"Arid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... places he loves, in remembrance or in hope,—those that have witnessed his happiness or his misery, and those so beautiful countries unknown to us, where we expect to find everything at once. Doubtless there is not a spot on the whole earth, a wild rock, an arid plain, over which we pass with indifference, that has not been consecrated in the life of some man, and is not painted in his remembrance; for, like battered vessels, before meeting inevitable wreck, we leave some fragment of ourselves on ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Sforza, Lodovico made a fair and large piazza, and adorned it with many noble buildings and a fine park, which he filled with beasts of prey for the pleasure of the ducal family. He also laid out some most beautiful gardens, and since all this country was very dry and arid, he constructed aqueducts with great artifice and ingenuity, and brought water into the place in such abundance that these lands, which had hitherto been sterile and barren, bore fruit in great quantities. And so entirely did he improve and alter ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... with the arid deserts and fearful mountains amongst which we had wandered for so many years, this country struck us as most charming, and indeed, seen by the red light of the sinking sun on that spring day, even as beautiful with the same kind of beauty which is to be found in Holland. One could ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... been to many of them a torturer, full of anguish and disappointments—a hard taskmaster, driving them on from day to day with weary feet and heavy heart, as over arid deserts where no sweet waters were springing from the wells of human love, or friendship, to slake their thirst for sympathy; they had prayed for death, they had writhed in the power of this life, and sought to be rid of it, as a prisoner of his bonds,—and now, when the bubbling waves came ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... "misguided attention to the desolate West." But few statesmen and fewer of the outside public in that day possessed the prophetic vision to perceive the future greatness of what were termed the "arid wastes" of Arizona and California. This was shown by the perfect hail of protest that swept to the White House when the terms of the Gadsden Treaty, drawn up by a man who as minister to a great minor republic had had ample opportunities to study at his leisure the nature of the country and the people ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... and the country to which even then he had given his future would lie in his relations with any woman, he would have treated the prediction as mere folly. To go far enough back in accounting for this one would arrive at the female sort, sterling and arid, that had presided over his childhood and represented the sex to his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare, who had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed and mended him from babyhood, good gaunt creature half-servant and half-friend—the mature respectable ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... although more elevated, would yet be quite cool (frais) so as to allow the plant to live, and then after having lived there, and passed through many generations there, it should gradually reach the poor and almost arid soil of a mountain side—if the plant should thrive and live there and perpetuate itself during a series of generations, it would then be so changed that the botanists who should find it there would describe it ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... itself, and Aholibah remained in the arid and flavourless town. Her intimate friends had weeks earlier gone to Trouville, to Dinard, to Ostende, to Hombourg, even as far as Brighton; but she lingered, seemingly from perversity. She came regularly to ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... spirit of individualism, restive under control. On the other hand, the sense of sharing with others the arduous tasks and dangers of conquering the wilderness gave birth to a strong sense of solidarity arid of human sympathy. With the lure of free lands ever before them, the pioneers developed a restlessness and a nervous energy, blended with a buoyancy of spirit, which are fundamentally American. Yet this same untrammeled freedom occasioned a disregard for law and a defiance of established government ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... army lay upon the burning sands of that arid plain, the greater part of the line without the friendly shelter of a tree, weary, yet not discouraged; grimy and dirty, and choked with dust, yet uttering no words ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... the torturing thirst from which I was suffering asserted itself. I could sleep no more. I had been dreaming that I was bathing in a running stream, with green banks and trees upon them, and I awoke to find myself in this arid wilderness, and to remember, as Umbopa had said, that if we did not find water this day we must perish miserably. No human creature could live long without water in that heat. I sat up and rubbed my grimy face with my dry and horny hands, as my lips and eyelids were stuck together, and it ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... plain, they met the mules. The driver's mouth fell open at the Frank's command to turn back, just when they were near the limit of that arid waste and all the beasts were tired. It was some time before this man, Mahmud, had mind for aught beyond his own complaints; but when at length he realised that Iskender, his good friend, was in disgrace, he also made entreaty for his pardon. The Emir, with him on one ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... nature of grace, between the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Having abandoned medicine and theology he got called to the Bar, practised for a while with distinct success, and coquetted with a notion of codifying the laws of the realm. The Bar proved too arid a profession to engage for long his attention; so he next sought and found a place in the office of another brother, Pierre, who was Chief Commissioner of Taxes in Paris. Here Perrault had little to do save to read at large in the excellent library ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... on leaving the flat monotonous banks of the Danube is anything but prepossessing. Although the land begins to rise almost immediately, the surrounding scenery is flat and arid. The soil, which is black or dark grey, is chiefly argillo-siliceous, and the plain is overrun with coarse grass, weeds, and stunted shrubs, diversified by fields of maize, patches of yellow gourds, and kitchen vegetables. Here and there the railway runs through or skirts ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... intensely fierce, and Smith, who found its glare affecting his eyes painfully, had donned a pair of huge blue-glass goggles. He was glad that he had done so when, passing over the crowded shipping of the port, he saw the sandy arid tracts around and beyond the town. Steamers hooted as the aeroplane flew above them; half-naked coolies lading the vessels with wheat and cotton, the produce of Sindh and the Punjab, dropped their loads and stared upwards in stupefied amazement. Smith could not wait to enjoy his first view ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... LIGHTNING PLANT, SIMPLER'S JOY, and so on through a long list of popular names for the most part testifying to the plant's virtue as a love-philter, bridal token, and general cure-all, has now become naturalized from the Old World on the Atlantic and Pacific Slopes; and is rapidly appropriating waste arid cultivated ground until, in many places, it is truly troublesome. In general habit like the blue vervain, its flowers are more purplish than blue, and are scattered, not crowded, along the spikes. The leaves are deeply, but less ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... a fact. God can cause the most discordant agencies to agree in effecting his purpose. Babylon is alternately an overflowed swamp, from the inundations of the obstructed Euphrates, and an arid desert, under the scorching rays of an Eastern sun. Says Mignon: "Morasses and ponds tracked the ground in various places. For a long time after the subsiding of the Euphrates great part of this place is little better than a swamp." At another season it was "a dry waste ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... items of elementary education, which present themselves even at the age of six, and must be seriously envisaged at seven, urge their objection in this form: Now we are face to face with the ugly specter of arithmetical tables, the arid mental gymnastics exacted by grammar. What do you propose? Would you abolish all this, or do you admit that the child must inevitably ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... guardians both strange and headstrong, some sheep would never get near the food necessary to keep them alive. Confined to the provender even their shepherds would have them contented withal, many would die. Sometimes, to escape from the arid wastes of "society," haunted with the cries of its spiritual greengrocers, and find the pasture on which their souls can live, they have to die, and climb the grassy slopes ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the sun-burnt barren rock, the arid lonely spot where we had to undergo nearly two years of ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... feathers on the neck and underparts have narrow dark borders, thus giving the plumage a scaly appearance, from which the birds take their name. They have a small tuft of whitish or buffy feathers on the top of the head. It is especially abundant in the dry arid portions of its range, being found often many miles away from water. Their eggs are laid in a shallow hollow under some small bush or cactus, and number from eight to sixteen; they are creamy white, finely specked with buff or pale brownish. Size ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... "the Ants were putting their damp food to dry in the sun. There came a starving Cigale to beg from them. She begged for a few grains. The greedy misers replied: 'You sang in the summer, now dance in the winter.'" This, although somewhat more arid, is precisely La Fontaine's story, and is contrary ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... Newton was to find the key; and so we, grown weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect the final combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new social era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid sophisters who assume that the last word of civilisation has been heard in existing arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from history to hope that generations will come, to whom our system of distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... from his stairway, crossed Main Street, and strode up the shady Court House walk. On the left side of the walk, a-tiptoe in an arid fountain, was poised a gracious nymph of cast-iron, so chastely garbed as to bring to the cheek of elderly innocence no faintest flush. On the walk's right side stood a rigid statue, suggesting tetanus in the model, of the city's founder, ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... ground which you intend to plant with vines were loose and arid, then I would never hesitate to advise you to always use in that case rooted vines, because the cuttings without roots would not absorb the rainy water which in such kind of soil runs away in the same time it takes to fall. This is the reason why, ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... those sinister persons who seem to smell blood and presage crime, reached Avignon from Versailles: his name was Jourdan. He is not to be confounded with another revolutionist of the same name, born at Avignon. Sprung from the arid and calcined mountains of the south, where the very brutes are more ferocious; by turns butcher, farrier, and smuggler, in the gorges which separate Savoy from France; a soldier, deserter, horse-jobber, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... fancies and wild day-dreams of the young, and you will never lead them beyond dull facts—dull because their relations to each other, and the one life that works in them all, must remain undiscovered. Whoever would have his children avoid this arid region will do well to allow no teacher to approach them—not even ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the waterless crystal which seeks to complete itself by means of our sea, to quench the thirst of its arid rigidity, and ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... ineffaceable hieroglyphics the symbol of Norwegian life, bestowing on these coasts the conformation of a fish's spine, fishery being the staple commerce of the country, and well-nigh the only means of living of the hardy men who cling like tufts of lichen to the arid cliffs. Here, through fourteen degrees of longitude, barely seven hundred thousand souls maintain existence. Thanks to perils devoid of glory, to year-long snows which clothe the Norway peaks and guard them from profaning foot of traveller, these sublime beauties are ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... done. Masses of stone, with a few grey-looking plants growing amidst the arid cracks, a little scattered dry grass in patches, and a few bushy-looking shrubs of a dull sagey green; that was all. There were plenty of stones near, one of which looked like a safe shelter for serpent or lizard; and some horny-looking beetles were busily crawling about. Above all the ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... having been sped upon their way to the Far East. Stephen remembered with more than his usual relish an engagement to dine that evening in Middleton street. He involuntarily glanced at his watch. It was half-past one. The afternoon looked arid, stretching between. Consulting his tablets, he found that he had nothing that was really of any consequence to do. There were items, but they were unimportant, transferable. He had dismissed Hilda Howe, but a glow from the world she helped to illumine showed ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and are the happy possessors of a "rain-stone." In consideration of a proper payment, the Wawamba wash the precious stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in a pot full of water. After that the rain cannot fail to come. In the arid wastes of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches sought to make rain by carrying water from a certain spring and throwing it on a particular point high up on a rock; after that they imagined that the clouds would soon gather, and that rain ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... in vain for any continuous sign of vegetation. A peculiarity of the land is the entire absence of woods and forests; hence also the absence of wild beasts, only hyenas, jackals, and wolves being found. Here and there, at long intervals, an oasis was observed like a smile breaking over the arid face of nature upon which a settled gloom rested nearly all the while. Once or twice there was seen a cluster of solitary palms by a rude stone wall, hedged in by a little patch of green earth, about which a few camels and goats were ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... souls, like their farms, would show here a patch of grain, and there the tares; there the weeds and here the sowing; over this place the rain has been, and that other, to one looking down upon it from afar, seems brown and desolate, wasted by fire or made arid by the drought? In this man's life is a poor beginning, but a better end; in this other's we see the foundations, the staging, and the schemes of mighty structures, now stopped, given over, or abandoned; of vessels, fashioned ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... more hopefully of the future. As they travelled northward they reached a region of greater cultivation and in their route passed some of the big fruit farms that were becoming more and more a feature of the country. Spots of beauty in the wilderness, carved out of arid desert by patience and perseverance and threatened always by the devastating locust, though no longer subjected to the Arab raids that had been a daily menace twenty or thirty years before. The motley gangs of European and native workers toiling more or less diligently in the vineyards and among ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... down in an avenue of lime-trees, which are still permitted to grow in that ancient place. In the centre of that avenue is a fountain, surmounted by a Triton so grey and moss-eaten, that though he holds his conch to his swelling lips, curling his tail in the arid basin, his instrument has had a sinecure for at least fifty years; and did not think fit even to play when the Bourbons, in whose time he was erected, came back from their exile. At the end of the lime-tree ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blessed ignorance of times to be when at "Vicksburg and the Bends" this same waiter would bring his coffee made of corn-meal bran and muddy water, with which to wash down scant snacks of mule meat. The listless eye still roamed the arid page as the slave returned with the fragrant pot and cup, but now the sitter laid it by, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... the fourth planet for his base. Although much smaller, it had the same reddish, arid look as his own home planet, while the third world was three-quarters drowned in water. But there were two factors that weighed so heavily against that choice that they rendered it impossible. In the first place, by far the greater proportion ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... him, rose the black cone of the mountain, over whose top the lazy clouds of thin white smoke were floating, tinged with the evening light; around him the desolate convulsed waste,—so arid, so supernaturally dreary; and below, like a soft enchanted dream, the beautiful bay, the gleaming white villas and towers, the picturesque islands, the gliding sails, flecked and streaked and dyed with the violet and pink and purple of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... blooms," he muses as he issues out of the forest and reaches the top of the mountain, "to the cliffs round which the eagles flit,—what a glorious promontory! What a contrast at this height, in this immensity, between the arid rocky haunts of the mountain bear and eagle and the spreading, vivifying verdure surrounding the haunts of man. On one side are the sylvan valleys, the thick grown ravines, the meandering rivulets, the fertile plains, the silent villages, and on the distant horizon, the sea, rising like ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... ghost stalk'd towards me with outstretch'd hand: I put mine behind me, and back'd away; My terrified brain could not understand, And my arid lips had nothing ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... without success, as some other kind of vermin is nearly certain to spring the trap before the chetah's arrival. Among the variety of small animals thus caught I have frequently taken the civet cat. This is a very pretty arid curious creature, about forty inches long from nose to tip of tail. The fur is ash-gray, mottled with black spots, and the tail is divided by numerous black rings. It is of the genius Viverra, and is exceedingly fierce when attacked. It preys chiefly upon fowls, hares, rats, etc. Its great ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... at noon, we were ordered to go to M———, and at 12.15 we were in convoy formation in the road by the barracks wall. The great route nationale from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun runs through a rolling, buff-brown moorland, poor in villages and arid and desolate in aspect. Now it sinks through moorland valleys, now it cuts bowl-shaped depressions in which the spring rains have bred green quagmires, and now, rising, leaps the crest of a hill commanding a landscape of ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... me, how different it was from those to which I had been accustomed on Earth! Out of a pink sky flakes of frozen dew were gently falling, starching the arid, verdureless soil with a glistening coat of evanescent white. Along the river bank, tall, slender, lightly-rooted trees reached far up into the breathless air, but there was never the movement of ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... highly favourable for solving the great question of the habitability of the moon. Yet the solution of this question escaped him still. He could only distinguish the deserted beds of the immense plains, and, towards the north, arid mountains. No labour betrayed the hand of man. No ruin indicated his passage. No agglomeration of animals indicated that life was developed there, even in an inferior degree. There was no movement anywhere, no appearance of vegetation ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... dissolved carbonic acid, and in colder countries to frost; the disintegrated matter is carried down even gentle slopes during heavy rain, and to a greater extent than might be supposed, especially in arid districts, by the wind; it is then transported by the streams and rivers, which, when rapid deepen their channels, and triturate the fragments. On a rainy day, even in a gently undulating country, we see the effects of subaerial ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... condition of mind when the capacity for feeling seems concentrated on a single centre of pain. Her soul revolved in a circle, and outside of its narrow orbit there was only the arid flatness which surrounds any moment of vivid experience. The velvet slippers, which might have been worn by the young clergyman, possessed a vital and romantic interest in her thoughts, but the mill and the machinery of which Abel was speaking ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... at one island, on which we also landed. It was completely surrounded by precipitous cliffs, arid, stony, rugged, treeless, unwatered. We contrived to clamber up the rocks, and advanced along a track beset with thorns and snags—a hideous scene. When we reached the prison and the place of punishment, what first drew our wonder ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... be regarded. It may be to you a region of dreams, and extravagant Anticipations. The mind may easily be allowed so to dwell on its scenes, that imagination shall take the place of reality. Circumstances often warrant but moderate expectations; yet amid the most arid waste you see, like the deceived traveller in the deserts of Zahara, the enchanting mirage, a beautiful lake of ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... masonry, built at great expense, and containing the most delicious water; but how few of us ever dream of asking at whose cost the trees that afford us and our followers such agreeable shade were planted, or the wells that afford us such copious streams of fine water in the midst of dry, arid plains were formed! We go on enjoying all the advantages which arise from the noble public spirit that animates the people of India to benevolent exertions, without once calling in question the truth of the assertion ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... and were seriously occupied in sacrificing each other's feelings on the altar of experimental cookery, in herding sheep with the assistance of paper novels, and in writing exceedingly long letters to the North. This wall-tent was the larva of the ranch. But the arid southern country proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them down in a delightful pasture-land, watered by three ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... circle, in front of the tent, Crusoe drove two rows of strong stakes sharpened at the top, about six inches apart. He laid pieces of rope between the stakes. The fence was about five arid a half feet high and so strong ...
— Story Hour Readers Book Three • Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie
... perceive,' he said. A delightful sense of well-being came into my mind. I sat down in the sweetness of ease after fatigue, of refreshment after weariness, of pleasant sounds and sights after the arid way. I said to myself that my past experiences had been a mistake, that this was where I ought to have come from the first, that life here would be happy, and that all intruding thoughts must soon vanish ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... had sweated up several most steep and dusty streets—hot and dusty, although it was but nine o'clock in the morning. Thence the guide conducted us into some little dust-powdered gardens, in which the people make believe to enjoy the verdure, and whence you look over a great part of the arid, dreary, stony city. There was no smoke, as in honest London, only dust—dust over the gaunt houses and the dismal yellow strips of gardens. Many churches were there, and tall half-baked-looking public edifices, that had a ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... broken only by the bells, by the chanting of the offices heard through the windows of the church, by the call of the jackdaws nesting in the belfries. The region is a desert of stones, a solitude with a character of its own, an arid spot, which could only be inhabited by beings who had either attained to absolute nullity, or were gifted with some abnormal strength of soul. The house in question had always been occupied by abbes, and it belonged to an old maid named Mademoiselle Gamard. Though ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... while in addition to this he never failed to express his meaning clearly. Giotto indeed was not so much the pupil of any human master as of Nature herself, for in addition to his splendid natural gifts, he studied Nature diligently, arid was always contriving new things and borrowing ideas ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... peculiar, fantastic, jingling manner which, illegitimate as it is, disorderly and scandalous to all lovers of propriety in style and diction, is at all events the very opposite to dulness—forms perhaps the most fortunate contrast that could have been devised with the Cromwellian period, so arid and colourless, so lengthy and so tortuous, tinged often with such a dismal obscurity, and valuable in fact only as showing the man, utterly valueless as an exposition of thought. Perhaps, as models of style, a critic would be as little disposed to applaud the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... hand by apparently small volcanic cones, though of no inconsiderable size, which tend in a great degree to increase the apparent dimensions of the central mountain. Some of these cones are covered with vegetation, but others are arid and bare. From this variety in the progress of vegetation, some persons have endeavoured to calculate the relative ages of the cones; but these opinions are exceedingly vague, as it requires a longer period to form a soil on some lavas than on others. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... witnessed in wonder. Never did the Germans come within touch of their foes, always visible, but not to be overtaken. When at last Count Herbert was convinced that his horses were no match for the fleet steeds of his opponents he discovered that he and his band were hopelessly lost in the arid and pathless desert, the spears of the seemingly phantom host ever quivering before him in the tremulous heated air against the cloudless horizon. Now all his energies were bent toward finding the way that led to the camp by the water-holes, but sense of locality ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... was not so clear. It lost itself amongst the innumerable tales of conspiracies and plots against the tyrant as a stream is lost in an arid belt of sandy country before it emerges, diminished and troubled, perhaps, on the other side. The doctor made no secret of it that he had lived for years in the wildest parts of the Republic, wandering with almost unknown Indian ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... which the train rolls, hour after hour, is the result of a great uplift. It was not sudden; it was slow but sure. This result is arid and plateautudinous, in a manner of speaking—not the best manner. It makes me think of democracy—and prohibition. To this complexion we shall come at last. To be sure, the genius of man will continue to cut channels ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... particular interest for any mortal man. Simkin contradicted it. Sutherland repeated it. Simkin knocked Sutherland's helmet overboard. Sutherland returned the compliment in kind, and their comrades had to quell an intestine war, while the lost head-pieces were left on the arid plain, where they were last seen surrounded by wonder-stricken and long-legged natives of the ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... 1880, at that fabled hour of the setting sun so vaunted by the guide-books Joanne and Baedeker, an hermetic yellow fog, complicated with a flurry of snow in white spirals, enveloped the summit of the Rigi (Regina monhum) and its gigantic hotel, extraordinary to behold on the arid waste of those heights,—that Rigi-Kulm, glassed-in like a conservatory, massive as a citadel, where alight for a night and a day a flock of tourists, worshippers of ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... they are so; in another, they are as wild and untamed as when buzzing and collecting their sweets in the vineyard of Timnath, where the mighty Sampson took their honey from the carcass of the dead lion; or, as when John the Baptist, clothed with camel's hair, ate "locusts and wild honey" in the arid wastes of Palestine. Although kept in partial bondage for six thousand years, the ruling propensity of the bee is to seek a home and shelter in the forest, when it emerges in a swarm from the parent hive; and no amount of domestic accommodation, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... them out of the mountains, led them deeper into their fatal recesses. The morning dawned upon them in a narrow rambla, its bottom formed of broken rocks, where once had raved along the mountain-torrent, while above there beetled great arid cliffs, over the brows of which they beheld the turbaned heads of their fierce and exulting foes. What a different appearance did the unfortunate cavaliers present from that of the gallant band that marched so vauntingly out of Antiquera! ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from being attractive. Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing to say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner. Then Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems arid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in Cowper, instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observations on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school- work of those ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the palisade continued, an endless barrier of sheer cliffs crowned with pine and hemlock. But the interesting section of the landscape lay almost directly in front of me—a rent in the mountain-wall through which appeared to run a level, arid plain, miles wide, and as smooth and even ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... other man she knew. Had not Norah married a plain farmer who was only a tenant? The new little Rose's father was not to be compared to Martin, and yet he had brought the supreme experience to her sister. So Rose sat dreaming, the arid level of monotonous days which, one short hour ago, had stretched before her, flowering into fragrant, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... the shore, and then enjoy a luncheon in the grotto, while the basalt columns vibrate like harps to the breeze. This arid reef, little as it is, compared with the cramped limits of the Chancellor's deck is like some vast domain; soon there will be scarcely a stone with which we are not familiar, scarcely a portion ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... hundred men, with seven batteries of Horse Artillery at his disposal. Between his camp and the mining city lay Cronje with a mobile force as large as French's own. Add to this that the ground to be covered consisted largely of arid and well-less veldt, affording neither food nor drink for man or beast. The time too was the African summer, with all the difficulties of handling partly raw English troops to be faced. The task before French and his men was certainly such ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... man. On the very first night, after he had travelled his tired horse on past sunset as long as he dared, he found a big patch of parakelia. This extraordinary plant sends up thick moisture-filled leaves in the middle of the most arid desert. The juice, which can be easily squeezed from parakelia leaves, tastes bitter and is not at all pleasant, but it has saved the life of many a bold adventurer in Central Australia. Stock can live on it for weeks at a time without a drink of water, and once Ajax got a mouthful of these ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... topic as this. Dr. Southard has said some of the things I would have said. I supposed this society was primarily interested in pragmatic discussions. At any rate, I left the American Philosophical Society some years ago and entered this to get rid of metaphysics and arid abstractions. As to what Dr. Swift says, it seems to me imitation plays a great but is by no means the sole role. It is of course purely instinctive, and the social instinct comes in everywhere, so much so that discussion on almost any topic is ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... August, 1856, the bark Northampton was lying in the harbor of San Diego. In spite of the awning spread over her deck the heat was almost unbearable. Not a breath of wind was stirring in the land-locked harbor, and the bare and arid country round the town afforded no relief to the eye. The town itself looked mean and poverty-stricken, for it was of comparatively modern growth, and contained but a few buildings of importance. Long low warehouses fringed the shore, for here came ...
— The Golden Canyon - Contents: The Golden Canyon; The Stone Chest • G. A. Henty
... a discharge of artillery in the outskirts, and the church bells begin ringing; but the peals dwindle away to a melancholy jangle, and then to silence. Simultaneously, on the northern horizon of the arid, unenclosed, and treeless plain swept by the eye around the city, a cloud of dust arises, and a Royal procession is seen nearing. It means the new king, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... glide toward inundating the gorge. These stones are shattered and pulverized; their living fractures and thin, harsh points wound the eye; they are still bruising and crushing each other. Not a bush, not a spear of grass; the arid grayish train burns beneath a sun of brass; its debris are scorched to a dull hue, as ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... survivals needed to establish a range of firm control specimens for the better identification of unknowns, particularly the wooden elements of tools—handles, moldings, and plane bodies—are frustratingly few in non-arid archaeological sites. When tracing the provenance of American tools there is the additional problem of heterogeneous origins and shapes—that is, what was the appearance of a given tool prior to its standardization in England and the United ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... and yellow rock, backed by the purple ridges of the greater heights. It was desert land, too. They had long since left the abundance of the valley behind them. Here was the stiff angularity of cactus, the twisted vegetation of an arid land. ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... generally rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on the sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from captivity. The English strikers used some barren republican formula (arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic shibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except for a wage accepted by them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... reply. "Very; but they're gettin' scarce, while the irrigating of arid lands is as yet in ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... and marginal wheat lands. Irrigation is already practised over other vast acreages. This land is level to rolling, and is of sandy loam nature. It is deeply under-laid by layers of lava rock—in places thousands of feet thick. As in most arid climates the soil is rich in minerals but low in nitrogen and organic matter. Under irrigation production is amazing. The growing season is sufficiently long for Carpathian walnuts anywhere in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... expected. Jugurtha avoided any general action, and eluded the pursuit of Metellus by the rapidity of his movements. Even when driven from Thala, a strong-hold which he had deemed inaccessible from its position in the midst of arid deserts, he only retired among the Gaetulians, and quickly succeeded in raising among those wild tribes a fresh army, with which he once more penetrated into the heart of Numidia. A still more important accession was that of Bocchus, king of Mauritania, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... Esdraelon or Megiddo separates the mountains of the north from those of the south. These last form a broken plateau between the Jordan and the Dead Sea on the one side and the Plain of Sharon and the sea-coast of the Philistines on the other, until they finally slope away into the arid desert of the south. Here, on the borders of the wilderness, was Beersheba the southern limit of the land in the days of the monarchy, Dan, its northern limit, lying far away to the north at the foot of Hermon, and not far from ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... of dyspnea, with a rapid pulse, should lead one to suspect pulsus alternans when such a condition occurs in a person over 50 with cardiovascular-renal disease, arid with signs of decompensation, and also when such a condition occurs with a patient who has a ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence 'heart-rending groans' and saw 'anguished claspings of hands' as he lost his way among their arid intricacies. ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... correct. But to that in which he believed he rigidly adhered; nor did he seek, as lesser artists (such as Victor Hugo and his disciples) seek now, to turn perforce the Historical into the Poetical, but leaving history as he found it, to call forth from its arid prose the flower of the latent poem. Nay, even in the more imaginative plays which he has founded upon novels and legends popular in his time, it is curious and instructive to see how little he has altered the original ground-work—taking ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... discovered, even more desolate than I had imagined. Nothing met the eye in every direction but vast plains of interminable sand, with hillocks here and there, also of sand; no trees were to be seen, not even a shrub; all was arid, dry and parched up with heat. The village was merely an assemblage of a dozen miserable mud huts, and so great was the monotony of the scene, that the eye rested with positive pleasure on the dirty, yellow-coloured craft in which we had landed during the night. It had apparently ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... sands had been, they seemed to widen out into a greater immensity of arid pallor before the city gates as yet unseen. The stretch of blue above looked vaster here, the horizons more remote, the radiance of the sun more vivid, more inexorable. Nature surely expanded as if in an effort to hold her arm against some tremendous spectacle set in its ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... a moral agriculturist. Principles which admit of trickery? Certainly. Am I to blame if the field of human sympathy can't be cultivated in any other way? Consult my brother agriculturists in the mere farming line—do they get their crops for the asking? No! they must circumvent arid Nature exactly as I circumvent sordid Man. They must plow, and sow, and top-dress, and bottom-dress, and deep-drain, and surface-drain, and all the rest of it. Why am I to be checked in the vast occupation of deep-draining mankind? Why am I to be persecuted for habitually exciting the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... These mountains have a determining influence on the climate, both of the coast and of that in the interior. They act on the clouds as they sweep against and over them, like a comb, extracting all possible moisture, leaving a cool, elastic, and arid continental atmosphere for this central area under present review. The effect is at once pronounced and everywhere visible. Less than two degrees of longitude east of these mountain ranges there is but about ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... out before them, covered with scattered patches of gorse, stunted fern, and low brushwood, presenting an unvaried surface of unbaked turf. The shallow coat of sod was manifested by the stones that clattered under the horse's hoofs as he rapidly traversed the arid soil, clearing with ease to himself, though not without discomfort to the sexton, every gravelly trench, natural chasm, or other inequality of ground that occurred in his course. Clinging to his grandson with the tenacity of a bird of prey, Peter for some time kept his station ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... upon was a magnificent monument to the ruined crags above. It was a southerly slope, and therefore semi-arid, covered with cercocarpus and yucca and some shrub that Madeline believed was manzanita. Every foot of the trail seemed to slide under Majesty. What hard ground there was could not be traveled upon, owing to the spiny covering or masses of shattered ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... walk to the bungalow where Joicey lived, over the Banking House itself, and the vast compound was arid and bare from three days of scorching drought. Coryndon's feet sounded gritting on the red, hard drive that led to the cool of the porch. No one called at such an hour; it was unheard of in Mangadone, where the day from two to five was ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... board. Their bodies had been galled and emaciated by the chains they carried, by the slender store of dry farina—the only food provided for them—and by the precarious and scanty supply of water obtainable on the arid plains or in the tangled forests they had traversed. The first canoe-load was taken alongside the ship about four o'clock in the afternoon, and in an hour the whole were on board. This is reckoned the most favourable time for getting under-way, as darkness ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... Sauveur. It is now called Frenchman's Bay. They saw a coast-line of weather-beaten crags set thick with spruce and fir, the surf-washed cliffs of Great Head and Schooner Head, the rocky front of Newport Mountain, patched with ragged woods, the arid domes of Dry Mountain and Green Mountain, the round bristly backs of the Porcupine Islands, and the waving outline of ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... pitilessly on an arid plain which was spotted with dust-gray clumps of mesquite and thorny chaparral. Basking in the burning sand and alkali lay several Gila monsters, which raised their heads and hissed with wide-open jaws as several ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... be truthful to himself he was bound to answer "Yes." He lived on the whole a Christian life, prayed but badly, but at any rate prayed without ceasing; only—only—Alas! How worm-eaten, how arid were the poor recesses of his soul! He wondered, with anguish, whether they would not end like the Manor in Edgar Poe's tale, by crumbling suddenly, one fatal day, into the dark waters of the pool of sin which ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement has many traits in common with, for example, primitive Christianity, notably that ardent faith in the ideal that has definitively deserted the arid field of bourgeois skepticism, and some savants, not socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace, de Lavaleye and the Roberty, etc., admit that it is entirely possible for socialism to replace by its humanitarian faith the faith in the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... districts where Mahomedan forefathers have bequeathed their oriental physiognomy and tall slender frame to their Christian descendants, Spaniards are rarely of very lofty stature. Federico was from the flat and arid province of La Mancha, where, as in compensation for the unproductiveness of the parched soil, handsome men and beauteous women abound. Of the middle height, his figure was symmetrical, elastic, and muscular, formed for feats of agility and strength; his step was light, but firm; his countenance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... had been snatched away from him. He thought of the girl herself, and the love that not all Mrs. Burgoyne's jealous anguish had been able to deny. And then his mind returned to Mrs. Burgoyne, and the arid ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the arid desert of commercialism. I found nothing but stupidity, except for business. I found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who were alive—with rottenness. What I did find was monstrous selfishness and heartlessness, and a gross, gluttonous, ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... a couple of hundred feet long. One entered into a main hall, perhaps fifty feet wide, with a great fireplace arid staircase of marble and bronze, and furniture of gilded wood and crimson velvet, and a huge painting, covering three of the walls, representing the Conquest of Peru. Each of the rooms was furnished in the style of a different period—one Louis Quatorze, one Louis Quinze, one Marie ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... and stalwart race of men and women, happy and contented, and showing more energy than you often see in an oriental country. The climate is cool, dry and healthful. The city stands upon a sandy and arid plain, 1,600 feet above the sea, surrounded by stony hills and wide wastes of desert, but, even these natural disadvantages have contributed to its wealth and industries, for the barren hills are filled with deposits of fine clays, rare ores and cheap jewels like garnets, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... behind"), and thus to circle forever round and round this globe, the ecstatic spectator of happiness and peace. He has had enough and more than enough of study, of struggle, of unfulfilled aspiration. Lonely dignity, arid renown, satiety, sorrow, knowledge without hope, and age without comfort,—these are his present portion; and a little way onward, waiting for him, is death. Too old to play with passion, too young not to feel desire, he has endured a long struggle between the two souls in his breast—one longing ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... beating heart walked towards Boleskey's. He looked up at the window, more than half expecting to see Rozsi there; but she was not, and he noticed with faint surprise that the window was not open; the plants, too, outside, looked singularly arid. He knocked. No one came. He beat a fierce tattoo. At last the door was opened by a man with a reddish beard, and one of those sardonic faces only to be seen on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the property of water that it constitutes the vital human of this arid earth; and the cause which moves it through its ramified veins, against the natural course of heavy matters, is the same property which moves the humours in every species of animal body. But that ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... the square the blatant orator balanced himself on a stone trough which was arid and dust-choked. He harangued the group of unkempt men; sweating, blinking, apathetic men; slouchy men; men who were ticketed in attire and demeanor with all the squalid marks of idlers, vagrants, ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... attempted to throw a sop to the labor vote by favoring restriction of immigration and laws for the protection of employees in dangerous occupations, and to the farmer by pronouncements against trusts, for extended postal service—particularly in rural districts—and for the reclamation and sale of arid lands to settlers. The Democrats went even further and demanded the return of "nearly one hundred million acres of valuable land" then held by "corporations ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, to many minds, illogical. His sequences are not the sequences of other men. His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy tale. His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his banqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch. He begins an essay about trivialities, and the conclusion is in the other world. And the peculiar character of his writing, like the peculiar character of all writing which is worth anything, arises from constitutional ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... That arid appearance which first meets the settler on his arrival, and to which allusion has already been made, cannot but prove disheartening to him: particularly if, as is generally the case, his own sanguine expectations of a second Paradise have been heightened by ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... America—the ash, elm, beech, oak, fir and walnut. The orchards, above those of oranges and lemons, are of figs and olives. The cork-oak covers considerable tracts, but is less attended to than in Spain. A non-European aspect is imparted by the tufts of cactus and aloes which abound in the most arid localities. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... blue van, Georgi, accompanied me in my walk, and fired several useless shots at wild partridges. We now arrived at the spot where the water is led by a subterranean aqueduct to Larnaca. This principle is so original, and has from such remote times been adopted in this arid island, that it merits a detailed description. The ancient vestiges of similar works in every portion of Cyprus prove that in all ages the rainfall must have been uncertain, and that no important change has taken place in the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... a pitiless heaven blazed a cruel sun to scorch us, thereby adding to this agony of thirst that parched us where we crawled with fainting steps, our sunken eyes seeking vainly for the kindly shade of some tree in this arid desolation. And always was my mind obsessed by that dream of gurgling brooks and bubbling rills; and now I would imagine I was drinking long, cool draughts, and thrusting leathern tongue 'twixt cracking lips, groaned in sharper agony. So crept we on, mile after mile, hoping the next would ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the waters of the glacial period covered the terraces of the Rhone Valley, forms the most popular support. The extreme abundance of these sites might easily influence the Bee's choice: all our less elevated uplands, all our arid, thyme-clad grounds are nothing but water-worn stones cemented with red earth. In the valleys, the Chalicodoma has also the pebbles of the mountain-streams at her disposal. Near Orange, for instance, her favourite spots are ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... ungenerous suspicions; but he had wronged us, still—I hoped, I trusted that he had. He had not attempted to cheek the course of our love by actually damming up the streams in their passage, but he had passively watched the two currents wandering through life's arid wilderness, declining to clear away the obstructions that divided them, and secretly hoping that both would lose themselves in the sand before they could be joined in one. And meantime he had been quietly proceeding ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... the Van Reenen Railway ends at Harrismith, an arid but cheerful little town at the foot of the great cliffs of the Plaatburg. It boasts its racecourse, golf-links, musical society, and some acquaintance with the German poets. The Scotch made it their own, though a few Dutch, English, and other foreigners were allowed to remain ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... the Caucasus, and other southern possessions of the empire, the winters are comparatively temperate, and the summers warm and long; but here, again, a great portion of this country consists of mountains, arid plains, and deserts, and it is subject to extreme and terrible droughts. Here is a vast extent of territory, comprising about one hundred and sixty-five degrees of longitude and thirty-five of latitude, which contains within its limits a greater variety of bad climates, and a greater ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... rather a reformation so arid, jejune and material that it promised little more than the "Law of Moses," before this was vivified and racially baptised by Mesopotamian and Persic influences. But human nature was stronger than the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... empties its waters into the Paraguay, is one of the most mysterious of rivers. Rising in Bolivia, its course can be traced down for some considerable distance, when it loses itself in the arid wastes, or, as some maintain, flows underground. Its source and mouth are known, but for many miles of its passage it is invisible. Numerous attempts to solve its secrets have been made. They have almost invariably ended disastrously. The Spanish traveller, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... her dream With grey lips arid and cold; She saw not the face as a beam Burn on her, but only a gleam Through her sleep ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... solar splendor flames; The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames; His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes, And dreams of erring ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... wonderful how close a parallel to classical training could be made out of that palaeontology to which I refer. In the first place I could get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its terminology, so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat the recent famous production of the head-masters out of the field in all these excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... in here," he said, in an arid voice, and held wide the door of the room where he and Rudyard had settled the first chapter of the future and closed the book ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker |
