I explained that they were bare masses of stone, with hardly enough earth in their clefts to nourish a stunted tree.
Now, this wall is seamed with fissures and clefts which already allow the sulphurous gases generated in the interior of the volcano to escape.
There, through scarcely visible clefts and joinings, escaped a pungent vapor, which infected the atmosphere of the cavern.
In a few moments Harding and Herbert on one side, the reporter and Neb on the other, had disappeared behind the rocks, and five minutes later Ayrton and Pencroft, having without difficulty crossed the channel, disembarked on the islet and concealed themselves in the clefts of its eastern shore.
They hunted there, among the shingle, in the clefts of the rocks, but found nothing.
Already the others had begun to lend an ear to this encouragement and were coming a little to themselves, when the same voice broke out again--not this time singing, but in a faint distant hail that echoed yet fainter among the clefts of the Spy-glass.
" Such was the opinion and the speech of men; but not of those creatures who had been born here, and who built and dwelt here—of the rats, namely, who were squeaking to one another in the clefts of a crumbling wall, quite plainly, and in a way the Dryad understood well.
There are gaps in the snowy mountains, the sun shines into the clefts; spring is coming, the birds are returning, and new races are coming with the same home sounds in their hearts.
He knew not; but the walls of ice shone like blue-green glass; innumerable clefts yawned around him, and the water-drops tinkled like the chiming of church bells, and shone clearly as pearls in the light of a pale-blue flame.
" The way led across the rushing Lutschine, which falls in numerous streams from the dark clefts of the Grindelwald glaciers.
I blew the smoke and ashes into his face and beard; I moaned through the broken window-panes, and the yawning clefts in the walls; I blew into the chests and drawers belonging to his daughters, wherein lay the clothes that had become faded and threadbare, from being worn over and over again.
I observed the clefts and wrinkles in the stem; they shone forth in strange colors, and took the form of hieroglyphics.
There grew magnificent oaks and beech-trees; and if the bark was split of any of them, long blades of grass grew out of the clefts; there were also large smooth lakes in the wood, on which the swans were swimming about and flapping their wings.
A FEW large lizards were running nimbly about in the clefts of an old tree; they could understand one another very well, for they spoke the lizard language.
The wild fig tree grows in the clefts of the wall, and covers the nakedness thereof with its broad grey-green leaves; trampling among heaps of rubbish, the ass treads upon green laurels, and rejoices over the rank thistles.
