But some managed to retrieve a few possessions.
While investors believed they had $65bn of savings, liquidators have only been able to retrieve a few million dollars.
He managed to retrieve a few fragments, which gave him the confidence to search much older fossils — first of animals, and then of ancient humans.
With luck and work, scholars retrieve a few splinters, put them in a guessed-at order and turn on some lights.
When, some mornings, I return, to retrieve a few final oddments — andirons, picture frames — the space of the house greets me with virginal impudence.
The downtown area was cordoned off and Mr. Katz was allowed to enter his apartment only once, for 15 minutes, to retrieve a few of his things.
Due to a disability, she stayed at home raising pigs while the rest of the household went out to work; she was the only one there when the house collapsed around her. Now her family are sheltering under a tarpaulin with the meagre possessions they retrieved: a few wooden stools and a couple of quilts.
Johnson retrieved a few wayward rebounds for the kid, and then headed into a nearby high-rise, where he was joined by another cousin, who goes by the name Boom (short for Tick-Tick-Boom, a reference to his three-point shot), and an old friend, Arva.
After retrieving a few items, he and Whatling notified the landowners (Suffolk County Council), and the police, without attempting to dig out any more objects.
All vesicles were eventually retrieved, over many minutes, suggesting that the clathrin machinery processed the membrane very slowly, retrieving a few vesicles at a time, then disengaging the coat (uncoating) and proceeding to the next set of vesicles.
(The crystal image comes from the salt mines of Salzburg, where it was the custom to hang a branch at the mine's entrance, then retrieve it a few months later, when — says Stendhal — "its smallest twigs, those no larger than a titmouse's paw, are spangled with an infinity of diamonds, dancing and dazzling").
