"Quicksand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the bank of the sluggish stream with its flood-worn channel and its treacherous patches of quicksand, the wagon thus halted by the sheer nerve and quick-thinking of mother became a very small island in a troubled sea of weltering backs and tossing horns and staring eyeballs. Riders shouted and lashed unavailingly ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... miles a day, until we reached the South Canadian, which proved to be the most delusive stream we had yet encountered. It also showed, like the Washita, every evidence of having been on a recent rampage. On our arrival there was no volume of water to interfere, but it had a quicksand bottom that would bog a saddle blanket. Our foreman had been on ahead and examined the regular crossing, and when he returned, freely expressed his opinion that we would be unable to trail the herd across, but might hope to effect it by cutting it into small bunches. When we came, ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... flushing scarlet at the unexpected question, the first with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerous quicksand, replied with a deadly thrill, "No, my darling. Why do ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... Greek author says: a woman's head is like a quicksand; for pray, mark well this argument, which is most weighty: As the head is the chief of the body, and as the body without a chief is worse than a beast, unless the chief has a good understanding with the body, and unless everything be as well regulated as if it were measured with ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
... It was a black fog. Robert could have landed ten thousand men, and we none the wiser. Does he tell how we were out all day riding the marsh, and how I near perished in a quicksand, and coughed like a sick ewe for ten days after?" ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... and the whole of the next day, when the tide suited, we were endeavouring to weigh the ship's anchors; but they were together with the cables so imbedded in the bottom, which must have been a quicksand, that this proved impossible. Had the ship been fitted with Captain Charles Phillips', R.N., capstan, there would have been a better chance of succeeding. As it was, after heaving down the ship nineteen inches by the head, and splitting the hawse pipes, we were ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... rock jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, something goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among the people in our parts, the name of the Shivering ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... women and children there," came the swift reply. "We seek to lay foundations of permanence and without the family we build on quicksand." ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to balance the ordinary accounts, but to cover the interest of the war-loans which he was obliged to contract? How far did his cheerful manifestoes deceive himself? What might he not really have accomplished if the royal support had been anything more solid than a shifting quicksand? These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily. Neither Necker, nor anybody else, knew exactly what the government owed, or what it borrowed. The loans contracted by Necker himself are believed to have amounted to five hundred and thirty million livres. Of this sum it is ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the strangest adventures that the Maharajah had was when, returning to camp one evening, he was informed that one of his largest and best elephants, "Kennedy", had got stuck in quicksand. In many parts of Assam there are quicksands and quagmires. This particular one chanced to be in a nala (stream). The elephant had refused to cross the partially dried-up stream. Instinct had warned him through the tip of his trunk that danger ...
— Bengal Dacoits and Tigers • Maharanee Sunity Devee
... synthetic, ersatz[&German]; simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, under the garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. "keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope" [Macbeth]; fronti nulla fides[Lat]; "ah that deceit should steal such gentle shapes" [Richard III]; "a quicksand of deceit" [Henry VI]; decipimur specie recti [Lat][Horace]; falsi crimen[Lat]; fraus est celare fraudem[Lat]; lupus in fabula[Lat]; "so smooth, he daubed his vice with show of virtue" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... will never be found," she said, breathlessly; "I put everything into the swamp. It is quicksand." ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... waist deep and then I was scared, you can bet. If there's one thing that gets me scared it's quicksand. As long as I could get my legs out I was all right, but when I began sinking as low as my waist and had to drag myself out by squirming and catching hold of bushes and things, then I lost my nerve—I have ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... considerable depth, we are pretty certain to find traces of mineral water. In some places, at the depth of six or eight feet, it has been discovered issuing from a fissure or seam in the underlying limestone, while at other places it seems to proceed from a thin stratum of quicksand which is found to alternate with the marl at distances of from ten to forty feet, below which bowlders of considerable size ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... when charged with it, they probably became insane. In their insanity they confessed their guilt. They found themselves abhorred and deserted—charged with a crime that they could not disprove. Like a man in quicksand, every effort only sunk them deeper. Caught in this frightful web, at the mercy of the spiders of superstition, hope fled, and nothing remained but the insanity of confession. The whole world ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... advice; I wish I could sometimes have given him a little. I should have told him that all his dainty jeers about middle-class denseness were beside the mark; all the complacent mockery concerning the deceased wife's sister and the rest, was of no use. If you see a man walking right into a deadly quicksand, you do not content yourself with informing him that a bit of fluff has stuck to his coat. Mr. Arnold should have gone among the lower middle-class a trifle more instead of trusting to his superfine imagination, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... first place, I must explain how I came to be without money in mine, so soon after arriving in Paris, where so much of the article is necessary. My woes all arise from vanity. That is the rock, that is the quicksand, that is the maelstrom. I presume you don't know anybody else who is afflicted with that complaint? If you do, I'll but teach you how to tell my story, and that will cure him; or, at least, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... trying to keep a firm footing on the shifting quicksand of the other's arguments. He knew a little of paradynamics, of course, but only as something supposed to remake the world and all science in some abstract future. It had been originated as a complex mathematical analysis of nuclear relationships, and had been seized on for some reason ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... his glass and watched Dalrymple as the latter did likewise, with that deliberate intention which few but Scotchmen can maintain on such occasions. The wine might have been poured into a quicksand, for any effect it ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... to him; the ominous hints whispered about the mysterious interviews at the Arlington; the hurried exposure; the frantic efforts to avoid it; the malignant gratification shown by the Marshses, "we built the foundation on which they grew; we'll hurl them from it into a quicksand from which they will never emerge;" the admissions of guilt made by the unhappy Secretary at a moment when, as it had been suggested, he was contemplating suicide; the imprisonment in his own house; their style of living; the fact of their appearance at a large ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... constructed differed greatly in the two rivers. The bed of the North River, at the level of the tunnels, consists of silt composed principally of clay, sand, and water, while that of the East River is formed of a great variety of materials, such as quicksand, sand, boulders, gravel, clay, and bed-rock. When the method of construction had to be decided there were no thoroughly satisfactory precedents to follow in the case of either river, although the Gas Tunnel ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles W. Raymond
... mid-stream without its ever having occurred to him that he might not be able to breast it. Even had he thought enough about the matter to admit that certain untoward conditions might have to be met, he would have failed to realize that the shore towards which he was struggling might prove in the end a quicksand. ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... roots is foreign to this neighbourhood I mean the Wappetoe, or the bulb of the Sagitifolia or common arrow head, which grows in great abundance in the marshey grounds of that beatifull and firtile valley on the Columbia commencing just above the entrance of Quicksand River, and extending downwards for about 70 Miles. this bulb forms a principal article of traffic between the inhabitants of the valley and those of this neighbourhood or sea coast. The instrument used by the natives in diging their roots ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... nothing good for man to know which could not be deduced from facts. This was the only sound basis of knowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could be made to stand upon facts was to try and build upon a quicksand. ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... for rapid transit subways for New York City, very much on the line of the present rapid transit subways, were also prepared for Mr. Corbin by the writer. These plans provided a system of deep tunnels in rock, entirely below the plane of quicksand, and at the Battery the lines were to connect directly into the tunnels to Long Island and New Jersey, respectively, and the stations throughout, where the rock was at a deep level, were to be fitted with elevators, grouped as suggested in Plate ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles M. Jacobs
... the Bride of Lammermoor, where [Edgar] Ravenswood is swallowed up by a quicksand, is singularly grand in romance, but would be inadmissible in a ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... their glances crossed, and for that instant she saw the face of a man who has just stepped into a quicksand. She grew red, without knowing why. Then he spoke, composedly, of ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... some process by which matter has been brought from one state to the other. Whether, however, the nebular hypothesis lays down the road travelled to this transfiguration, we are not sure. Some of it seems like solid rock, and some like shifting quicksand. Doubtless there is a road from that chaos to this fair cosmos. The nebular hypothesis has surveyed, worked, and perfected many long reaches of this road, but the rivers are not bridged, the chasms not filled, ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... guess what questions they were preparing. I had to arrange my defence without knowing in what way they would try to trip me, and I had to think faster than I ever have thought before. I had no more time to be scared, or to regret my past sins, than has a man in a quicksand. So far as I could make out, they were divided in opinion concerning me. Rupert of Hentzau, who was the adjutant or the chief of staff, had only one simple thought, which was to shoot me. Others considered me a damn fool; I could hear them laughing and saying: "Er ist ein dummer ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... was yaller as a punkin. Skeert out of his wits. 'Come on down, you pore critter!' sez I. But he just opened his mouth and couldn't say a word, just a dry croak like a frog bein' swallored in sudden quicksand. 'Come on down,' I coaxed, 'I'll quile Buck down till he's ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... inconvenient person to talk to!" said Mr. Motley with a glance at the handsome face. "Like a quicksand—closing around one. Mrs. Linden, do you not find it so? Ah George!—talking to Miss Pet as usual. Permit me—Mrs. Linden, Mr. Alcott. George, you cannot have forgotten Mrs. Linden?" That George had not ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... fellowship is to be found in Walt Whitman. One will look long before one finds a more consistent or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is chanted in Leaves of Grass. It is based upon individualism; the strong body and the possessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open road" in comradeship; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates the indissoluble union of "these States"; and the States, in turn, in spite of every "alarmist," "partialist," or "infidel," are ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... own body, and so being short lived to boot she remains from century to century to human eyes in statu quo. Her body never becomes machinate, whereas this new phase of organism which has been introduced with man into the mundane economy, has made him a very quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation; certain fundamental principles will always remain, but every century the change in man's physical status, as compared with the elements around him, is greater and greater. He is a shifting ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... lay not water, but a smooth surface of viscid slime, here luminous with the florescence of rottenness, there furrowed by a tiny runnel of moisture which sluggishly crept across it to the slow stream beyond. This quicksand, vile and treacherous, lapped the wall below the window, and more than accounted for the absence of bars or fastenings. But, leaning far out, he saw that it ended at the angle of the building, at a point twenty feet or so to ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... at her companion. Was she indeed so unsuspicious of the quicksand on which stood the fair temple of her hopes ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the English crown. The Maguires, the O'Reillys, the O'Donels—all the clans who had stood by Sussex in the preceding summer—were given over to their enemy bound hand and foot. But Elizabeth was weary of the expense, and sick of efforts which were profitless as the cultivation of a quicksand. True it was that she was placing half Ireland in the hands of an adulterous, murdering scoundrel, but the Irish liked to have it so, and she forced herself to hope that he would restrain himself for the future within the bounds ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... lost his anchor; the things which his life had been built on would not hold him. Money—men envied the rich nowadays, he said, and the rich man had no rights in the courts or out of them; friends—they had gone up in the market, and he could not afford them; politics—he had found it a quicksand. So he jabbered to Neal Ward, his secretary, and pulled down the curtains of his car on the station side of every stop the train made in its long ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... snare and quicksand, pilgrim? Do pitfalls lie where roses seem to grow? And have you sometimes stumbled in the darkness, And are you bruised and scarred by many a blow? Pilgrim, I know, I know! ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... verb), assigning as his reason, that 'If St. John had written [Greek: erchesthai], no one would ever have substituted [Greek: dierchesthai] for it.' But to construct the text of Scripture on such considerations, is to build a lighthouse on a quicksand. I could have referred the learned Critic to plenty of places where the thing he speaks of as incredible has been done. The proof that St. John used the uncompounded verb is the fact that it is found in all the copies except our two untrustworthy ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... he is, he replies a Ravi Das. Another tradition current among them alleges that their original ancestor was the youngest of four Brahman brethren who went to bathe in a river and found a cow struggling in a quicksand. They sent the youngest brother in to rescue the animal, but before he could get to the spot it had been drowned. He was compelled, therefore, by his brothers to remove the carcase, and after he had done this they ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... their way, the madness and the darkness will spread until the black cloud charged with death covers the face of the earth for a season with shame and anguish and destruction. A sane world, an orderly world, a peaceful world, can never be founded on materialism. That foundation is a quicksand in which all that is dearest to ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
... pleasant country roads, and afterwards along a succession of bays of a fairylike prettiness, to our destination—Cramond on the Almond—a little hamlet on a little river, embowered in woods, and looking forth over a great flat of quicksand to where a little islet stood planted in the sea. It was miniature scenery, but charming of its kind. The air of this good winter afternoon was bracing, but not cold. All the way my companions were skylarking, jesting, and making puns, and I felt as if a load had been ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at least five or six people about the cart, some on foot, others on horseback; the former lent assistance whenever it was in danger of upsetting, or sticking fast in the quicksand; the others rode before and acted as guides, often changing the direction of the vehicle as the precarious state of the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... at the mouth of the river Neath. "Terrible hard country this," said one of the monks next day in the castle at Swansea. "Some people are never satisfied," retorted his companion; "you were complaining of its being too soft in the quicksand yesterday." The mountains were trying to men no longer in their youth; after toiling up one the archbishop sank exhausted on a fallen tree and said to his panting companions, "Can any one enliven the company by whistling a tune?" "Which," adds Gerald, ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... return empty handed, whilst others, Mr. Chairman, make up, we know, pretty good bags. The Son of Apollo, whilst thus hunting one gruesome, windy morning, fortunately for us, sank in a boggy, yielding quicksand. Luckily he extricated himself in time, and on reaching the margin of the swamp, there stood an old pet of his tethered as if waiting for its loved rider, a vigorous Norman or Percheron steed. Our friend bestrode him, cantered ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... St. Michael, on the Norman coast, A restless river, changing oft its course, Flows sullenly; and racehorse-like the tide, Which, going, leaves a wilderness of sand. Comes rushing back, a foam-topp'd, wat'ry wall; And those who, wand'ring, 'scape the quicksand's grip, Are often caught and drown'd ere help can come. But fair the prospect from the Mount when bright The sunshine falls on Avranches far away, A white town straggling o'er a verdant hill; And on the tree-clad country toward ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... the tracks of Blake's party, which led up the moraine, and carried us over quicksand and through glacial streams, icy cold. Finally we came to where Blake had started up the mountain side, and with all due regard to my friend, his trail was not an easy one. About noon it began to rain, ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... and go and make inquiries myself. This house is a place of mysterious disappearances. I wonder if the beach below is of quicksand, and does it ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... over my blunders, and save me from calamitously passing into the next world. He bore it in courteous silence, except when speaking was necessary. He would show me the lower ford, which I could never find for myself, generally mistaking a quicksand for it. He would tie my horse properly. He would recommend me not to shoot my rifle at a white-tailed deer in the particular moment that the outfit wagon was passing behind the animal on the further side of the brush. There was seldom a day that ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... permits a lie nowhere; and all this results from that which is in itself a delusion,—a lie! Oh, holy "delusion"! Oh, wondrous, truth-loving, wonder-working "lie"! Was ever such a miracle, that a falsehood works truth?—that a delusion, instead of leading into marsh, or bog, or quicksand, as other will-o'-the-wisps ever and always have, leads along a morally elevated path where every footstep rings with the music of divine certainty, as though it trod upon a rock! Such a miracle, contrary to all reason, is worthy of acceptance only by the blind, childish, ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... refused to turn, as they sometimes did, in the middle of some deep, broad mud-hole. The light prairie soil, when thoroughly saturated, is capable of very great volatility and yet of stick-to-it-iveness. While the team and wagon, buried deeply in the mud, found the soil as yielding as quicksand, the passengers, on alighting, were no more fortunate. To make the chair and wade ashore with its precious burden, at such a time, involved a very nice adjustment of balances. If the three went headlong before they reached the shore, each received a generous "coat ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... 29th we reached the lowest ford of the Red Deer River, one hundred and sixty-eight miles, by our course, from Battleford. On the north side of the river at this ford there is quicksand. The water too, in mid-stream, was deep enough to flow over the side-boards of our waggons, and at one place the current was dangerously rapid. After repeated trials by some of the men on horseback to find the best footing, we made the attempt, and the whole party ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... of youth was over, Leo Battista Alberti devoted his great faculties and all his wealth of genius to the study of the law—then, as now, the quicksand of the noblest natures. The industry with which he applied himself to the civil and ecclesiastical codes broke his health. For recreation he composed a Latin comedy called 'Philodoxeos,' which imposed upon ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... be squaring our accounts,' he thought—'looking things in the face. Something must be done; and here she is laughing and making everyone stare!' Done! But what could be done, when it was all like quicksand? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the wagon to the opposite bank; but although we found no less than four shoals in the course of our first day's search, three of them extended less than halfway across the river, while the fourth proved to be a quicksand in which we narrowly escaped losing both our horses, saving them at last only by the skin of our teeth and after nearly an hour's hard and strenuous labour. This occurred about three o'clock in the afternoon, and when at length we were all once more safe on solid ground we were, horses ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... affectation, and take from the dignity of virtue. Virtue, as the very word imports, should have an appearance of seriousness, if not austerity; and to endeavour to trick her out in the garb of pleasure, because the epithet has been used as another name for beauty, is to exalt her on a quicksand; a most insidious attempt to hasten her fall by apparent respect. Virtue, and pleasure are not, in fact, so nearly allied in this life as some eloquent writers have laboured to prove. Pleasure prepares the fading wreath, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... I have hated, yet never a night is missed. It is at the same hour. What I hate comes to me. Whatever I fear is mine. To run away from something is for me to meet it. My estate is gone; money I have not. I sink like a man in a quicksand, down, down, down. I come here. ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... the two ranges, however, the fine sand was extremely nasty, almost as bad as quicksand, and we had some trouble in extricating ourselves. We sank into it almost up to the waist. We then crossed the broad plain in a diagonal for nearly four miles, and at last, after some seven hours of anxiety, not to speak of hunger and thirst, we ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... invaluable friend had, to the great joy of Evellin, allied himself to their house by marrying the Lady Eleanor Neville, his only sister. Though Buckingham never stood firmer in the King's favour, he had already experienced that popular esteem is a quicksand, fair to the eye, but fallacious and destructive to all who build their greatness on it. Two parliaments that were called, in succession, to grant the supplies which the favourite's profusion, and the war in which he had unwisely engaged, rendered necessary, had been ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... there Will hang on every step from rich and poor, Grey quickly-glancing eyes will wrinkle round, And courtesy will watch them day and night. Shameless they are, yet will they blush, amid A nation that ne'er blushes: some will drag The captive's chain, repair the shattered bark, Or heave it from a quicksand to the shore, Among the marbles of the Libyan coast; Teach patience to the lion in his cage, And, by the order of a higher slave, Hold to the elephant their scanty fare, To please the children while the ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... question. The tragic force of it overwhelmed all reasoning. She knew beyond all doubting that she had made the most ghastly mistake of her life. She had done it in blindness, but the veil had been rent away; and, horror-struck, she now beheld the accursed quicksand into which ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... old drawbridges, were also of cast iron; and in some cases even the locks were of the same material. Thus, on a part of the Ellesmere Canal opposite Beeston Castle, in Cheshire, where a couple of locks, together rising 17 feet, having been built on a stratum of quicksand, were repeatedly undermined, the idea of constructing the entire locks of cast iron was suggested; and this unusual application of the new material was ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... followed this non-committal remark was most discomfiting. I had a feeling that the moments were critical, and—they were slipping away. Should I leap into the tide of explanation? That way, perhaps, lay safety. Always the quicksand of Qui s'excuse, s'accuse, made me draw back. I became extremely nervous.... Feverishly I tried to think of a remark which would be natural and more or less relevant, and would pilot us into a channel of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... tell me what to say or do. It seems that I but sink myself the deeper in the quicksand of thy disapproval at every struggle to escape. Do ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the lowest point under the river, the grade was to be 1.5% on all lines. Later, during construction, when excavating westward under 33d Street from Fifth Avenue, the surface of the rock was broken through, disclosing quicksand; within the next few days trial drill holes through the tunnel roof at 32d Street and Fifth Avenue showed a thin cover with quicksand above it. The conditions had been indicated in a general way by borings made before construction ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Alfred Noble
... "trembling prairie," or prairie tremblante, is low, level, treeless delta land, having a top soil of vegetable mould overlying immense beds of quicksand. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin to shop again. She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself the teo-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively (and economically) to concerts—but the swinging doors of the department stores suck her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... high-water mark, and thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less, a slab of Egyptian granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and, mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man by the returning sea. You may write upon its fine-grained face with ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... did not quench my thirst. I was feverish and would have given anything in the world for something to interest me suddenly and have absorbed me and lifted me out of that slough in which my heart and my brain were being engulfed, as if in a quicksand. I did not venture to avow to myself what was making me so dejected, what was torturing me and driving me mad with grief, or to scrutinize the muddy bottom of my present thoughts sincerely and courageously, to question myself and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... again ascended a low table land of the same description. At ten miles came upon a few low sand rises, about a mile in breadth. We then struck a creek, another tributary, spread over a large plain, very boggy, with here and there patches of quicksand. We had great difficulty in getting over it, but at last succeeded without any mishap. We then entered a thick scrubby country of mulga and other shrubs; the soil now changed to a dark red, covered splendidly with grass. After the first mile the scrub became much thinner; ground slightly ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... time to see the last of the water. It seemed to sink as in quicksand. The shape of the hole had changed. The tremendous force of the blast in the adjoining field had obstructed or diverted the ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... in thickness, through which the water entered so fast, as to almost prevent them from going deeper. They, however, proceeded through another bed of blue clay, twenty or twenty-two feet, and came to a fine yellow sand, resembling quicksand, into which they dug three feet and stopped, having found sufficient water. The whole depth of the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... what the Inquiries are-and this wise nation is gaping to see the chick which their old brood-hen the House of Commons will produce from an egg laid in November, neglected till April, and then hatched in a quicksand! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... us against, and which, as the water was thick and muddy, gave Gerome and myself some anxiety. The stream was about fifty yards across and much swollen by the snow. Landing on the other side ahead of my companions, I rode on alone, and presently found myself floundering about girth-deep in a quicksand. It was only with great difficulty that we extricated the pony. These quicksands are common on the shores of the Caspian, and natives, when travelling alone, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... were brought under cover of darkness by the old woman from the mansion-house. Northmour and the young lady, sometimes together, but more often singly, would walk for an hour or two at a time on the beach beside the quicksand. I could not but conclude that this promenade was chosen with an eye to secrecy; for the spot was open only to the seaward. But it suited me not less excellently; the highest and most accidented of the sand-hills immediately adjoined; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... concern that an honest seaman should be so taken in stays; but he imputed all his calamities to the wife. "For why?" said he; "a seafaring man may have a sweetheart in every port; but he should steer clear of a wife, as he would avoid a quicksand.—You see, brother, how this here Clewline lags astern in the wake of a snivelling b—-h; otherwise he would never make a weft in his ensign for the loss of a child—odds heart! he could have done no more if he had sprung a top-mast, or started ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... tirade in two words "Petitio principii," and so smoke on; and, not being an university woman, she could not keep her eye on the original assumption while following the series of inferences the learned doctor built so neatly, story by story, on the foundation of the quicksand of a ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises, tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for he always meant the lovely thing first, not ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... be hoped," he said, drearily; "it is so to be believed. Woman's love-memory is a kind of quicksand that can swallow a score or so of gallant gentlemen and show no trace ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... become lovers, are plighted by themselves and parted by Lucy's mother, Lady Ashton. The fourth and last act shows a room at Ravenswood, wherein is portrayed the betrothal of Lucy to Bucklaw, culminating in Edgar's sudden irruption; and finally, it shows the desolate seaside place of the quicksand in which, after he has slain Bucklaw, Edgar of Ravenswood is engulfed. The house that Scott, when he wrote the novel, had in his mind as that of Sir William Ashton is the house of Winston, which still is standing, not many miles from Edinburgh. The tower of Wolf's Crag ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... loss. Our kingdom of Phaeacia, as you know, is chiefly rich in shipping. In all parts of the world, where there are navigable seas, or ships can pass, our vessels will be found. You cannot name a coast to which they do not resort. Every rock and every quicksand is known to them that lurks in the vast deep. They pass a bird in flight; and with such unerring certainty they make to their destination that some have said that they have no need of pilot or rudder, but that they move instinctively, ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... of this animal (of which there is an excellent coloured plate in 'P. Z. S.' 1872, p. 494) was captured in 1868 in Chittagong. She had got into a quicksand, and had exhausted herself by floundering about. The natives contrived to attach two ropes to her neck, and, hauling her out, managed to make her fast to a tree. Next morning they found her so refreshed and ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... be performed rather with reference to him who does than to that which is done, there is a taint in it for which Eve is hardly answerable. It is but as a fair tower which the builder has set on an unknown quicksand, and which the floods shall damage or carry away. Oh! whosoever thou art that readest this, forget not these words, but grave them as on marble, and in golden letters. 'While the altar sends up a holy flame, have ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... will most certainly be rifled at." He stood over me in the dim light of the dawn, chuckling and laughing to himself. Suppressing my first impulse to catch the man by the neck and throw him on to the quicksand, I rose sullenly and followed him to the platform ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of the crossing. The river was high, and his mules quickly mired down in the quicksand. The more they pawed ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... crumble. For thou hast sought support where it was not to be found, for thou hast built thy house on a quicksand...." ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... looked towards the river, and observing some islands in it, my plan was instantly formed. If I could only reach the river, I would swim out and get behind one of the islands. And the river being high and turbid, with a quicksand bottom, I did not believe they would venture to come after me. (I had learned to swim when a boy, and that now was my means of salvation.) I started for the river as soon as the last Indian had passed me, "double quick," but as I started, ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... and quite different boats, while Turnbull had an abstract knowledge of science and some of its applications to navigation, which was worse. The presence of the god or fairy can only be deduced from the fact that they never definitely ran into anything, either a boat, a rock, a quicksand, or a man-of-war. Apart from this negative description, their voyage would be difficult to describe. It took at least a fortnight, and MacIan, who was certainly the shrewder sailor of the two, realized that they were sailing west into the Atlantic and were probably by this ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... impassable bar to greatness for a man to imagine himself great when there is not in him one single element of greatness? Let us confess ourselves that which we can not consent to remain! The confession of not being, is the sole foundation for becoming. Self is a quicksand; God is the only rock. I have ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... there never could be another time, and he didn't want that there should. This knowledge left him rather dazed. He felt a good deal like a man who, walking across a pleasant beach and enjoying the view, suddenly finds himself up to his neck in quicksand. And, like a person in such a quandary, Wade's first ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... his charge, and had his confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off into deep water in a single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom,—a soft arenaceous mud, which if beat for some time by the foot or hand, resolved itself into a sort of quicksand, half-sludge, half-water, which, when covered by a competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's keel,—the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion of the bank immediately beneath ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... assertion of fact to one of the opposite sex. When it became absolutely necessary to change a woman's preconceived notions as to what she should do—as, for instance, discouraging her riding through quicksand—he would persuade somebody else to issue the advice. And he would cower in the background blushing his absurd little blushes at his second-hand temerity. Add to this narrow, sloping shoulders, a soft voice, and a diminutive ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... sluggish creek flowed into the sea. At the mouth of the valley whence it issued stood two or three native huts. A man wearing a malo was up on the roof of one, thatching it with grass. Riding near, we hailed him and inquired about a quicksand which lay just ahead and which we must cross. He told us to avoid the makai side and keep to the mouka side. We followed his directions, and crossed in safety. For all practical purposes there are but two directions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... complaints about his extravagant wife with a sympathetic expression, but no comment—and that night spent the ten minutes before she dropped off to sleep in pondering the impenetrable mysteries of the institution called marriage. She had married the solid Hermie, and he had turned out to be quicksand. She had not married the whipper-snapper Clint, and now he was one of the rich city's rich men. Had she married him against her parents' wishes would Clint Darrow now be complaining of her extravagance, perhaps, to some ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... political Unions, and what not. Like all folks who wade so deep, they can't always tell the natur' of the ford. Sometimes they strike their shins agin a snag of a rock; at other times they go whap into a quicksand, and if they don't take special care they are apt to go souse over head and ears into deep water. I guess if they'd talk more of ROTATION, and less of ELECTIONS, more of them 'ere DYKES, and less of BANKS, and attend more to TOP-DRESSING, and ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... end spontaneously in fourteen days. Skilled watching is what the competent doctor gives. You would not despise or underestimate the pilot's skill, who steered your barque through a dangerous sea in smoothest water, because he knew each hidden rock or unseen quicksand on which but for his guidance you ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... country where everything seems shifting like a quicksand, where men shed their homes as snakes their skins, where you may meet a three-story house, or even a church, on the highway, bitten by the universal gad-fly of bettering its position, where we have known a tree to be cut down merely because "it had got to be so old," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... crowded company of all the godly persons of England—'piteous people, that be of sin destroyers', 'mourners for sin, with lamentation', and 'good rich men that helpeth folk out of prison'—has been wrecked on a quicksand and the whole company drowned. Next he has an ill-sounding report of his own last voyage to give. When that is finished Imagination proposes an adjournment for pleasures more active than conversation, where purses may ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... faultering, rising, clutching as at some false deceiving hand stretched out from the clouds—saw this marble arm uttering her dying hope, and then her dying despair. The head, the diadem, the arm,—these all had sunk; at last over these also the cruel quicksand had closed; and no memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, except my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem over the grave of the buried child, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... wages. I feel no security in facts, precedent seems no protection to me. The wisdom you can find in an Encyclopedia, or in Selfridge's Information Bureau, seems to me just a transitory adaptation to quicksand circumstances. ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... croaked Silas Boyd, his deep bass voice lowered to a whisper. "I be 'feard ter quit the trail furder. 'Pinnock's Mis'ry' be hyar-abouts somewhar, a plumb quicksand, what a man got into an' floundered an' sank, an' floundered agin, an' whenst they fund him his hair war white an' his mind deranged. Or else we-uns mought run off'n a bluff somewhar, an' git our ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... quicksand often have to be built in places where least expected, and sometimes the writer has been able to conveniently span the vein with an arch and avoid trouble; but where it cannot be conveniently arched over, it will be necessary to sheath pile for a trench ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... he told of cheating Death in quicksand fords, of day-long battles with naked Apaches in the malapi, of fighting off bandits from the stage while the driver kept the horses on a run up Dragoon Pass, of grim old ranchmen stalking cattle-thieves by night, of frontier sheriffs and desperadoes and a wilderness ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... one near the spot. It was a tree that had already been instrumental in saving his life: for it was the same that stood by the little straits where Ossaroo had set his nets, and by means of which Caspar had been enabled to hoist him up out of the quicksand. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... longed to help his people, his thoughts had always turned, not to God first, but to the money his uncle had left him. He had trusted in a fancy—no less a fancy when in his uncle's possession than when cast into the quicksand of the bank; for trust in money that is, is no less vain, and is farther from redress, than trust in money that is not. In God alone can trust repose. His heart had been so faithless that he did not know it was! He thought he loved God as the first and last, the beginning, middle, and ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... banks of a river which Burke named the Cloncurry. A few hundred yards below the camp Billy got bogged in a quicksand bank so deeply as to be unable to stir, and they had to undermine him on the creek side and pull him into the water. About five miles farther on he bogged again, and afterwards was so weak that he ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... always acknowledged that strain of insincerity, but he had fallen into the error of believing that underneath all those shifting sands there was at last bedrock and that it was his hand which was to discover it. He now knew that it was nothing but sands, and a quicksand at that, yet the knowledge made the death of his love no easier. Love cannot be killed—it always dies a natural death; and natural deaths are slow processes. Of all the things Blanche had said to him one at least was very true, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... as the "ward of the nation"—a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization which I pronounce to be reared upon quicksand, a civilization more fruitful of poverty, misery and crime than of competence, happiness and virtue. Those who regard the black man in the light of a "ward of the nation," are too narrow-minded, ignorant or ungenerous to deserve my contempt. The people of this country have been made fabulously ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... miles westward from its confluence with the Missouri. There was no road leading into the river, nor any evidence of its having been crossed by any one, at that place. We were informed that the bottom was of quicksand, and fording, therefore, dangerous. We tested it, by riding horses across. Contrary to our expectations, the bottom was found to be a surface of smooth sand, packed hard enough to bear up the wagons, when the movement ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... worse," said Vince, with a shiver. "It looks quite hard down there, and all as tempting as can be; but it's loose quicksand, and my foot went down into it just as if it was so much sticky oil. ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... many things that were risky. Jean had shot at him with real bullets so many times that her nervousness on this particular day was rather unaccountable to him. Jean had lassoed him and dragged him behind Pard through brush. She had pulled him from a quicksand bed,—made of cement that showed a strong tendency to "set" about his form before she could rescue him,—and she had fought with him on the edge of a cliff and had thrown him over; and his director, anxious for the "punch" that was his fetish, had insisted on a panorama of the fall, so that ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... farther glimmer of more sands beyond them challenged our advance. We had come to a "grapevine ferry." The scow was on the other side, the water too shoal for the horses to swim, and the bottom, most likely, quicksand. Out of the blackness of the opposite shore came a soft, high-pitched, quavering, long-drawn, smothered moan of woe, the call of that snivelling little sinner the screech-owl. Ferry murmured to me to answer it and I sent the same faint horror-stricken tremolo back. Again it came ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... Daddy John on the driver's seat. It seemed an easy matter, the water chuckling round the wheels, the mules not wet above the knees. Half way across, grown unduly confident, the doctor turned in his saddle to address his daughter when his horse walked into a quicksand and unseated him. It took them half an hour to drag it out, Susan imploring that her father come back to the wagon and change his clothes. He only laughed at her which made her angry. With frowning brows she saw him mount again, and a dripping, white-haired ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone without her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to be no more forgotten while ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... something that made him feel giddy and very sick. That significant silence was to him nothing short of tragedy. He had seen his hero topple at a touch from the high pinnacle on which he had placed him, and he felt as if the very ground under his feet had become a quicksand. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell |
