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... after coursing in distracted filaments about the "corbeille," join their waters and speed downhill towards the oasis, a narrow belt of trees running along either side. This marvellous palm-embroidered rift sunders Nefta, seated on the arid sand-hills overhead, into two distinct towns or settlements. The eye follows the stream as far as the low-lying plantations and into the Chott beyond, resting at last upon the violet haze of its mysterious ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... guide by, merely a single faint star peering out from a rift of the clouds, but Keith's remembrance was that the ford led straight out to the centre of the stream, and then veered slightly toward the right. He knew the sand ridge was only used by horsemen, not being wide enough for the safe passage of wagons, but the depth ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, the shadow of a wind-rift on the snow. And low in the sky danced in unholy revel the suns, sometimes as many as eight of them, gazing with the abandoned red eyes of debauchees on the insignificant travellers groping ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... Dodona in Epirus, and at Delphi, at the foot of Mount Parnassus. At Dodona it was Zeus who spoke by the rustling of the sacred oaks. At Delphi it was Apollo who was consulted. Below his temple, in a grotto, a current of cool air issued from a rift in the ground. This air the Greeks thought[59] was sent by the god, for he threw into a frenzy those who inhaled it. A tripod was placed over the orifice, a woman (the Pythia), prepared by a bath in the sacred spring, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... to the pleasure of life more than this. There are, to my knowledge, gifted people now alive who have no other vice than this of restlessness, and seemingly no other curse in their lives to make them unhappy: but that is enough; it is "the little rift within the lute." Restlessness makes them hapless men ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... from a great distance, Vaillant's voice saying irritatedly, "Let Paula take care of him, Webber. Look at this—we're going to cross another rift—" ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... be inferred that the Professor's domestic relations were defective: they were in fact so complete that it was almost impossible to get away from them. It is the happy husbands who are really in bondage; the little rift within the lute is often a passage to freedom. Marriage had given the Professor exactly what he had sought in it; a comfortable lining to life. The impossibility of rising to sentimental crises had made him scrupulously careful not to shirk the practical obligations of the bond. ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... said Shif'less Sol, "that after the fall Adam an' Eve left by that rift between the hills, an' thar the Angel stood with the Flamin' Sword to keep 'em out. O' course they might hev crawled back down the hillside here, an' in other places, but I guess they wuz afeard. It's hard to hev had a fine thing an' ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... listened, sensitively eager to hold and exhaust each passing moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will "load every rift with ore." ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... depth and richness to that dark-blue vault, while the pavements of the streets and the houses grew vaguely distinct and gray? Suddenly, in turning the corner into Piccadilly, they saw the moon appear in a rift of those passing clouds, but it was not the moonlight that shed this pale and wan grayness down the lonely streets. It is just at this moment, when the dawn of the new day begins to tell, that a great city seems at its ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... to abate. The vault of clouds seemed to rise and heighten and suddenly, through a rift, a long ray of sunshine fell upon the fields, and presently the clouds separated, showing the blue firmament, and then, like the tearing of a veil, the opening grew larger and the beautiful azure sky, clear and fathomless, spread over the world. A fresh and ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... spoke, while still his greeting kiss Ached in her hair. She did not dare to lift Her eyes to his—her anguished eyes to his, While tears smote crystal in her throat. One rift Of weakness humored might set ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... he looked back. There was a rift in the clouds just behind the hill of Calvary, and the rude cross stood out vividly against the sky. "At last!" he murmured; "at last! Farewell to the dead ashes of life! It is rest to have ended the struggle, even to have fallen. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... legation on the same evening. Sheep and goats, as it were, one dinner to the Allied representatives, the next to the representatives of the Central powers. Much nice sorting is required, and they tell us that in consequence of the war Peking society is rift in twain. This is all very well when it happens in a big community, but when it happens in such a limited little society as Peking, all walled in together within the narrow inclosure of the legation quarter,—walled in literally, also, in the fullest sense, with soldiers from the ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... strewn with rocks, leg-twisting boulders, and great cliffs where eagles dwelt. Being a seaman, Atta had his bearings. The path to Delphi left the shore road near the Hot Springs, and went south by a rift of the mountain. If he went up the slope in a beeline he must strike it in time and find better going. Still it was an eerie place to be tramping after dark. The Hellenes had strange gods of the thicket and hillside, and he had no wish to intrude upon ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the next day in again searching for some indication that might assist them, but in vain. Dias and Jose both asserted that the tiny rift in the rocky peak looked wider from the middle of the valley than at any other point, and even Harry and his brother admitted that it could scarcely be seen from the foot of the hills on either side, ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... things that make me think; things beyond all poetry: A yellow space or rift in evening sky: A chimney or pinnacle high in the air; And a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the spacious gloom. He opened the great doors gently, and came out into the soft spring night air. All was silent now. The narrow side-canal had a glimmer of moonlight, the opposite palace was black, with one spot of light where a window shone: overhead in the narrow rift of dark-blue sky a flock of stars flew like bright birds through the soft velvet gloom. The water lapped mournfully against the marble steps, and a gondola lay moored to the posts, gently nodding to its black ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... not only of all human races but of all things that live, whether animal or vegetable, think little, but that little almost identically on every subject. That "almost" is the little rift within the lute which by and by will give such different character ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... memory of their struggle, laughed at this blocking move. Katharine Graham, although she did not laugh, enjoyed Pellams's unconscious "like this." She was a Theta Gamma with Miss Meiggs, and of late there had been a little rift in their ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... will do the same; he offers to address a manifesto to the people in which he will advise them to give proper obedience to the Church and not to be estranged from her because his adversaries have been insolent and he himself harsh. But all these submissive words do not conceal the rift which already separates his mind from the essential basis of the Church of Rome. It sounds like cold irony when he writes: "What shall I do, Most Holy Father? I am at a complete loss. I cannot endure the weight of your anger, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... to burn into her face. It was as though she had been walking in an arbour and suddenly, through some rift in the boughs, found herself exposed to the scorching sun. She felt dominated by a force stronger than her own nature. A little afraid, she shrank instinctively away from him, and as she dared not look up, she did not see the expression of triumph, mingled ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... mounted, and descended into another valley. Here they came upon Pendle Water, and while skirting its banks, could see at a great depth below, the river rushing over its rocky bed like an Alpine torrent. The scenery had now begun to assume a savage and sombre character. The deep rift through which the river ran was evidently the result of some terrible convulsion of the earth, and the rocky strata were strangely and fantastically displayed. On the further side the banks rose up precipitously, consisting for the most part of bare cliffs, though now and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... is Archean and Primary (with a few modern plutonic outbursts), and chiefly consists of granite, felspar, quartz, gneiss, schists, amphibolite and other Archean rocks, with Primary sandstones and limestones in the basin of Lake Nyasa (a great rift depression), the river Shire, and the regions within the northern watershed of the Zambezi river. Sandstones of Karroo age occur in the basin of the Luangwa (N.E. Rhodesia). There are evidences ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... bloom, so it is with some of the noblest blossoms of the soul. The bolt that prostrated Saul gave him the exceeding brightness of Christ; and so some hymns could never have been written but for a heart-stroke that well-nigh crushed out the life. It is cleft in two by bereavement, and out of the rift comes forth, as by resurrection, the form and voice that shall never die out of the world. Angels sat at the grave's mouth; and so hymns are the angels that rise up out of our ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... rock-world and behold the earth at its best; But now mid the maze of the foot-hills he seeth the light no more, And the stars are lovely and gleaming on the lightless heavenly floor. So up and up he wendeth till the night is wearing thin; And he rideth a rift of the mountain, and all is dark therein, Till the stars are dimmed by dawning and the wakening world is cold; Then afar in the upper rock-wall a breach doth he behold, And a flood of light poured inward the doubtful dawning blinds: So swift he rideth ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... last comes a rift in the clouds. One of them happens to mention Beverley Dixon. The other ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... with us a sparing lunch of thin sandwiches and a frugal flask of modest, blushing brandy, which we diluted at a stingy little fountain spring which dropped economically through a rift in the rock, as if its nymph were conscious that such a delicious drink should not be wasted. As it was, it refreshed us, and we were resting in a blessed repose under the green leaves, when we heard footsteps, and an old woman came ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... let us note that in Catholicism as early as in Protestantism appeared the sharp rift between intellect and belief. Montaigne, a man of the world, is outwardly a conformist, but a real skeptic. A nominal Catholic, he corresponds to Shakspere, a nominal Protestant. Montaigne reveals the world of one personality ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... rift in the clouds and with this denial his calmness deserted him for passion. The old family love, strong even though he had himself so violated it, burst into flame in his heart. Once more he would fight for those ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... and concealment that an animal might envy. No probable hiding-place he selected, such as might be known or divined—a cave, the attic of his trading-house, the cellar beneath—all obvious, all instantly explored. Instead, he slipped into a rift in the rocks along the river-bank. Myriads of such crevices there were in the tilted strata—unheeded, unremarked, too strait and restricted to suggest the idea of refuge, too infinitely numerous for search. There, unable ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... A rift had come in the smoke, and a column of boats, moving with well-timed oars, could for a moment be seen as ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... Skag's feeling was called to pity as well as admiration. The rift in this Deal's nature was emotional not physical—some mad poetic thing, forever struggling in the tight matrices of a hard-set world. India was rising clearer to Skag; even certain of her profound complexities. He knew that instant how the fertilising pollen of the West was needed here, and how ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... hopeless would be the opening measures of "Tristan and Isolde" without that upward inflection which comes like a sunbeam through a rift in the cloud; with a downward inflection the effect would be that of unrelieved gloom. In the Prelude to "Lohengrin," Wagner pictures his angels in dazzling white. He uses the highest vibrating sounds at his command. But for the dwarfs who ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... side of the gorge Tarzan half clambered and half slid to the sandy floor beneath. He had come upon the rift at almost the exact spot at which he had clambered from it weeks before, and there he saw, just as he had left it, just, doubtless, as it had lain for centuries, the mighty skeleton and ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... course it is; but then their marriage has long had a rift in it, so that the tearing asunder was easier than one would have thought. He himself sees that, after what has occurred, it is impossible for ...
— The Live Corpse • Leo Tolstoy
... speak as we pass by. Rift in the lute I think. Treats him with scorn. See. He admires him all the more. The night Si sang. The human voice, two tiny silky chords, wonderful, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the cool sweetness that must reside in her lips as it resided in all about her. Her kiss would be like her hand-shake or the way she looked at one, firm and frank. In imagination he dared to think of her lips on his, and so vividly did he imagine that he went dizzy at the thought and seemed to rift through clouds of rose-petals, filling ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... we entered I had three distinct shocks in quick succession. Flashy, painted and rouged as I was I dreaded Orontides' eyes. There he was behind his counter, visible through a rift in the press of handsomely dressed ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... place refers to him as an "amateur ascetic," but in this the author of the Philosophical Dictionary pays Seneca the indirect compliment of regarding him as a Christian. Renan says, "Seneca shines out like a great white star through a rift of clouds on a night of darkness." The wonder is not that Seneca at times lapsed from his high estate and manifested his Sophist training, but that to the day of his death he saw the truth with unblinking eyes and held the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... being very rough. It was going on for six in the evening. When the disk was swung back, a red light entered, glorious and radiant. The dying sun appeared upon the horizon in dazzling splendour, through a torn rift in a gloomy sky; its blinding light glanced over the waves, and lit up the floating hospital, like ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... Who had made you valiant, strong and swift And maimed you with a bullet long ago, And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift, And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow, Gave back your youth to you, And packed in moments rare and few Achievements manifold And happiness untold, And bade you spring to Death as to a bride, In manhood's ripeness, power and pride, And on ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Uncle Tucker with a slight rift in the gloom. "They are some women in the world, if a man was to seal up his trouble in a termater-can and swoller it, would get a button-hook and a can-opener to go after him to get it out. You belong to ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... uncertain Miss Clegg. That petite and aggravating young woman had been especially exasperating at the Cable dinner. Mr, Rigby, superbly confident of his standing with her, encountered difficulties which put him very much out of temper. For the first time, there was an apparent rift in her constancy; never before had she shown such signs of fluctuating. He could not understand it—in fact, he dared not understand it. "She was a most annoying young person," said Mr. Rigby to himself wrathfully, more than once ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... literary work, his home and his social life in Richmond, it would seem that every need of The Dreamer's being was now satisfied and the days of his life were moving in perfect harmony. But "the little rift within the lute" all too soon made its appearance. It was caused by the alarm of Mr. White, the owner and founder ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... evening, when no one could much mind the occasional sprinkle of rain, so glad were they of a change from the fierce heat and drought of the past fortnight. As it was, the clouds brooded low, and the breeze held the freshness of showers near by, while now and then the moon peered through a rift and lit up the hushed darkness, which was like that of a chamber where sleep comes ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... just as the sun was gathering his cohorts for departure. A breath of fragrant breeze, heavy laden with clover and sweet with the stretch of cool, moist shade through which it had passed, came sweeping across the road, and the sounds of a farm hand whetting his scythe. Through a rift in the trees appeared a patch of delicate blue sky and the edge of a rosy cloud. Mrs. LeMasters came to the wistful end of an alluring and musty reminiscence and gazed regretfully at the tawdry beauties of the present. Then she turned her eyes upon Joe, and with a sigh that ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... enough. I could guess the rest. I walked to the window and stood, looking out. The clouds were breaking and, as I stood there, a ray of sunlight streamed through a rift and struck the bay just at the spot where the dingy had grounded. The shallow water above the flat flashed into fire. I am not superstitious, as a general thing, but the sight comforted me. It seemed like an omen. There was the one bright spot ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... on during the gray, lowering, chilly day, and toward evening the clouds broke in the west, and a setting sun shone through the rift, burnishing the desert to red and gold. Shefford's instinctive but deadened love of the beautiful in nature stirred into life, and the moment of its rebirth was a melancholy and sweet one. Too late for the artist's work, but not too ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... or the class; or it may be just the other way. And you, my dear friend, may be (or may think yourself to be) somewhat strong where he is somewhat weak; an opportunity for many subtle temptations. The days and weeks go on; and if you let "the little rift" of criticism widen, and do not continually take it to your Lord to be examined and mended, other feelings—not born from above—may steal in between you and this good man, your elder and leader in Christ. Petty dislikes and impatience may rise in your ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... easily protected. Agriculture is the most important sector, with livestock normally accounting for about 40% of GDP and about 65% of export earnings, but Saudi Arabia's ban on Somali livestock, due to Rift Valley Fever concerns, has severely hampered the sector. Nomads and semi-nomads, who are dependent upon livestock for their livelihood, make up a large portion of the population. Livestock, hides, fish, charcoal, and bananas are Somalia's ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... contradiction as absolute scepticism has,—in fact, it is only its practical counterpart; for both scepticism and pessimism involve the assumption that it is possible to reach a position outside the realm of being, from which it may be condemned as a whole. But the rift between actual and ideal must fall within the real or intelligible world, do what the pessimists will; and a condemnation of man which is not based on a principle realized by humanity, is a fiction of abstract thought, which lays stress on ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... ethereal vault; encroachment none 50 Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon, Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay 55 All meek and silent, save that through a rift— Not distant from the shore whereon we stood, A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place— Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice! 60 Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour, For so it seemed, felt ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... reach of deep, still water, unbroken by a ripple, so hemmed in on all sides by walls of deep green black wattle, tea-tree, and delicate silver acacia, that the water seemed to flow in a deep shoreless rift of the forest, above which the taller forest trees towered up two hundred feet, hiding the lofty cliffs, which had here receded a little back from ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... waves of hot, sultry air were rising from the sun-baked earth. Usually at this time of the night there were countless stars, and now as he looked up into the great, vast arc of sky he saw no stars at all except away down in the west in a big rift between some mountains. He pulled up his pony and sat motionless in the saddle, watching the sky. A sudden awe for the grandeur of the scene filled him. He remembered to have seen nothing quite like it in ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... wrang wi' him at his wark," thought Jack, and they walked along, only now and then giving utterance to some common place remark. Dick's conscience accused him. He felt that he possessed a secret that Jack could not share. There was a rift in the lute. Perfect confidence had ceased to exist between them. Why should it be so? he asked himself. Jack has committed no fault. Had the case been reversed he felt sure that Jack would have confided in him. Ah, but Jack could never love her as he loved her! Nobody could ever love her as ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... encouraged railway building, and a trunk line through Rhodesia affords an outlet to the ports of the south coast. It is the policy of the mother-country to extend this road along the lake-region and the Nile Valley (known as the "Great Rift") to the Mediterranean Sea. This plan when carried out will give Great Britain a practical control of the trade of eastern Africa. The imports are mainly textiles, machinery, and ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... the night of terror came another courier, not this time from Thermopylae. He bore a letter from Themistocles, who was returning from Euboea with the whole allied Grecian fleet. The reading of the letter in the Agora was the first rift in the cloud above ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... bed of the Zambesi. The lips of the crack are still quite sharp, save about three feet of the edge over which the river rolls. The walls go sheer down from the lips without any projecting crag, or symptoms of stratification or dislocation. When the mighty rift occurred, no change of level took place in the two parts of the bed of the river thus rent asunder, consequently, in coming down the river to Garden Island, the water suddenly disappears, and we see the ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... a moment at the door. Isobel was resting quietly, and he went out of the cabin without making a sound. The night had grown blacker and gloomier. There was not a rift in the sullen darkness of the sky over him. A wind had risen from out of the north and east, just enough of a wind to set the tree-tops moaning and fill the closed-in world about him with uneasy sound. He walked toward the tent where little Isobel had been, and there was something in the air that ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... the afternoon I went to the window and looked out. I perceived a strip of pale, watery blue through a rift in the storm-laden clouds, and I chose to see that, and that only, ignoring the wind-lashed trees of the allee; the leaves, wet, and sodden and sere, hurrying panic-stricken before the gale, ignoring, too, the low wail promising a coming hurricane, which sighed and soughed beneath the ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... connection between an unseen world of spirit, unconditioned by matter, and our present world of spirit, conditioned by matter. When the pull is strong enough. And what pull could be stronger than England's danger? To Kitchener?" The black-lashed, gray eyes flamed at me, unblinking the rift of light through the curtain ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... dreadful light came into his eyes that never shone in the eyes of any other man. Then I grew sick at heart, my father—ay, though I loved my people little, and they had driven me away, I grew sick at heart. Now we had come to a spot where there is a great rift of black rock, and the name of that rift is U'Donga-lu-ka-Tatiyana. On either side of this donga the ground slopes steeply down towards its yawning lips, and from its end a man may see the open country. Here Chaka sat down at the end of the rift, pondering. ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... it began to blaze well, and then winking to himself, as Dean saw, the big fellow stepped right forward before the rest, holding the improvised torch so that the light illumined the glittering walls and ceiling of the rift of ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... brightened, then gloomed again. "Yes,—but that 'if' is like a mile-wide rift in the ice. You can never get ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... Rift Valley susceptible to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions; deforestation; overgrazing; soil erosion; desertification; ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... speaking very low. "Oh, dear lad, they're cut off from the shore. There's a big rift in the ice now, and it's growin' each moment bigger, and they're on the wrong side o' ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... The movement was a hopeless failure because the working men declined to have anything to do with the so-called leaders. When the split took place in the Chamber of Mines, it became the business of Dr. Leyds and the President to keep the rift open. This was done persistently and in a very open manner—the seceders being informed upon several occasions that a fusion of the two Chambers would not be welcome to the Government. Both before and since that time the same policy has found expression in the misleading statement ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... fearing the voice of the prince ran swiftlier some little while; and presently did the good warrior Antilochos espy a strait place in a sunk part of the way. There was a rift in the earth, where torrent water gathered and brake part of the track away, and hollowed all the place; there drave Menelaos, shunning the encounter of the wheels. But Antilochos turned his whole-hooved horses out of the track, and followed him a little at one side. And the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... A rift now appeared in the war cloud. Early in April, Washington received intelligence of a new order in council dated January 8, 1794, which only forbade trade between the French colonies and Europe, leaving American vessels to trade freely with the French West Indies. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens. Around in every direction it was still as black as pitch, but nearly overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky—as clear as I ever saw—and of a deep bright blue—and through it there blazed forth the full moon with a luster that I never before knew her to wear. She lit up everything about us with the greatest distinctness—but, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... minute by minute becoming more overshadowed by evening. The misty gloom, usual at twilight, became thicker; it was like a growth of darkness at the bottom of a well. The opening of the creek seaward, a narrow passage, traced on the almost night-black interior a pallid rift where the waves were moving. You must have been quite close to perceive the hooker moored to the rocks, and, as it were, hidden by the great cloaks of shadow. A plank thrown from on board on to a low and level ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... quality that is not common in the work of our minor poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to us—I mean the romantic temper. He is essentially Celtic, and his verse, at its best, is Celtic also. Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to study how to 'load every rift with ore,' yet is more fascinated by the beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music. The spirit that dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual poem or particular passage, but this ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... do I desire thine ear. The cause of this rift is yonder." And he jerked his thumb backward over his shoulder towards the poop-house. "If we remove that cause, of a surety the rift itself will vanish, and all will be ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... praised!" said the trapper, "it's the boy's own piece, and he let it off as he shot the rift the fourth bend above. Yis, the boy knows his danger and he took the vantage of the rift to signal me with his piece, for oars couldn't help him in the rift and the missin' of a single stroke wouldn't ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... time of year was about the approach of the rainy season, and the tepid, tropical clouds added obscurity to the darkness of the sky, so that the night fell with even more startling quickness than usual. The blackness was very dense. Now and then a group of drifting stars swam out of a rift in the vapors, but the night was curiously silent and ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... bright matter, which appeared nearly straight, owing to the inclination in which they lay relatively to us. These bright rings surrounded an undefined central luminous mass. Recent photographs by Mr. Russell showed that the great rift in the Milky Way in Argus, which to the eye was void of stars, was in reality uniformly ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... themselves so far as to applaud, as the least sign of approbation of Austrian military music would have been looked upon as treason to the Italian Fatherland. All public life in Venice also suffered by this extraordinary rift between the general public and the authorities; this was peculiarly apparent in the relations of the population to the Austrian officers, who floated about publicly in Venice like oil on water. The populace, too, behaved with ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... felt he had blundered. It was the first real shadow on his courtship—perhaps the little rift within the lute. He turned back to Becky for sympathy. There was no Becky. She had taken advantage of the conversation to slip away. He found her again in a moment though, at the other end of the room. She was seated before a machine. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to Doble, out of the air. He looked up. Two great boulders lay edge to edge beside the path. Through a narrow rift the blue nose of a forty-five protruded. Back of it glittered a pair ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... pilot, following his gaze, saw the mute but convincing explanation of that loss of time. The smoke-stack, buff-coloured underneath, was white with salt, while the whistle- pipe glittered crystalline in the random sunlight that broke for the instant through a cloud-rift. The port lifeboat was missing, its iron davits, twisted and wrenched, testifying to the mightiness of the blow that had been struck the old Tryapsic. The starboard davits were also empty. The shattered wreck of the lifeboat they had held lay on the fiddley beside the smashed engine-room skylight, ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... cannot be sure about, he will have the steadier mind for it—and there is profit in that. I know that when the Children of the Tree die in a far land, then—if they be at peace with God—they turn their longing eyes toward home, and there, far-shining, as through a rift in a cloud that curtains heaven, they see the soft picture of the Fairy Tree, clothed in a dream of golden light; and they see the bloomy mead sloping away to the river, and to their perishing nostrils is blown faint and sweet the fragrance ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... point the river-bed was cleft through its centre, to the depth of eighteen or twenty feet, by a chasm from fifteen to eighteen feet wide, into which the waters pour with considerable violence. A bridge in the middle of the river spans this rift, and the stranger who reaches the banks feels unable to account for its appearance among the cloud of spray which entirely conceals the chasm in the ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... being but the catspaw to scheming forces." With your denial of any intrinsic beauty in the emotion, with your acceptance of it as an unfortunate incident in human affairs, comes a vague hope that the race will outgrow this force. Here is your rift in the cloud. You picture a scientific Utopia where there are no lovers and no back-harkings to the primitive passion, and you appoint yourself pioneer to the promised land of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... "Spit it out, Brenton! Rift it aff yer chist!" he adjured him. "Something has gone bad inside your Denmark, and I'm so far kindred to the blessed angels that ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Bea's hand was on the portiere when a rustling in the kettle caught her attention. Through a rift between the folds she spied lace ruffles about a delicate hand that was dropping envelopes down upon the others. Over the tripod a face appeared for one moment in the dim light, and then was gone. Light steps retreated swiftly, and a door closed ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... said Ned when he discovered that each end of the rift had been filled with closely fitted rock, "and human hands ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... He saw the rift in the moving sidewalk coming, far ahead, a great, gaping rent in the metal fabric of the swiftly moving escalator, as if a huge blade were slicing it down the middle. Harry's hand went to his mouth, choking back a scream as the hole moved with ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... boy and came a-visiting, they always put me here. That screen would set me dreaming—and the blue roses and the moon clock. I used to lie in that bed and send myself to sleep with more tales than are in the Arabian Nights. There's a rift in the poplars through which you can see a very bright star—Sirius, I believe. May you have pleasant dreams, Mr. Rand, in my old bed!" He glanced from Rand's flushed face to the papers strewn upon the counterpane. "You have been ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and action; to ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that even the thought of possible discord has become impossible. In its unity not only cognition and volition, but feeling also, must be blended and united. In some way or another it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge, and the immediate must for it be no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry |
