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"Obsidian was also used by the ancient Mexicans to make knives and daggers," Tom went on. "When Cortez conquered Mexico he found the priests cutting the hearts from their living victims with knives made from this volcanic glass-like rock, known as obsidian. It may be that your brother has met with a vein of that in the tunnel," Tom said to the contractor. "Possibly," admitted Mr. Titus.
Imagine eight-and-forty hours of roaring wind, the thermometer well down towards zero, scooping and gouging across a hundred miles of newly fallen snow. The air is full of stinging shot, and at ten yards the trees are invisible. The foot slides on a reef, polished and black as obsidian, where the wind has skinned an exposed corner of road down to the dirt ice of early winter.
He reached a turn in the passage; it was still too dark for him to see anything. He proceeded more cautiously, wondering at those craggy walls. And then Chick slapped his hands to his eyes. It was as if he had been shot into the core of the sun the obsidian darkness flashed into light a light beyond all enduring. Chick staggered, and cried in pain.
The fourth and fifth zones, the regions of the retama and the gramina, occupy heights equal to the most inaccessible summits of the Pyrenees. It is the sterile part of the island where heaps of pumice-stone, obsidian, and broken lava, form impediments to vegetation. Two herbaceous plants, the Scrophularia glabrata and the Viola cheiranthifolia, advance even to the Malpays.
Once able to break his obsidian straight, the workman has got on a long way in his trade, for a large proportion of the articles he has to make are formed by planes intersecting one another in various directions. But the Mexican knives are generally not pointed, but turned up at the end, as one may bend up a druggist's spatula.
Opposite the base of Obsidian Cliff is Beaver Lake, the home of numerous beavers and a great resort for waterfowl during a part of the year. After passing Obsidian Cliff, hot springs become more numerous until we reach Norris Geyser Basin. In this locality the odor of sulphur is strong and unpleasant.
For the last year, I have worn a pin of obsidian which you would swear was an Egyptian scarab if I had not myself obtained it from the ossuaries of the Cave Dwellers in the American Southwest. Come out now to the cave door and look up and down the cañon again!
Some of these furnish a clew to the manner in which the dwellings were formed by scraping and burrowing. Splinters of obsidian and of basalt sharp fragments, resembling clumsy chisels or knives served to dig an oblong hole in the soft pumice or tufa of the cliff.
The "sacrificial stone," so called, which also stands in the court-yard of the Museum, was not one of the ordinary altars on which victims were sacrificed. These altars seem to have been raised slabs of hard stone with a protuberant part near one end, so that the breast of the victim was raised into an arch, which made it more easy for the priest to cut across it with his obsidian knife.
You, a common adventurer will dictate to Zoraida!" For the moment he felt powerless in face of her cold taunting. But there was too much at stake for him to yield now to a feeling of powerlessness. One hand was on her wrist; the gripping fingers of the other shut about the haft of the ancient obsidian knife. The old knife of sacrifice.
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