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In his term he had seen many another come in hope, linger in disappointment, leave only to go to a meaner cell in the same stratum of misfortune. What could be done to prevent it? Nothing that the wits of P. Sybarite could compass: he was as inefficient as any gnat in any web.... Through the halls resounded the cacophonous clangour of a cracked gong announcing dinner.
At four o'clock, that hour before dawn cracks, even the West Forties, where night is too often cacophonous with the sound of revelry, drop into long narrow aisles of gloom.
There is no such thing as a singly euphonious or a singly cacophonous name. There is no word which, by itself, sounds ill or well. In combination, names or words may be made to sound ill or well. A sentence can be musical or unmusical. But in detachment words are no more preferable one to another in their sound than are single notes of music.
Bewildered, Des Esseintes looked on and listened to the cacophonous sounds of the names: the Encephalartos horridus, a gigantic iron rust-colored artichoke, like those put on portals of chateaux to foil wall climbers; the Cocos Micania, a sort of notched and slender palm surrounded by tall leaves resembling paddles and oars; the Zamia Lehmanni, an immense pineapple, a wondrous Chester leaf, planted in sweet-heather soil, its top bristling with barbed javelins and jagged arrows; the Cibotium Spectabile, surpassing the others by the craziness of its structure, hurling a defiance to revery, as it darted, through the palmated foliage, an enormous orang-outang tail, a hairy dark tail whose end was twisted into the shape of a bishop's cross.
Not so. However slight the belly may be, the insect nevertheless possesses one, correctly proportioned to the rest of the body, so that the classic denomination, far from giving us any information, might mislead us, were we to trust it wholly. Nomenclature, which changes from day to day and becomes more and more cacophonous, is an unsafe guide.
Then came the vicar, following her from the drawing-room, and all three went on. Presently Short heard the front door open and Mr. Ambrose shouted to the fly. "Muggins! Muggins!" No one had ever been able to say why Abraham Boosey, the publican, had christened his henchman with an appellation so vulgar, to say the least of it so amazingly cacophonous.
Since Goodloe had not cut off the connection, the mingled clamor of the station came to the listening ear; the incessant clicking of the telegraph instruments on Goodloe's table, the trundling roar of a baggage-truck on the station platform, the cacophonous screech of the passenger-engine's pop-valve.
The company's entrance into the township of Guichen, if not exactly triumphal, as Binet had expressed the desire that it should be, was at least sufficiently startling and cacophonous to set the rustics gaping. To them these fantastic creatures appeared as indeed they were beings from another world.
We have inserted a large number of place names in this narrative, not because the names are famous or to be found in any but a very large scale map, nor because there was even anything at these places to justify their having names at all, but because each little group of cacophonous Arabic words will call up to those who were with us memories and mental pictures of incidents and scenes, otherwise forgotten.
This was what she told herself. She grabbed thick lips by one of his long ears and forced him to kneel. "Do you think I'd let an ugly dog like you slobber on me?" she blared. There was more hysterical laughter. The room itself seemed to scoff her pretension to motherhood within the sheer volume of its cacophonous and sneering laughter.
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