Canalis

“ Canaliculus (dimin. of Canalis, q.v.) . A small channel or groove; or a fluting carved on the face of a triglyph. (Fig. 128.)
Canalis (akin to Sanscrit root KHAN, to dig) . An artificial channel or conduit for water. The term canalis is also given to the fillet or flat surface lying between the abacus and echinus of an Ionic capital. It terminates in the eye of the volute, which it follows in such a way as to give it the proper contour.
Canathron (Gr. κάναθρον) . A carriage, of which the upper part was made of basket-work.
Canberia, Med. Lat. (Fr. jambières) . Armour for the legs. ”

“ And when conversation began, when intellects so keen, so subtle, were revealed in two-edged words with more meaning and depth in them than Anais de Bargeton heard in a month of talk at Angouleme; and, most of all, when Canalis uttered a sonorous phrase, summing up a materialistic epoch, and gilding it with poetry—then Anais felt all the truth of Chatelet's dictum of the previous evening. Lucien was nothing to her now. Every one cruelly ignored the unlucky stranger; he was so much like a foreigner listening to an unknown language, that the Marquise d'Espard took pity upon him. ”

“ I approached the neighborhood of the canal-boat as the distant city clock chimed the first stroke of 12. It was the dark of the moon and the sky was overcast. Heat-lightning flickered low in the sky, seeming to come from every point of the compass and circumscribe the horizon, as if unseen fires burned behind the rim of the world. By its fitful glimmer, I saw a new thing—between the old boat and the canal bank stretched a long, slim; solid-looking shadow—a plank had been let down! ”

“ I thought of what I heard every day on the canal--that all women were alike; that they existed only for that sort of companionship with men with which my eyes were so ignorantly familiar; that all their protestations and refusals were for effect only; that a man need only to be a man, to know what he wanted, and conquer it. And I felt rising in me like a tide the feeling that I was now a man. The reader who has believed of me that I passed through that canal life unspotted by its vileness has asked too much of me. ”

“ Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers ”

“ In the most brilliant day the scenery of a canal has at best but scant liveliness, the whole thing is so prosaic and artificial, and in fact stupid, if one can ever say that of any place where there is fresh air and clear water, and blue sky and green trees.
Still I had to push on, and sometimes, for a change, to tow the boat while I walked. The difference between a glorious river encircling you with lofty rocks and this canal with its earthen walls was something like that between walking among high mountains and being shut up by mistake in Bloomsbury-square. ”

“ A canal ran along at the rear of the Dust-heap, and on the banks of its opposite side slowly wandered by—with hands clasped and hanging down in front of him, and eyes bent vacantly upon his hands—the forlorn figure of a man, in a very shabby great-coat, which had evidently once belonged to one in the position of a gentleman. ”

“ Obviously there must come a moment in the history of each canal when it is more expensive to clear it out than to construct a new one, and thus every canal bears within it the germ of its own destruction. ”

“ Seventeen years now since he bent to his oar behind my cushions—twenty-six in all since I began to idle about her canals. It is either the little canal next the Public Garden, or up the Giudecca, or under the bronze horses of San Marco; or it may be we are camped out in the Piazzetta before the Porta della Carta; or perhaps up the narrow canal of San Rocco, or in the Fruit Market near the Rialto while the boats unload their cargoes.
All old subjects and yet ever new; each has been painted a thousand times, and in as many different lights and perspectives. ”

“ Passing, one after another, world-old cities now dwindled to decaying towns, and numberless canal-mouths, now fast falling into ruin with the fields to which they ensured fertility, under the pressure of Roman extortion and misrule, they had entered one evening the mouth of the great canal of Alexandria, slid easily all night across the star-bespangled shadows of Lake Mareotis, and found themselves, when the next morning dawned, among the countless masts and noisy quays of the greatest seaport in the world. ”

“ I stood for some time looking up at the sky, watching the low drift of heavy clouds, which were visible in the dull reflected glow from distant lights in the heart of the city, so that they appeared to have a lurid phosphorescence of their own. The ground under my feet, on the contrary, was utterly devoid of light. I had felt my way carefully, knowing the edge of the canal partly by instinct, partly by the even more perfect blackness of the water in it, and even holding pretty well to the path, because it was perceptibly sunken below the ground beside it. ”

“ On passing through the Canobic gate of the city, on the right hand is the canal leading to Canobus, close to the lake. They sail by this canal to Schedia, to the great river, and to Canobus, but the first place at which they arrive is Eleusis. This is a settlement near Alexandreia and Nicopolis, and situated on the Canobic canal. It has houses of entertainment which command beautiful views, and hither [Pg 238]
[CAS. 800] resort men and women who are inclined to indulge in noisy revelry, a prelude to Canobic life, and the dissolute manners of the people of Canobus. ”

“ The snipe and duck hunters forsook the marsh, and the wood-cutters abandoned the canal. Sometimes the hardier boys who ventured out there snake-shooting heard a slow thumping of oar-locks on the canal. They would look at each other for a moment half in consternation, half in glee, then rush from their sport in wanton haste to assail with their gibes the unoffending, withered old man who, in rusty attire, sat in the stern of a skiff, rowed homeward by his white-headed African mute. ”

“ When there is neither notch nor canal, anteriorly or posteriorly, interrupting the edge of the aperture, it is described as entire. When there is a notch or sinus at the anterior extremity, it is said to be emarginated. When the edge of this notch is expanded, and drawn out in the form of a beak, it is said to be canaliferous, or to have a canal. ”

“ The blacks were kind and civil, as they usually are when fairly treated. They stood upon the dike and shouted unintelligible farewells as I descended the canal to Alligator Creek. This thoroughfare soon carried me on its salt-water current to the sea; for I missed a narrow entrance to the marshes, called the Eye of the Needle (a steamboat thoroughfare) , and found myself upon the calm sea, which pulsated in long swells. To the south was the low island of Cape Roman, which, like a protecting arm, guarded the quiet bay behind it. ”

“ A Professor Douglass, of Arizona, has lately suggested that the canals are nothing but the black rays that can be seen radiating from a black spot, on a light ground, when looked at with a small screen placed in front of the pupil of the eye, so that the light enters only around the edges. According to Professor Douglass, the black oases are the only real things in the canal system, while the canals themselves have no tangible existence, and are nothing more than these black rays issuing from the dark spots. ”

“ From above, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut in the plain, and again let off into the ditch, toward the sea; these canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal into another, and to the city. Twice in the year they gathered the fruits of the earth—in winter having the benefit of the rains, and in summer introducing the water of the canals. ”

“ In my despair I cast a glance down at the canal, in which the stars were shining dimly. It looked cold and black and cruel; but the glance turned the current of my plans. I stopped suddenly, drew the girl to the water, and stooping, pulled to me a small boat that was hobbled to the bank. In a minute more we were in the cockleshell, and she was in the middle of the ditch, just as two dark figures ran into view along the path. ”

“ Whatever it may be, dead or living, ghost or mortal, I bid the driver halt, and alighting, hasten to the edge of the canal. Looking into the dark muddy water, I see a lad of about twelve years, just able to keep his head above the stream, and screaming lustily for help. A young man reaches the spot at the same moment, and plunges instantly into the canal to the rescue of the boy who is too much frightened and exhausted to give any account of himself. ”

“ Next morning we are up on deck in good time, as we want to see all we can of the canal. We are by this time out in the wide water of the Bitter Lake, where we can go at a good speed, then the canal itself begins again and we pass one of the little station-houses where the signalmen live; it looks as if it was built out of a child's bricks, and stands on the arid banks with only a few scanty palms near. It must be a dreary sort of life for ever signalling to ships which are going onward to all countries of the world, while you yourself remain pinned down in the same few square yards of land. ”

“ There are not a few people who regard the canal system almost as they might regard the Dodo and the Megatherium. It is to them an effete relic of a time when civilisation was as yet but imperfectly developed. ... Canals do, indeed, belong to the past. ... That canals also belong to the present, Egypt, the American isthmus, Manchester, Corinth, and other places, fully prove, and, unless we greatly err, they are no less the heritage of the future." J. S. Jeans, Waterways and Water Transport, section 1, chapter 1. ”

“ Monday morning, bright and early, found us on the smooth, slippery surface of the canal. “Us” here includes, in addition to Bill and myself, my two younger brothers, Jack and Fred, and also Dutchy Van Syckel and Reddy Schreiner, neighbors of ours. It was the custom at the first of December every year to drain out most of the water in the canal, in order to prevent possible injury to the canal banks from the pressure of the ice. ”

“ Canal life in Eastern France is a characteristic feature, the whole region being intersected by a network of waterways, those chemins qui marchent, or walking roads as Michelet picturesquely calls them. And strolling on the banks of the canal here you may be startled by an astonishing sight, you see folks walking, or apparently walking, on water. Standing bolt upright on a tiny raft, carefully maintaining their balance, country people are towed from one side to the other. ”

“ As we went up the side of the canal we perceived a dark body meeting us. The clouds had again obscured, though not quite hidden the moon, and we could not at first make out what it was. When we came nearer it showed itself a body of men hauling something along. Yes, it was the life-boat, afloat on the troubled waves of the canal, each man seated in his own place, his hands quiet upon his oar, his cork-jacket braced about him, his feet out before him, ready to pull the moment they should pass beyond the broken gates of the lock out on the awful tossing of the waves. ”

“ Across the waste ground crawled the canal that started in the clean green-brown country; here it ran between a clammy grassless towing path and a brick wall. “Ran” is too jocund a word to describe its action. It crept stickily along, a slimy glaze coating its surface, whereon floated the hairless swollen body of a drowned rat.
Ralph Campion stood at the side of the black canal, and looked at the sheer drop of the brick work. ”

“ By our sixth rule, this rippling water as it retires should show more and more of the reflection of the sky above it, and less and less of that of objects beyond it, until, at two or three hundred yards down the canal, the whole field of water should be one even gray or blue, the color of the sky receiving no reflections whatever of other objects. What does Canaletto do? Exactly in proportion as he retires, he displays more and more of the reflection of objects, and less and less of the sky, until, three hundred yards away, all the houses are reflected as clear and sharp as in a quiet lake. ”

“ Amenthes with Thoth-Nepenthes. July.
First among these is a truth of which I have long been convinced; to wit, that when a seeming discordance arises between the portrayals of a canal, it is commonly not a case of mistake nor of change, but one of separate identity. The canal has not shifted its place, nor has an error been committed; the fact is that one canal has been observed at one time, another at another. ”

“ What is there inland but a desert waste of sand-hill and arid flat that is barren as my hand, bearing nothing but a little scrubby thorn and thistle and bramble--sand, that’s not worth half a crown an acre? There is no necessity for us to cut a canal. The canal exists, cut in order that the Hey-tor granite may be conveyed along it to the sea. It has not occurred to the fools that the barges that convey the stone down might come up laden with Teign mud, instead of returning empty. ”