Abyss

“ Imagine a mountain suddenly cleft asunder, disclosing a frightful abyss several hundred feet in depth, lined with gray rocks that rise almost perpendicularly to the very clouds, and, far down at the bottom, a narrow stream winding sullenly along, looking like one of the fabled rivers of the abisso doloroso of the great Florentine. ”

“ There, on the wall of the abyss, some hundreds of feet below the basin, below the great spar hanging in space, I could see all that was now left of the sunlight—a bright red patch glistening upon the granite. Making my way a little further along to the angle of the buttress, I could trace this shaft of light from the abysmal depths up to the stupendous grating at the far end of the gulf. ”

“ The flood, and swallowed up the fallow waves,
The struggling sea—the abyss devoured it all. 1590
Yet not the waves alone it swallowed up;
But fourteen men, worst caitiffs of the throng,
Went headlong to destruction with the flood
Under the yawning earth. Then sore afraid
Was many a heart at that calamity;
They feared the slaughter both of men and wives,
A yet more wretched season of distress,
When once those sin-stained cruel murderers,
Those warriors fierce, plunged headlong down the abyss. ”

“ I stand at the window of my cell. The sun sinks and the shadows creep higher on the sides of the mountains beyond the abyss. The abyss itself is filled with a mist whose billowy surface looks like a great lake. I think how Benedicta climbed out of these awful depths to fling me the edelweiss; I listen for the sound of the stones displaced by her daring little feet and plunging into the chasm below. ”

“ Thy soul is given into thy hands. Thy path is full of rocks and boulders, there is no way out near; it is overgrown with creepers and wolf's-foot. Abysses are on one side of thee, the mountain and the wall of rock on the other. Thou drivest in against it. The chariot jumps on which thou art. Thou art troubled to hold up thy horses. If it falls into the abyss, the pole drags thee down too. ”

“ Its rapid waves dash among the rocks, and shoot even beyond their limits. Divided by the rapidity of its course and the depth of the abyss where it falls, it changes into a grey moving veil; and, at length scattered into humid atoms, it shines with the tints of the rainbow, and, suspended over the valley, refreshes it with plenteous dew. The traveller beholds with astonishment rivers flowing towards the sky, and issuing from one cloud, hide themselves in the grey veil of another. ”

“ Crouching at the back of the cave, I saw a swift light go shooting up through the blue haze, then die down and break, and as it dimmed and broke I saw myriads of the globes that are the eyes of the pit people swing downward into the abyss. ”

“ As we penetrated deeper and deeper into this obscurity, I perceived in the midst of the darkness an abyss of immense extent filled with smoke and a lurid glare, the sight of which caused my hair to stand on end with terror. From this abyss proceeded piteous wailing, which sounded as if a number of men and women were being put to cruel torture and death. ”

“ Chaos umpire sits, And by decision more embroils the fray By which he reigns: next him, high arbiter, Chance governs all. Into this wild Abyss, The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave, Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixed Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more worlds— Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while, Pondering his voyage ”

“ A few steps across the arid tableland brought them to its edge. Tom could not repress a shudder as he gazed into the fathomless rift. Seared by volcanic fires till its sides were of a reddish, angry hue, the abyss itself seemed to have likewise been the result of some tremendous convulsion of nature. ”

“ Peaks will shift and glow, walls darken, crags take fire, and gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the gleam of opalescent lakes of mountain water. The traveller who goes out to the edge and peers into the great abyss sees but one phase out of hundreds. If he is fortunate, it may be one of its most beautiful combinations of color and shadow. But to know it, to feel its majesty, one should camp in the bottom and watch the sunset and the moonrise while the river marches from its lair like an angry lion. ”

“ Ashes, ashes, fine grey dusty ashes pervaded space, till presently a hurricane rose and swept away the chaos of gloom, and vast nothingness yawned before her: a bottomless abyss—an insatiable throat, swallowing down with greedy thirst all that was left; till where the world had been, with gods and men and all their works, there was only nothingness ”

“ The chances of the abyss are illimitable. Everything is possible in it, even salvation; an issue may be found, though it be invisible. How the child, wrapped in a smothering winding-sheet of snow, lost on a narrow elevation between two jaws of an abyss, managed to cross the isthmus is something he could not himself have explained. He slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered,—that is all; that, indeed, is the secret of all triumphs. At the end of less than half an hour he felt that the ground was rising. He had reached the other shore. Leaving Chesil, he had gained terra firma. ”

“ The next thing we did was to make a complete tour of the tremendous chasm, which we were able to observe was in the form of an almost perfect circle, save for where the ruin-crowned spur of rock jutted out, spoiling its symmetry.
The abyss was, as Tonnison put it, like nothing so much as a gigantic well or pit going sheer down into the bowels of the earth. ”

“ Its passages are cut through sharp cornered rocks between which thou must squeeze thy body, and yet other rocks stick out into the darkness like the bristles of a mad boar. Beware these bristles! If thou shouldst run against one, thy feet will stumble over the edge of the abyss. Once thou hast fallen into it, no more forever will thine eyes behold the light of day. ”

“ Stamped the nether abyss in trembling and howling and dismay.
And a seventh age passed over, and a state of dismal woe.
Terrified, Los stood in the abyss, and his immortal limbs
Grew deadly pale. He became what he beheld, for a red
30⁠Round globe sunk down from his Bosom into the Deep. In pangs
He hovered, it trembling and weeping. Trembling it shook
The nether abyss in tremblings. He wept over it, he cherished it
In deadly, sickening pain, till separated into a female pale
As the cloud that brings the snow. ”

“ The gods of the abyss came thronging up on all sides through the gates;—terrible-looking beings with unaccountable aspects, dispensers of death and horror with their eyes;—some stamping with hoofs, some rolling on enormous spires,—their faces human, their hair serpents. ”

“ I know of one, in the depths of a fathomless abyss, whose waters rage in wild fury over fantastic piles of boulders, tossing up feathers of white spray to make glints of light on the smooth apron of the limestone walls which enclose and overshadow it, which is matchless in its weird beauty. ”

“ Every evening the mist rises from the abyss. It forms billows; then rings; then flakes, and these rise and grow and darken until they are great clouds. They cover the hill and the valley, the tall pines and the snow-pointed mountains. They extinguish the last remaining touches of sunlight on the higher peaks, and it is night. ”

“ The space-flyer floated out over the edge of the abyss and dropped. It descended straight for three miles, then followed the curl of the titanic crevice toward the horizontal. Ancient civilized men had shaped the upper cavern, men of a lost generation, but this titanic lower abyss was a fault created by nature herself. ”

“ By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city. Beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black but shining. Round it were fiery tracks, on which revolved vast spiders crawling after their prey, which flew or rather swam in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption ”

“ Turn back, I say, turn back, before the abyss swallows you and the pit closes its mouth, before you are engulfed whence you shall not escape, before, bound hand and foot, you are cast into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, before you are hurled into darkness, shut in with the darkness of death. ”

“ A large white jug and a corkscrew are far too valuable to a creature of the Abyss to permit another creature to die in peace. To the last, Dan Cullen's soul must be harrowed by the sordidness out of which it strove vainly to rise. ”

“ A star shall fall from heaven to earth and there shall be given up the key to the pit of the abyss. And it shall open the pit of the abyss and there shall go up a smoke out of the pit as the smoke of a great furnace ”

“ When one sees children picking flowers upon the edge of an abyss, one may easily guess the result."
"And we are not children, and we knew the abyss was there. We have been wilfully blind, audacious, desperate. Herrick, we are pledged to be each other's ruin here and hereafter. Can a man of honour, do you think, recall such a pledge—break his word to the lady he has sworn to destroy?" ”

“ These natures turn from the substance to dream of the shadow, they leave the narrow fields of science and go out boldly over those unsounded waters beyond. Souls such as these are never quite at home in life: the dark, the undreamed of, the infinite has enchanted them. They are drawn by the attraction of the Abyss. ”

“ The tidal wash, the heavy lapse and then heavier resurge, with the rush and cataract-roar of the seas as they fell far down into the chasm, assailed his ears continuously. Peering down, he could see the foam upon the flood, as it swept ravening round the cave and then fell headlong into the abyss, above which was a misty pulsating whiteness, the send and spray of tons of whirled water. ”

“ The great abyss as we see contains a considerable quantity. The earth, at the approach of the comet, would prove the force of its attraction; and the waters [125] contained in the great abyss would be agitated by so violent a kind of flux and reflux, that the superficial crust would not resist, but split in several places, and the internal waters be dispersed over the surface, "And the fountains of the abyss were opened." ”

“ Fond, “on the brink of this lake; and the light of our dismal torches, which emitted a black smoke, reflecting our pale images from its bottom, we almost conceived we saw a troop of specters starting from an abyss to welcome us. The illusion was extremely striking.”
On landing, the visitor enters a spacious vacuity, two hundred and twenty feet in length, two hundred feet in breadth, and in some parts one hundred and twenty feet in hight, opening into the bosom of the rock; but, from the want of light, neither the distant sides nor the roof of this abyss, can be seen. ”

“ The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them. Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror nor delight. They are unaware of the Unseen ”

“ Its associations are the storm, the cloud, the wild sea, the desolate waste, the uninhabited coast. The blocks of granite are hideous and enormous—everywhere perpendicular wall—the severe inhospitality of the abyss. ”

“ These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. ”

“ So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge man-killing machine, and when I pass along the little out-of-the-way streets with the full-bellied artisans at the doors, I am aware of a greater sorrow for them than for the 450,000 lost and hopeless wretches dying at the bottom of the pit. They, at least, are dying, that is the point ”

“ There is not a feature of any kind on which the eye can rest. In the foreground the earth is all tunnelled and tumbled; quarries stretch in every direction, with huge, gaunt, straddling, gallows-like structures emerging, a wheel spinning at the top, and ropes travelling into the abyss; heaps of grey débris, interspersed with stunted grass, huge excavations, ugly ravines with a spout of grim stone at the seaward opening, like the burrowings of some huge mole. ”

“ Accordingly I made my way along towards the buttress—part of the pathway was in the moonlight—but when I reached it I found that the great spar was still hanging horizontal above the abyss, while the moon rays flooding on to the surface of the lake showed the water boiling up from below as when I had first seen it.
For a long half hour I crouched in the shadows there, thinking that the fierce tohunga would again appear on the scene, but all was quiet: nothing moving except the overflow into the abyss, and the moonlight slowly creeping down after it. ”

“ Now let us deliberately pass by all the attractions of the middle zone of tide-pools and on as far as the lowest level of the water will admit. We are far out from the shore and many feet below the level of the barnacle-covered boulders over which we first clambered. Now we may indeed be prepared for strange sights, for we are on the very borderland of the vast unknown. The abyss in front of us is like planetary space, unknown to the feet of man. ”

“ It is evident, however, as soon as the eye attaches itself to the side of the Dome, that one of its loftiest precipices, originally measuring an altitude as great as any yet remaining, has precipitated itself in a crushed and broken mass into the abyss. ”

“ The only path by which men can go down that gorge clings to the eastern face of the abyss and is for ever plunged in shadow. Down this path I went very late upon a summer night, close upon midnight, and the moon just past the full. The air was exceedingly clear even for that high place, and the moon struck upon the limestone of the sheer opposing cliffs in a manner neither natural nor pleasing, but suggesting horror, and, as it were, something absolute, too simple for mankind. ”