What is "handrail"

Usage examples of "handrail".

Palewski wondered briefly whether sunlight had penetrated to this spot at all in the past fifteen hundred years: the sunken doorcase, he had long suspected, was early Byzantine work, and he had no reason to imagine that the dark wooden handrail, to which he was now clinging as he swung blindly but unfalteringly upstairs, was anything but Byzantine itself, like the stone of the house, and the window embrasures, and the very probably Roman vaulting overhead.

Ahead, the way was barred by a circular hole in the deckplate, ringed by rusty handrails - a waste chute, scorched and blackened where clinker from the furnaces had been tipped down.

A cool breeze touched their faces as they peered over the handrail and down, the long spiral of stairs dwindling into darkness below with the bronze handrails gleaming.

He noted that the handrails were long unpolished, that a couple of stanchions were missing and that several treads were broken.

Touch-gliding in a series of slow lopes using feet and handrails, he navigated the labyrinth of passages and shafts to a circum-Hub corridor that brought him to the access point.

Adams shrugged, then quickly grasped the handrail by the cargo door as the plane lurched to a heavy sea.

All the carriages were now jolting backwards under the impetus of the releasing pressure of the compressed buffer springs, Jansci, a bunch of keys swinging in one hand and the levelled gun still in the other, was stepping across from the guard's van to the cattle truck, and Reynolds himself was just grabbing hold of the handrail when the guard's van bumped violently into the truck and gave it its initial impetus for the run down the long, gentle hill they had just climbed.

Her husband was at a world-wide congress of ball-bearings manufacturers in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in his absence she invited Gibreel into her apartment of stone lattices from Jaisalmer and carved wooden handrails from Kcralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or cupola turned into a whirlpool bath.

Jago was louging by the companion ladder, but straightened up as Adam seized the handrail.

He grabbed at a handrail and made a dancer's turn into the center of the cabin, recovering from the near-stumble as gracefully as a cat correcting a mis-timed jump.

Moving was like trying to operate a marionette from the inside -- I swayed and pitched from side to side, using a line of parked cars as a combination handrail and crash barrier.

To keep a watch, especially a watch on the bridge, was torture: the first shock of that bitter wind seared the lungs, left a man fighting for breath: if he had forgotten to don gloves-first the silk gloves, then the woollen mittens, then the sheepskin gauntlets-and touched a handrail, the palms of the hands seared off, the skin burnt as by white-hot metal: on the bridge, if he forgot to duck when the bows smashed down into a trough, the flying spray, solidified in a second into hurtling slivers of ice, lanced cheek and forehead open to the bone: hands froze, the very marrow of the bones numbed, the deadly chill crept upwards from feet to calves to thighs, nose and chin turned white with frostbite and demanded immediate attention: and then, by far the worst of all, the end of the watch, the return below deck, the writhing, excruciating agony of .

Two arms and a bundle of rubbery something covered in umber hair lurches out from the handrail and casually grabs hold of the priceless historical relic, then clambers inside and squats on top of the dummy wearing Al Sheperd's age-cracked space suit.

It was a giant moving walkway, and people holding onto moving handrails moved along in ten lanes in either direction.

A rope was tied around the handrail, looped over a beam, and held a long heavy rod suspended over the centre of the reaction engine.