Prostrate

The others gave way, and one stepped backwards and fell over Merry's prostrate form with a curse.

When I was five years old the prodigious disaster of Agincourt fell upon France; and although the English King went home to enjoy his glory, he left the country prostrate and a prey to roving bands of Free Companions in the service of the Burgundian party, and one of these bands came raiding through Neufchâteau one night, and by the light of our burning roof-thatch I saw all that were dear to me in this world (save an elder brother, your ancestor, left behind with the court) butchered while they begged for mercy, and heard the butchers laugh at their prayers and mimic their pleadings.

Above her, on a crag's uneasy shelve, Upon his elbow raised, all prostrate else, Shadow'd Enceladus; once tame and mild As grazing ox unworried in the meads; Now tiger-passion'd, lion-thoughted, wroth, He meditated, plotted, and even now Was hurling mountains in that second war, Not long delay'd, that scared the younger Gods To hide themselves in forms of beast and bird.

Had he forced her to prostrate herself to the ground all night, had he beaten her or made her fetch wood or water, it would never have entered her mind to think her position hard; but this loving despot—the more cruel because he loved her and for that reason tormented himself and her—knew how not merely to hurt and humiliate her deliberately, but to show her that she was always to blame for everything.

"I know how terrible that must sound to you. That's why I was so persecuted by the cretins at that house of horrors the town fathers saw fit to call a high school. I thought it might drive me mad with grief, their passing, or at least prostrate me for a year . . ."

Trembling in every joint, from cold and exhaustion, he made an effort to stand upright; but, shuddering from head to foot, fell prostrate on the ground.

Some of the people who crowded in the carts whipped stupidly at their horses and quarrelled with other drivers; some sat motionless, staring at nothing with miserable eyes; some gnawed their hands with thirst, or lay prostrate in the bottoms of their conveyances.

My wrist bled freely, and quite a little pool trickled on to the carpet. I saw that my friend was not intent on further effort, and occupied myself binding up my wrist, keeping a wary eye on the prostrate figure all the time. When the attendants rushed in, and we turned our attention to him, his employment positively sickened me.

The voice of Labor, despised and outraged; a mighty giant, lying prostrate—mountainous, colossal, but blinded, bound, and ignorant of his strength.

"Anius, the priest and king, with laurel crown'd, His hoary locks with purple fillets bound, Who saw my sire the Delian shore ascend, Came forth with eager haste to meet his friend; Invites him to his palace; and, in sign Of ancient love, their plighted hands they join. Scarce had I said: he shook the holy ground, The laurels, and the lofty hills around; And from the tripos rush'd a bellowing sound. Prostrate we fell; confess'd the present god, Who gave this answer from his dark abode: 'Undaunted youths, go, seek that mother earth From which your ancestors derive their birth. The soil that sent you forth, her ancient race In her old bosom shall again embrace. Through the wide world th' Aeneian house shall reign, And children's children shall the crown sustain.' Thus Phoebus did our future fates disclose: A mighty tumult, mix'd with joy, arose. "All are concern'd to know what place the god Assign'd, and where determin'd our abode.

The vain person rejoices over every good opinion which he hears about himself (quite apart from the point of view of its usefulness, and equally regardless of its truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he subjects himself to both, he feels himself subjected to both, by that oldest instinct of subjection which breaks forth in him.—It is "the slave" in the vain man's blood, the remains of the slave's craftiness—and how much of the "slave" is still left in woman, for instance!—which seeks to seduce to good opinions of itself; it is the slave, too, who immediately afterwards falls prostrate himself before these opinions, as though he had not called them forth.—And to repeat it again: vanity is an atavism.

As strange misgrown masses gather in the knotholes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.

Morrel made another step back, staggering, breathless, crushed; then all his strength give way, and he fell prostrate at the feet of Monte Cristo.

On rushing, in a body, to the cellar, we discovered our beloved President prostrate upon the floor, having tripped and fallen while getting wood for domestic purposes.

"I have lain here now for three days," cried the young man without noticing, "and I have seen a lot! He runs about all night long; he was up at least seven times last night, to satisfy himself that the windows and doors were barred, and to peep into the oven. That man who appears in court for scoundrels, rushes in here in the night and prays, lying prostrate, banging his head on the ground by the half-hour—and for whom do you think he prays? Who are the sinners figuring in his drunken petitions? He is as mad as a March hare!"

By the dim light of the candle, a large tear could be distinguished on the pale and prostrate colonel's cheek, where it had trickled from his dead eye.

I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head—useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for housekeeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trapdoor, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping.

Under the arch of the horse's belly, between his legs, the eye looked through into an intense darkness; below, the space was closed in by the figure of the prostrate man.

5 This is the female form, A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction, I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it, Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear'd of hell, are now consumed, Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable, Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice, Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.

His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode.

And here you had, in this spot or at the edges of it, sixteen elementary-school kids scattered about prostrate on the ground, some of them starting to move, some of them completely still.

Eugene gave a loud shriek of ecstasy and danced about, insane with joy, while Ben, making little snarling noises in his throat, leaped on his brother's prostrate body and thumped his bruised skull upon the boards.

The Arab peasantry were in the grip of Turkish military service, and Syria prostrate before the merciless Jemal Pasha.

"The same goes for you, Nott," said Voldemort quietly as he walked past a stooped figure in Mr. Goyle's shadow. "My Lord, I prostrate myself before you, I am your most faithful —" "That will do," said Voldemort. He had reached the largest gap of all, and he stood surveying it with his blank, red eyes, as though he could see people standing there.

"I thought as much. It don't give lasses a chance. Them as doesn't prostrate therselves afore Leonard 'ull fall afore the all-conquering Albert. It's an absolute walkover for the male sex."

"I demand of you a thousand pardons, monsieur. Monsieur, I am ashamed. I prostrate myself."

Where I have learnt me to repent the sin Of disobedient opposition To you and your behests; and am enjoin'd By holy Lawrence to fall prostrate here, To beg your pardon.

Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing, unresting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God's power, and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript.

And once he'd clambered over the fucking rock wall, he hadn't been able to manage more than a few drops, even though it had felt like a real bladder-buster at the time. Bryan hopes he's not going to have trouble with his prostrate; trouble with the old prostrate is the last thing he needs. He's got enough other problems, by the hairy old Jesus.

And at last I turned my Lambretta homewards, so that I was at the Guru Mandir roundabout with the roar of aircraft overhead, mirages and mysteries, while my father in the idiocy of his stroke was switching on lights and opening windows even though a Civil Defense official had just visited them to make sure the blackout was complete; and when Amina Sinai was saying to the wraith of an old white washing-chest, "Go away now—I've seen enough of you," I was scooting past Civil Defense jeeps from which angry fists saluted me; and before bricks and stones could extinguish the lights in my aunt Alia's house, the whining came, and I should have known there was no need to go looking elsewhere for death, but I was still in the street in the midnight shadow of the mosque when it came, plummeting towards the illuminated windows of my father's idiocy, death whining like pie-dogs, transforming itself into falling masonry and sheets of flame and a wave of force so great that it sent me spinning off my Lambretta, while within the house of my aunt's great bitterness my father mother aunt and unborn brother or sister who was only a week away from starting life, all of them all of them all squashed flatter than rice-pancakes, the house crashing in on their heads like a waffle-iron, while over on Korangi Road a last bomb, meant for the oil-refinery, landed instead on a split-level American-style residence which an umbilical cord had not quite managed to complete; but at Guru Mandir many stories were coming to an end, the story of Amina and her long-ago underworld husband and her assiduity and public announcement and her son-who-was-not-her-son and her luck with horses and verrucas and dancing hands in the Pioneer Café and last defeat by her sister, and of Ahmed who always lost his way and had a lower lip which stuck out and a squashy belly and went white in a freeze and succumbed to abstraction and burst dogs open in the street and fell in love too late and died because of his vulnerability to what-falls-out-of-the-sky; flatter than pancakes now, and around them the house exploding collapsing, an instant of destruction of such vehemence that things which had been buried deep in forgotten tin trunks flew upward into the air while other things people memories were buried under rubble beyond hope of salvation; the fingers of the explosion reaching down down to the bottom of an almirah and unlocking a green tin trunk, the clutching hand of the explosion flinging trunk-contents into air, and now something which has hidden unseen for many years is circling in the night like a whirligig piece of the moon, something catching the light of the moon and falling now falling as I pick myself up dizzily after the blast, something twisting turning somersaulting down, silver as moonlight, a wondrously worked silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli, the past plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before my parents' funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all the Saleems go pouring out of me, from the baby who appeared in jumbo-sized front-page baby-snaps to the eighteen-year-old with his filthy dirty love, pouring out goes shame and guilt and wanting-to-please and needing-to-be-loved and determined-to-find-a-historical-role and growing-too-fast, I am free of Snotnose and Stainface and Baldy and Sniffer and Mapface and washing-chests and Evie Burns and language marches, liberated from Kolynos Kid and the breasts of Pia mumani and Alpha-and-Omega, absolved from the multiple murders of Homi Catrack and Hanif and Aadam Aziz and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, I have shaken off five-hundred-year-old whores and confessions of love at dead of night, free now, beyond caring, crashing on to tarmac, restored to innocence and purity by a tumbling piece of the moon, wiped clean as a wooden writing-chest, brained (just as prophesied) by my mother's silver spittoon.

"Shai-hulud spare us! "Take Shaitan away... " Slowly, not wanting to arouse the prostrate priests, Sheeana began the shuffling, unrhythmic movements of the dance. As the remembered music grew within her, she unclasped her hands and swung her arms wide. Their hands clapped rhythmically as they chanted the ancient words: "Our fathers ate manna in the desert, "In the burning places where whirlwinds came!"

The squire, who saw expiring on the ground His prostrate master, rein'd the steeds around; His back, scarce turn'd, the Pelian javelin gored, And stretch'd the servant o'er his dying lord.

He found them all going about their various business with the exception of Mrs. James Ratcliffe, who was prostrate in bed and being attended by the doctor, who deplored the nervous shock she had received.

"Instead of resisting his two antagonists, he surrendered suddenly to both of them. He gave way like a Japanese wrestler, and his foes fell prostrate before him. He gave up the race round the world, and he gave up his address to young Antonelli; then he gave up everything to his brother. He sent Stephen money enough for smart clothes and easy travel, with a letter saying roughly: 'This is all I have left. You have cleaned me out. I still have a little house in Norfolk, with servants and a cellar, and if you want more from me you must take that. Come and take possession if you like, and I will live there quietly as your friend or agent or anything.' He knew that the Sicilian had never seen the Saradine brothers save, perhaps, in pictures; he knew they were somewhat alike, both having grey, pointed beards. Then he shaved his own face and waited. The trap worked. The unhappy captain, in his new clothes, entered the house in triumph as a prince, and walked upon the Sicilian's sword. "There was one hitch, and it is to the honour of human nature.

Tom stood over the prostrate man.

Such fire to use, And what may else be remedy or cure To evils which our own misdeeds have wrought, He will instruct us praying, and of grace Beseeching him; so as we need not fear To pass commodiously this life, sustained By him with many comforts, till we end In dust, our final rest and native home. What better can we do, than, to the place Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall Before him reverent, and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeigned and humiliation meek?

Don Quixote was, as has been said, speaking to the lady in the coach: "Your beauty, lady mine," said he, "may now dispose of your person as may be most in accordance with your pleasure, for the pride of your ravishers lies prostrate on the ground through this strong arm of mine; and lest you should be pining to know the name of your deliverer, know that I am called Don Quixote of La Mancha, knight-errant and adventurer, and captive to the peerless and beautiful lady Dulcinea del Toboso: and in return for the service you have received of me I ask no more than that you should return to El Toboso, and on my behalf present yourself before that lady and tell her what I have done to set you free."

His first thought was that the prostrate figure was that of some wounded or dying man, but as he watched it he saw it writhe along the ground and into the hall with the rapidity and noiselessness of a serpent.