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fissure
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  • First there's the land, thousands of miles of it, with an outer circle of rock and mountains, ice-covered, fissured and wrinkled; then forest tangled with windfall, a matted pelt of it, dead wood rotting under moss; then the odd clearing.†   (source)
  • From the fissure a thread sprouted, delicate as silk.†   (source)
  • His eye was still good, but all around it was a twisted mass of scar, slick black flesh hard as leather, pocked with craters and fissured by deep cracks that gleamed red and wet when he moved.†   (source)
  • Their faces were covered with every kind of misery I could imagine: pits and pustules, cracks and bumps, and fissures that I was sure erupted with the same vehemence as snails writhing in a bed of salt.†   (source)
  • Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red grapes forced up from the fissure.†   (source)
  • She was getting so good the cracks and fissures were smaller and smaller.†   (source)
  • Which makes me start to slide backward, away from Ben, who's wisely thrown himself on his stomach at the edge of the fissure to avoid riding the chunk with me straight into the black hole.†   (source)
  • But because I spent so much time in the hospital, it did little to heal the fissures that had begun to form in our relationship.†   (source)
  • The pain over my heart returns, and from it I imagine tiny fissures spreading out into my body.†   (source)
  • This is how my mother must have felt when she saw the first shaft of sunlight penetrate the fissure in her stone prison walls.†   (source)
  • Shingles from the slate roof fell through the fissures.†   (source)
  • From somewhere high above there came the cold sound of wind through unseen fissures.†   (source)
  • He treats us to "a singularly dreary tract of country," to "a few rank sedges" and "white trunks of decayed trees," to "the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn," so that we're ready for the "bleak walls" of the house with its "vacant eye-like windows" and its "barely perceptible fissure" zigzagging its way down the wall right down to "the sullen waters of the tarn."†   (source)
  • I kept staring at the fissure in the marble floor where two years ago Nico had banished a bunch of bloodthirsty skeletons to the Underworld.†   (source)
  • You had to be careful not to hit the fissure that ran down the middle like the Grand Canyon.†   (source)
  • Apollo, the god of the oracle, spoke through his priestess Pythia, who sat on a stool over a fissure in the earth, from which arose hypnotic vapors that put Pythia in a trance.†   (source)
  • His feline eyes, slit by their single vertical pupils like fissures in a green-gold wall, were serious for once.†   (source)
  • My handwas broken, but there wasn't any serious damage, just a tiny fissure in one knuckle.†   (source)
  • He dreamed of the piling, so real he felt he could almost reach out and slide his palm over its green-black fissured curve.†   (source)
  • Bujumbura sits alongside the tranquil waters of Lake Tan-ganyika, at the foot of a fissured mountain range that rises sharply out of the flats and glows orange on clear days, when the sun sets over Congo to the west.†   (source)
  • The fissures they see in Hutterite colonies that grow too big are the fissures that result when the bonds among some commune members begin to weaken.†   (source)
  • They came to a series of shelves dropping down and, beyond them, saw a fissure with its ledge outlined by moonshadow leading along the vestibule.†   (source)
  • She bears witness as the fissures open up, the lava leaking out, this great explosion of what, I guess to her, must look like grief.†   (source)
  • Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure.†   (source)
  • Affection had appeared, but through a fissure, a crevice, in the person, through which, behind affection, came all the winds of fear.†   (source)
  • My hand swept over her belly, and then down farther, between her legs, running over a soft fissure, the absence, the empty space, more intriguing than what might have been present.†   (source)
  • There were bulges of rock and ripples where it had flowed and hardened, but there was no crack or fissure that would reveal a doorway or conceal a hidden spring.†   (source)
  • He was so imperfect already, his cracks and fissures apparent.†   (source)
  • And out the demons came—from every cave and crevice, through every fissure and crack, from under the rocks and up from the mud, stomping and shuffling, slithering and sliding, through the murky shadows.†   (source)
  • He drove very slowly over the craters of Highway 3, and the long stretches of lumpy, fissured bedrock, and the steep inclines where the dirt track was just piles of boulders.†   (source)
  • She never even cracked, but he'd pushed her hard enough to cause fissures.†   (source)
  • A fissure forms in the vessel.†   (source)
  • With a final, fiery step, Cooper leaped out of a narrow fissure, his Amplified stride carrying them far out into the gray twilight.... Several of the creatures spilled out of the fissure in— pursuit, their momentum carrying them beyond the ledge so that they plummeted screaming into the valley below.†   (source)
  • Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved.†   (source)
  • Then the fissure filled halfway with water and we dived.†   (source)
  • The two of them were tucked inside a narrow fissure in the side of a cliff, up high.†   (source)
  • But ahead of him, through the windshield, with its spidery webwork of fissures, he saw the sixteen-thousand-foot-high panorama of the Karakoram's foothills tearing at a blameless blue sky with its fearsome assortment of brown, broken teeth, and felt unaccountably happy.†   (source)
  • A granite shelf juts out from a fissure a few feet away.†   (source)
  • We dragged our boats across the beach toward a sea cave, its entrance a black fissure in a hill of rocks.†   (source)
  • It was as if he were contemplating that serene mountain landscape Einstein had described, and suddenly between the mountains had appeared a fissure, a gap of pure nothing.†   (source)
  • These men were looking, ever so delicately, for an opportunity to drive a wedge into that fissure.†   (source)
  • In the dark, in the moonless jungle, the fissures are not so visible, the hypocrisies and lies less disturbing.†   (source)
  • As the crack narrowed he had to turn his feet sideways, and he found himself searching the rock face alongside for handholds for his left hand as the right worked the main fissure.†   (source)
  • I've fought storms and floods and rock slides and rail fissure...I knew how to do it, and I liked doing it...But this kind of battle-it's one I can't fight.†   (source)
  • Its bed was cracked with fissures deep enough to put a hand into, and along the banks elephant grass grew in crisp powdered tangles.†   (source)
  • Even if you're blasting miles away, there are bedrock fissures that can be weakened.†   (source)
  • And Janice's John Kim, exquisitely silent, was like some fault-ridden patch of ground that shakes and threatens a violence but then just falls in upon itself, cascading softly and evenly down its own private fissure until tightly filled up again.†   (source)
  • Tayo looked up at the big orange sandrock where the wild grape vine grew out of the sand and climbed along a fissure in the face of the boulder.†   (source)
  • But now Lincoln's youth has aged into a landscape of fissures and contours, his forehead and sunken cheeks a road map of despair and brooding.†   (source)
  • Day after day the pitiless sun blazed down, scorching whatever still struggled to grow and baking the earth hard until at last it split and great irregular fissures gaped in the land.†   (source)
  • So, partly as a result of having internalized these attitudes through growing up with them, and partly as a result of growing a skin to protect myself against them, I went for years half-avoiding and half —resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot.†   (source)
  • He came to the bottom of the well and moved across it, passing among broken stones and over fissures in the rocky floor.†   (source)
  • The cleavage between them, a mythical fissure which I had never seen at such close range, gave forth a faint film of dew.†   (source)
  • Dan's eyes were hollowed, and his face carved with fissures of exhaustion.†   (source)
  • Here and there a boulder had lately fallen and lay in their path wet within its fissures as if it began to live, and secrete, and they had to climb around it, holding to brush.†   (source)
  • fissure in the rocks.†   (source)
  • Harry saw a fissure in the cliff into which dark water was swirling.†   (source)
  • Given time it will fissure the asphalt, topple the walls, push aside the roofs.†   (source)
  • He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.†   (source)
  • She set her hand on the wall and pressed against a tiny fissure, which began to glow blue.†   (source)
  • The ceiling was cracked and damp, wetness seeping down through the fissures in the stone.†   (source)
  • I pulled out my blade and the fissure grew.†   (source)
  • Already the ends of my thumbs are fissuring, my face withering further.†   (source)
  • Flames erupted from the fissure, and the earth swallowed the skeletons in one loud CRUNCH!†   (source)
  • Cracks ran down his face, fissures opening in the flesh, and he reached up and ripped the mask away.†   (source)
  • She looked up to see a line of hawks along the rim of the fissure.†   (source)
  • My sword skittered across the ground and fell straight into the open fissure.†   (source)
  • Then I looked down and saw fissures in the pavement.†   (source)
  • A spill of sand spread its brief curtain across the open end of the fissure.†   (source)
  • In a few minutes they stood on the floor of the fissure holding the pack between them.†   (source)
  • The next day, dawn broke as they were crossing a cracked and fissured plain of hard red earth.†   (source)
  • The cavern floor split open into a great fissure separating them from the Enemy.†   (source)
  • THE STEPS LEADING UP FROM the beach were cut into the side of a fissure in the cliffs.†   (source)
  • Somewhere it made a hollow whooooo in a rock fissure.†   (source)
  • A jagged fissure snaked upward in the stones.†   (source)
  • "Hurts," she said, and then fissuring cracks spread out from her mouth, across her face.†   (source)
  • The fissure would've swallowed us, but Isis's voice spoke in my mind, telling me the word I needed.†   (source)
  • The stone floor was webbed with fissures like a sheet of ice.†   (source)
  • She slides up close to the edge and pries at something wedged in a fissure of rock.†   (source)
  • With a sharp boom the shaft of stone cracked before them, a fissure splitting it from top to bottom.†   (source)
  • Her body was as gray as ash, fissured with black lines like volcanic lava.†   (source)
  • He pointed to a tiny fissure running diagonally from the edge to the bottom.†   (source)
  • A huge arching fissure went almost all the way up.†   (source)
  • And the air is wholesome there because of the outlets through fissures in the rock far above.†   (source)
  • Beyond the fissure was a howling, writhing mess of bodies, but the carriage seemed unharmed.†   (source)
  • Even the fissure from which they'd leaped was now some anonymous shadow high upon the cliff face.†   (source)
  • The wall was broken two-thirds of the way up by a crooked fissure of icy stone.†   (source)
  • Right across the floor, close to the feet of two huge pillars a great fissure had opened.†   (source)
  • The fissure lengthened, and a web of hairline fractures spread outward from it.†   (source)
  • Hieroglyphs blazed to life in front of us: I LI The fissure stopped just short of my feet.†   (source)
  • The two boys sat in the semidarkness of the fissure, breathing the stale air.†   (source)
  • Her mother would step into the fissure and touch that horrible spire—and she would be absorbed.†   (source)
  • As he neared the fissure, he could see a much larger, darker gap beyond it—a cove.†   (source)
  • When I pull her into the fissure, she is wild-eyed and shaking.†   (source)
  • The fissure closed in the balcony floor.†   (source)
  • I stuck the old one into a deep fissure in the tree's bark—couldn't use it again anyway.†   (source)
  • No cracks or fissures appeared within the stone.†   (source)
  • as Winterfell's Great Keep, was as scarred as it was massive, its stones fissured and discolored.†   (source)
  • Then with a rush it leaped across the fissure.†   (source)
  • He's on the fissure where it bends left.†   (source)
  • A fissure spread across the center of the room, coming straight toward Leo and Hazel.†   (source)
  • What few trees they saw were stunted, grotesque things growing sideways out of cracks and fissures.†   (source)
  • No sign of gate or entrance, not a fissure or crack could Frodo see in the frowning stone.†   (source)
  • It possessed no fissures, crevices, or other faults near enough to the ground that he could use to climb its sides.†   (source)
  • Then, up ahead, I heard a massive flushing sound—like water being forced through pipes ...or fissures.†   (source)
  • All I could think of was the fissure in the dining room pavilion, where those skeletons had been consumed last summer.†   (source)
  • His javelin slammed into the earth where Artemis had been a split second before, and a fissure opened in the rocks.†   (source)
  • The triangular formation of the ancients finally broke apart when, with a racking groan, a deep, narrow fissure opened in a long zigzag across the middle of the clearing.†   (source)
  • Underneath her smile and exclamations to my sister and me were fissures that led somewhere deep inside her.†   (source)
  • And then, quite distinctly, I felt the splintering along the fissure line in my heart as the smaller part wrenched itself away from the whole.†   (source)
  • I always wished for my aunt to hold my hand, but she never did, and I had balled my hands into fists and followed the hypnotic swish of her corduroy pants, dreading the moment that St. Anne's Academy for Girls would rise up over the crest of the final hill, the dark stone building lined with fissures and cracks like the weather-beaten face of one of the industrial fishermen who work along the docks.†   (source)
  • The fissure soon opened into a dark tunnel that Harry could tell would be filled with water at high tide.†   (source)
  • Transparent mountain ranges of data, endless glaciers of ROMworks, access ganglia spreading like fissures, iron clouds of semisentient internal pro:ess bubbles, glowing pyramids of primary source stuff, each guarded by lakes of black ice and armies of black-pulse pilages.†   (source)
  • A fissure opened in the stone floor of the workshop, and Minos and all his spirits were sucked into the void with a horrible wail.†   (source)
  • Spiderwebbing cracks fissured the glass-that-was-not-glass; the last thing Clary heard before the Portal dissolved into a deluge of ragged shards was Valentine's derisive laughter.†   (source)
  • Most of them ignored the sealed fissure in the marble floor at the entrance-a ten-foot-long jagged scar that hadn't been there last summer-but I was careful to step over it.†   (source)
  • The son of Nemesis fell through a fissure that went straight through the heart of the mountain—straight into open air.†   (source)
  • A fissure opened in front of the dracaenae, and a dozen undead warriors crawled from the earth-horrible corpses in military uniforms from all different time periods-U. S. Revolutionaries, Roman centurions, Napoleonic cavalry on skeletal horses.†   (source)
  • A wall of force shimmered along the fissure line, separating Kronos's vanguard, my friends, and me from the bulk of the two armies.†   (source)
  • Paul reached the spice patch, shoveled a mound of it into a fold of his robe, returned to the fissure.†   (source)
  • Presently, he looked up the fissure at the new slope, studying it, marking the looseness of the sand.†   (source)
  • The fissure narrowed to some ten meters' width at the brink of a dim gray sandslope that slanted downward into darkness.†   (source)
  • In that instant, the sun lifted above the horizon somewhere to the left beyond the end of the fissure.†   (source)
  • He stopped at the end of the fissure where it looked out on the desert's marching dunes some thirty meters below.†   (source)
  • Jessica nodded, walked to the fissure's mouth where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung her binoculars to the left.†   (source)
  • She turned, seeing that Paul had the tent up, its rib-domed hemisphere blending with the rock walls of the fissure.†   (source)
  • Paul ignored her, leaped to his feet, and was off down the wind-compacted surface that spilled from the end of the fissure to the desert's floor.†   (source)
  • Taking the reworked instrument in one hand, a handful of spice in the other, Paul went back up the fissure, studying the lay of the slope.†   (source)
  • Presently, Paul moved slantwise up the slope, probing cautiously until he found the wall of the fissure, an outcurve of rock there.†   (source)
  • He looked back up the fissure.†   (source)
  • He was out on the hard-packed floor of the fissure then, swinging her to his shoulder and breaking into a staggering run as the entire sandslope came down with a loud hiss that echoed and was magnified within the rock walls.†   (source)
  • Fissures had opened in his cheeks, and a foul white fluid was seeping through the joints of his splendid gold-and-crimson armor to pool beneath his body.†   (source)
  • The afternoon came, and the sun, going west towards the mountains, sent out long yellow beams between the cracks and fissures of the clouds.†   (source)
  • Slowly, ever so slowly, the fissure in the girl's gums and palate fused into a seamless whole, the two sides of her cat lip pulled together—her skin flowing like liquid—and her upper lip gradually formed a pink bow free of flaws.†   (source)
  • At last there was a sound like a gunshot, and a huge crack appeared in the glass, spiderwebbing out into countless fissures.†   (source)
  • She walked, smelling night air and wet leaves and the smell of the city, glittering in the far distance like a faerie castle wreathed in lights—and where she walked, spiderwebbing cracks fissured out from her footsteps and slivers of glass splashed up like water.†   (source)
  • As the glacier inched over humps and dips in the Cum's underlying strata, it fractured into countless vertical fissures-crevasses.†   (source)
  • With a roar, the fissure became a yawning chasm as the surrounding earth sheared away in a flurry of avalanches and rock-slide s. Three of the dreadnoughts vanished from view as they plunged down into the gulf.†   (source)
  • The fissure in the earth had filled with gold and precious stones, bubbling in a thick soup of petroleum.†   (source)
  • From the fissure between them, the river blasted out in a vertical sheet—less like a waterfall and more like a dam splitting down the middle.†   (source)
  • Fords concentrated on the unconscious body; he edged the scalpel through the skin at the base of the subject's skull with small, precise movements, and then sprayed on the medication that stilled the excess flow of blood before he widened the fissure.†   (source)
  • From time to time wooden steps stretched across the fissure to carry them to better footing on the opposite side.†   (source)
  • But others in the British government foresaw a different scenario, one where America's slavery problem would eventually cause a fissure that would split the United States into two countries.†   (source)
  • Seconds later, jets of steam shot from the fissure like geysers, arcing high into the night and dissipating on the wind.†   (source)
  • "For the third time," she said, her face and voice shut tight against any fissure of emotion, "I do not know where he is.†   (source)
  • The ones closest to Jace crumbled first, but the light ran through all of them like a fissure opening in the earth, and one by one they shrieked and dissolved, leaving a thick layer of gray-black ash on the floor.†   (source)
  • A fissure ran across the length of the ceiling and the far end of the cavern collapsed, burying the altar and the pater.†   (source)
  • The very terrain where the gae bolga had struck seemed to be dying, rotting away and collapsing to form a great fissure that spread swiftly beneath the attackers.†   (source)
  • She felt the stone shudder: small fissures appeared, but she clung on grimly, dragging her stele across the wall's surface, swift and slashing.†   (source)
  • The wall of fire had subsided until only a few tongues of flame licked occasionally from the fissure.†   (source)
  • His glance was now like the hands of a man hanging over an abyss, groping frantically for the slightest fissure of doubt, but slipping on the clean, polished rock of her face.†   (source)
  • They had not gone very far when they came upon a great fissure that yawned suddenly black before their feet.†   (source)
  • Jewels and chunks of gold shot from the fissure with such force, they cracked the cavern walls and sent shrapnel flying, stinging Hazel's skin through her jacket.†   (source)
  • The raven's path seemed to be following the curve of the stream as it wended its way west, disappearing finally into a narrow fissure in the wall.†   (source)
  • People with pleading eyes and desperate faces crowded into tents where evangelists cried in triumphant gloating that man was unable to cope with nature, that his science was a fraud, that his mind was a failure, that he was reaping punishment for the sin of pride, for his confidence in his own intellect-and that only faith in the power of mystic secrets could protect him from the fissure of a rail or from the blowout of the last tire on his last truck.†   (source)
  • With cautious skill, tap by tap — a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day — so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock.†   (source)
  • For a moment he thought he'd lost sight of Hugo, and his heart fell—then he saw the black sinking shape as the raven swooped low and disappeared into the dark, fissured hole in the valley's rock wall.†   (source)
  • Black lines fissured out across the stone, cracking into the shape of a door; the edges of the lines began to shimmer.†   (source)
  • Ghosts climbed from the fissure and seeped from the walls—an entire Roman legion in full battle gear.†   (source)
  • David screamed and great gouts of green-gold fire and molten rock roared up from the fissure, pluming higher and higher until they came crashing down like a wave upon the carriage and nearby horde.†   (source)
  • The fissure exploded.†   (source)
  • The fissure was sheltered, and only occasionally did breezes run along its length and jump out again into the abyss.†   (source)
  • A sharp crack echoed through the chamber, and Eragon saw a thin fissure appear at the top of the dark, pitted egg.†   (source)
  • It seemed to sprout from solid rock, its pale roots twisting up from a myriad of fissures and hairline cracks.†   (source)
  • She saw the sentences: "It may be possible that after a period of heavy usage, a sudden fissure may appear, though the length of this period cannot be predicted...The possibility of a molecular reaction, at present unknown, cannot be entirely discounted...Although the tensile strength of the metal is obviously demonstrable, certain questions in regard to its behavior under unusual stress are not to be ruled out....Although there is no evidence to support the contention that the use of the metal should be prohibited, a further study of its properties would be of value."†   (source)
  • Hoping that the floor and the ledges of the thousand-meter fissure he was about to ascend would be relatively free of snow, he began to climb.†   (source)
  • So, over two and a half thousand years ago, the elves built this room atop the fissure, and an oracle came to live here for many hundreds of years, even after the elves abandoned the rest of Ilirea.†   (source)
  • There were fissures and chasms in the walls and floor, and every now and then a crack would open right before their feet.†   (source)
  • Dimly the hobbits could discern tall piers and jagged pinnacles of stone on either side, between which were great crevices and fissures blacker than the night, where forgotten winters had gnawed and carved the sunless stone.†   (source)
  • It looked like a great rampart or sea-wall whose foundations had shifted, so that its courses were all twisted and disordered, leaving great fissures and long slanting edges that were in places almost as wide as stairs.†   (source)
  • Here the fissure stopped sloping to the left and went straight up for fifty meters before it resumed its slanting run.†   (source)
  • The Wailing Tower only wailed when the wind blew from the north, and that was just the sound the air made blowing through the cracks in the stones where they had fissured from the heat.†   (source)
  • It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.†   (source)
  • Alessandro had been following a fissure into which he was able, when he wanted, to insert half his body from head to toe, after which he had simply to bend his knee and sit back, and he was completely wedged in, free to drive a piton, rest, or survey the route above.†   (source)
  • They made fissure lines for the eventual separation of the slabs, provided bases and pivots for cables, cranes, and hooks, and, in a fanciful sense, they killed the virginal marble just as harpoons kill a whale before it, too, is cut into slabs.†   (source)
  • Alessandro climbed like this for more than three hundred meters, talking to himself freely, discarding holds as soon as he had them, breathing ferociously, and forgoing rest when he reached a safe gallery or runway along the fissure.†   (source)
  • Though artillery sometimes shows a broad white flash that turns night to day, it seems to have escaped from a fissure in the ground, and its deep and terrible sound has no relation to the aerial tantrums with which we associate it.†   (source)
  • The winds were sometimes so high that his ears popped with the change in pressure, and the normally hypnotic whistling of the wind through fissures in the shutter frames became louder than the horn of an express train.†   (source)
  • There smokes trailed on the ground and lurked in hollows, and fumes leaked from fissures in the earth.†   (source)
  • But only a short way ahead its floor and the walls on either side were cloven by a great fissure, out of which the red glare came, now leaping up, now dying down into darkness; and all the while far below there was a rumour and a trouble as of great engines throbbing and labouring.†   (source)
  • Still, I was quite vulnerable; fissures would appear in the armor I had wrapped around me, and there were moments when I was assaulted by Kierkegaardian dread.†   (source)
  • The largest of these holes were rimmed with ridges of broken rock, and broad fissures ran out from them in all directions.†   (source)
  • With that he carried all the gear away to one of the many gaping fissures that scored the land and threw them in.†   (source)
  • And yet we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures.†   (source)
  • Those who can, have a fissure somewhere inside.†   (source)
  • What the fissure through which one sees disaster?†   (source)
  • Before vice and shortcoming, admitted in the weariness of maturity, common enough and boring to make an extended showing of, there are, or are supposed to be, silken, unconscious, nature-painted times, like the pastoral of Sicilian shepherd lovers, or lions you can chase away with stones and golden snakes who scatter from their knots into the fissures of Eryx.†   (source)
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