"Sinuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of such tributary streams as the Noe, watering Hope Valley, and the Wye, is famous for its beauty (see DERBYSHIRE). The Derwent flows south past Chatsworth, Matlock and Belper and then, passing Derby, debouches upon a low plain, and turns south-eastward, with an extremely sinuous course, to join the Trent near Sawley. Its length is about 60 m. It falls in all some 1700 ft. (from Matlock 200 ft.), and no part is navigable, save certain reaches at Matlock and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... orchestra stalls, with the clicking of her heels, the clacking of her castanets, now held high over head, now held low behind her back, the flashing of her ivory teeth, the shrill screaming, electric magenta of her smile, the wile of her wriggle, the passion of her performance. And close beside her the sinuous Mazantinita would flaunt a garish tambourine and wave a shrieking fan. All inanimate objects, shawls, mantillas, combs, and cymbals, become inflamed with life, once they are pressed into the service of these senoritas, languorous and forbidding, indifferent and sensuous. Against these rude gipsies ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... released, like some huge bird that had received its death-wound, turned head downwards towards the earth; and, after making various sinuous evolutions through the air, flouting its long tail first in one direction then in another—it was seen darting down towards the acclivity of the mountain. At length, passing behind the summit of the cliffs, it was no longer visible to the eyes of those who had aided it in its lofty flight, ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... of the way in which the thematic system is worked. There are two themes connected with Loki. One is a rapid, sinuous, twisting, shifty semiquaver figure suggested by the unsubstantial, elusive logic-spinning of the clever one's braincraft. The other is the fire theme. In the first act of Siegfried, Mimmy makes his unavailing ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... still within our hands a lever of greater power, though the danger of wielding it is proportionately greater to those who would use it. This power is the People. Before us lies a course infinitely more perilous than the sinuous paths trodden by the first followers of St. Ignatius as they advanced towards power. It lies on the troubled waters; it leads over the restless, ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... himself cautiously, he crouched on all fours in the grass, slipping and sliding forward so hiddenly that the keen ear and eagle eye of the approaching soldier took note of no least ripple in the quiet grass by the roadside. It was the sinuous, silent motion of a snake; and suddenly his eyes narrowed, his lips drew back from his teeth, his ears pricked forward, along the ridge of his bare back the hair bristled, and the locks about his face waved and writhed as though they were the locks of Medusa herself. Ah, and were those the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a franc or two admission and entered a place which had flower beds in it, and grass plots, and long, curving rows of ornamental shrubbery, with here and there a secluded bower convenient for eating ice cream in. We moved along the sinuous gravel walks, with the great concourse of girls and young men, and suddenly a domed and filigreed white temple, starred over and over and over again with brilliant gas jets, burst upon us like a fallen sun. Nearby was a large, handsome house with its ample front ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the splendid forest, there was fire,—at first nothing but a thin, serpentine trail of ashes through moss and bedded needles; then, scarcely six inches in width, a smouldering, sinuous path from which fine threads of smoke rose straight upward, vanishing in ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... minutes the deed was accomplished. Its lovely sinuous "figure" reduced to the stolid contour of a black plush work-bag, its small uneasy head thrust into the roomy muslin cranium of the Bengal Tiger, the astonished Cat found herself slumping soggily on a ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... is one of nicely regulated refraction. If the river were perfectly straight, the gravity and inertia of its waters would move in a right line, with a velocity beyond all control. But we find the river very sinuous, and the momentum of current consequently lessened. For example, striking in an arm of the river, by the inertia of the moving volume, the water is thrown, and with less velocity, upon the opposite bank, which it pursues until it meets another repellent obstacle, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... trees that rise from hedgerow clusters of dog-rose, ivy, and honeysuckle, and with snugly nestling homesteads and quaintly-cowled "oast-houses" sprinkled here and there, sweep across the valley, through which the river winds in sinuous curves, onwards to a long range of ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... stated in a very clear and suggestive manner by Professor Albert A. Stanley of the University of Michigan: "If in the future the line of demarcation between the college and the university shall cease to be as sinuous and shadowy as at present, the university will offer well-defined courses in research, in creative work, possibly in interpretation—by which I do not mean criticism, but rather that which is criticized. [Professor Stanley evidently refers to musical performance.] The college courses will ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... nest, the owl, the kite, and daw Long-tongued, frequenter of the sandy shores. A garden-vine luxuriant on all sides 80 Mantled the spacious cavern, cluster-hung Profuse; four fountains of serenest lymph Their sinuous course pursuing side by side, Stray'd all around, and ev'ry where appear'd Meadows of softest verdure, purpled o'er With violets; it was a scene to fill A God from heav'n with wonder and delight. Hermes, Heav'n's messenger, admiring stood That sight, and having all survey'd, at length Enter'd the ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... her sinuous yet malleable nature, so full of guile and so full of goodness, that reminded us pleasantly of lowly folk in elder lands, where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints of fear between master and servant, without disturbing the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... rush through them, over them. The thirteen cannon behind the struggling hydra of gray seem one vortex—sulphurous, flaming, spitting, as from one vast mouth, scorching fire, huge mouthfuls of granite venom. Back—back, the gray masses break in sinuous, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... their arms like giant bulbs, and feet that held the ground like the hoofs of oxen. The wrestlers were calm to all outward appearance, and embraced each other with the quiet fondling of lambs and the sinuous power of less affectionate creatures. But the people about them were wildly excited. They stopped to watch every wary movement of the foot, and craned their necks to catch the subtlest twist ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... face to the physiognomist. This man had a mouth to whose lips divine kindness lent its sweetness. They were wholesome, full, red lips, finely wrinkled, sinuous, mobile, by which nature had given expression to noble feelings; lips which spoke to the heart and proclaimed the man's intelligence and lucidity, a gift of second-sight, and a heavenly temper; and you would have judged him wrongly from looking merely at his sloping forehead, his fireless eyes, ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... wines, old silver, old traditions, handed down from father to son, and from the son to the son's son. Standing on the edge of the bluff which the city crowns, it dominates from its windows and terraces the valley of the Aar. Swift and unruffled, the river glides through the meadows like a sinuous ice-green serpent. Beyond the river and behind the pastoral slopes of the Gurten hangs a curtain of mist, which lifts at times to display the line of the Bernese Oberland, from ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... which now hung heavily over all objects, served, no doubt, to deepen the vague impressions which these objects created. So dense was this pleasant fog that I could at no time see more than a dozen yards of the path before me. This path was excessively sinuous, and as the sun could not be seen, I soon lost all idea of the direction in which I journeyed. In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect—that of enduing all the external world with an intensity ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... silken mantle that had been about her below stairs and he saw now that she was a vivid, exotic shimmer of gauzy green against the saffron veil that fell from her henna hair. There was barbaric beauty in her, in the bold, painted face, the bare, gold-banded arms, the slender, sinuous lines, and there was barbaric splendor in the heavy jewels ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Kublai Khan A stately pleasure dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sacred sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground, With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... face of nature herself, and the character of the race that looks up to her, that fail to the mind's eye. The West Coast of Scotland is something like that nature in a general way, except that it is infinitely smaller and less grand; but that constant, bright blue sky, those deeply-indented, sinuous, gleaming friths, those headstrong rivers and headlong falls, those steep hillsides, those long ridges of fells, those peaks and needles rising sharp above them, those hanging glaciers and wreaths of everlasting ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... Of that cynical theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting in its own words the very spirit of ruthless revolution, embodied in that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows, like slightly sinuous lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the perpendicular folds ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... more or less, On the sinuous line of a letter S, Twining its little houses through The twists of the street, as our hamlets do, For no good reason, so far as I know, Save that chance has arranged it so. It's a quaint old ramshackle moss-grown ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... With the sinuous avoidings of a baffled snake the road turns and turns upon itself until its earlier promise of high adventuring seems doubtful. As often as not it climbs a semi-barren dun stretch of sunbaked earth dotted with stubby cacti—passes these dwarfed grotesques, ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... me on its velvety paws, softly rubbing its sinuous body against my legs. I leaned over to stroke it, and it permitted my caress, purring, and finally leaping upon my knees. I noticed then that it was a female cat, quite young, and that she seemed disposed to permit me to pet her as long as ever I would. Finally, however, I put her ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the two cats appearing with miraculous suddenness out of nowhere—as is the custom of their priceless tribe—rushed wildly past. Fierce, sinuous, infinitely graceful shapes, leaping high in air, making strange noises, chirrupings and squeakings, thudding of quick little paws, as they chased one another round the antiquated, seaward-trained cannon and pyramid ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... along the shore, beside the black, sinuous line of shrivelled fucus. The base of the cliff was piled with chalk debris. On the other side was the level plain of the sea. Hand in hand, alone and overshadowed by huge cliffs, they toiled on. The waves staggered in, and fell, overcome at ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... of his jacket, and had dropped it between his feet. He sat bare-headed, all in white now. He felt the belt at his waist. They were nearing the launch, which stood still big above them, her myriad lamps making lovely darts, and sinuous running tongues of ugly red and green and yellow light on the lustrous dark water, under ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... ground, Insect or Worme; those wav'd thir limber fans For wings, and smallest Lineaments exact In all the Liveries dect of Summers pride With spots of Gold and Purple, azure and green: These as a line thir long dimension drew, 480 Streaking the ground with sinuous trace; not all Minims of Nature; some of Serpent kinde Wondrous in length and corpulence involv'd Thir Snakie foulds, and added wings. First crept The Parsimonious Emmet, provident Of future, in small room large heart enclos'd, Pattern ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... he was, it was fixed that he should lead the attempt. At the hour, then, for chapel the prisoners passed as usual through the door. When it came to Paul's turn he drew himself by his hands to the pipe, and then creeping along its sinuous course, gained the wall before he had even fetched his breath. Rather more clumsily, Augustus followed his friend's example. Once his foot slipped, and he was all but over. He extended his hands involuntarily, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... horrible that even Kali and his brave followers stiffened with fear. Out of the mango-tree a black, writhing mass crept toward the terrified squealing boar. Unfolding length after length, the thing advanced, until nearly thirty feet of sinuous, undulating life stretched between the mango tree and the boar's cage. Papita, sickened with fear, buried her face in her mother's bosom, weeping hysterically; Sicto, pale and trembling, grasped ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... the Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by a snowy saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts. Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The green and golden forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the sinuous valley brings their lines together or disparts them. There is a sound of cow-bells on the meadows; and the roar of the stream is dulled or quickened as the gusts of this October wind sweep ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... began etching, and in fifteen months finished a series of masterpieces. His line, surprisingly agile and sinuous, has the finesse of Goya—whom he resembled at certain points. He used aquatint with full knowledge of effects to be produced, and at times he recalls Rembrandt in the depth of his shadows. His friend ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... or HAMPSHIRE AVON rises in Wiltshire south of Marlborough, and watering the Vale of Pewsey collects feeders from the high downs between Marlborough and Devizes. Breaching the high ground of Salisbury Plain, it passes Amesbury, and following a very sinuous course reaches Salisbury. Here it receives on the east bank the waters of the Bourne, and on the west those of the Wylye. With a more direct course, and in a widening, fertile valley it continues past Downton, Fordingbridge and Ringwood, skirting the New Forest on the west, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... they had traversed the forest, and emerged on the hill overlooking Vivey. From the border line where they stood, they could discover, between the half-denuded branches of the line of aspens, the sinuous, deepset gorge, in which the Aubette wound its tortuous way, at the extremity of which the village lay embanked against an almost upright wall of thicket and pointed rocks. On the west this narrow defile was closed by a mill, standing like a sentinel on guard, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... seen of them as in a glorified humanity, it would be manifestly a moral incongruity to invest the devil in a similar form. It must, then, be the shape of some other creature; as a lion, or a lamb, or—why not a serpent? Is there any improbability here? and not rather as apt an avatar of the sinuous and wily rebel, the dangerous, fascinating foe, as poetry at least, nay, as any sterner contrivance could invent? The plain fact is, that Reason—given keenness—might have guessed this ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... hair above a face of radiant purity, of deft fingers moving in swift and sure precision as they wound the white rolls of bandages round bloody and broken flesh, of two round capable arms whose lines suggested strength and beauty, of a firm knit, pliant body that moved with easy sinuous grace, of eyes—but ever at the eyes he paused, forgetting all else, till, recalling himself, he began again, striving to catch and hold that radiant, bewildering, illusive vision. That was a sufficiently maddening process, but to ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... as the house began to rock and peal full-throatedly. 'Dal fled. A sinuous and silent procession was filing into the police-court to a scarcely audible accompaniment. It was dressed—but the world and all its picture-palaces know how it was dressed. It danced and it danced, and it danced the ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... describing the egg, which is a white, opaque object, shaped like a much-elongated oval. One of the ends is lengthened out into a neck or pedicle, which is as long as the egg proper. This neck is somewhat wrinkled, sinuous and as a rule considerably curved. The whole thing is not at all unlike certain gourds with an elongated paunch and a snake-like neck. The total length, pedicle and all, is about 3 millimetres. (About one-eighth of an inch.—Translator's Note.) It is needless to say, after recognizing the grub's ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... which is often so lovely in Oldport. It was perfectly still; the tide swelled and swelled till it touched the edge of the green lawn behind the house, and seemed ready to submerge the slender pier; the water looked at first like glass, till closer gaze revealed long sinuous undulations, as if from unseen water-snakes beneath. A few rags of storm-cloud lay over the half-seen hills beyond the bay, and behind them came little mutterings of thunder, now here, now there, as if some wild creature were roaming up and down, dissatisfied, in the shelter ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... height, formed of one block of green and red jasper, and cut into the fanciful undulating arch of the Saracens. The consummate artist had seized the advantage afforded to him by the ruddy veins of the precious stone, and had formed them in bold relief into two vast and sinuous serpents, which shot forth their crested heads and glittering eyes at Honain ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... Paspaheghs were silent for evermore. Diccon had the knife of the first to fall, and it ran red. The Italian, quick and sinuous as a serpent, kept beside my lord and me, striving to bring his dagger to his master's aid. We two panted hard; before our eyes blood, within our ears the sea. The noise of the other combatants suddenly fell. The hush could only mean that Diccon was dead or taken. I could not look behind ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... gently receding in the western horizon on a beautiful summer evening nearly a century ago, a solitary voyageur might have been seen slowly ascending the sinuous stream that stretches from the North Star State to the Gulf of Mexico. He was on a mission of peace and good will to the red men of the distant forest. On nearing the shore of what is now a great city the lonely voyageur was ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... believe, a sort of lounge for the students. Anyhow, a few students were lounging in it; only a few—there was no rush for the privilege. And the few loungers were really lounging, in the wonderful sinuous postures of youth. They might have been lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amid portraits ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... from the Wilderness (for such was the appropriate name of Quilp's choice retreat), after a sinuous and corkscrew fashion, with many checks and stumbles; after stopping suddenly and staring about him, then as suddenly running forward for a few paces, and as suddenly halting again and shaking his head; doing everything ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... to her handsomeness, an air of depth and firmness, an exquisite health and clearness to the colour in her cheeks. Her step was as light as Nancy's, elastic and buoyant— a gliding motion which gave a sinuous grace to the movements of her body. There had also come into her eyes a vigilance such as deaf people possess, a sensitive observation imparting a deeper intelligence ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... cigars. The valley was like a tumbled mountain, thick with crags and eminences, through which the river worked strenuously, sinuous in foam, hurrying at the turns. Angelo watched all the ways from a distant height till set of sun. He saw another couple of soldiers meet those two at the inn, and then one pair went up toward the vale-head. It seemed as if Vittoria had disconcerted them ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ancestors, and that he had taken in from them, as did Elsie Venner, the serpent nature. They had gone snaking, generation after generation, from the days of the serpent worship of old, it may be back to the old Serpent himself; and this tawny, sinuous, active thing of evil, this boy, without the least sense of sympathy for any pain, who devoured a cobra alive with as much indifference as he had just shown in petting it, was the result. He was a human snake. I had long before ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... consists of elongated cells with plane or sinuous walls, various kinds of short cells intercalated between the ends of long cells, motor-cells and stomata. Hairs of different sorts occur as outgrowths of the epidermis. The roughness of the surface of the ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... palm, from an equal regard for both the claimants. Munro still had the advantage; but a momentary pause of action, and a sudden evolution of his antagonist, now materially altered their position, and Dexter, with the sinuous agility of the snake, winding himself completely around his opponent, now whirled him suddenly over and brought himself upon him. Extricating his arms with admirable skill, he was enabled to regain his knee, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Newcastle the road— first on one side of a creek and then on the other—occupies the whole bottom of the ravine, being partly cut out of the steep hillside, and partly built up with bowlders removed from the creek- bed by the miners. The hills are wooded, the course of the ravine is sinuous. In a dark night careful driving is required in order not to go off into the water. The night that I have in memory was dark, the creek a torrent, swollen by a recent storm. I had driven up from Newcastle and was within about a mile ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Only such a man as Carr, alone would have braved the treacherous snows and the intense cold of the Arctic winter to run him down. Falkner knew that, as an hour later he looked over the roaring stove at his captor. About Carr there was something of the unpleasant quickness, the sinuous movement, of the little white ermine—the outlaw of the wilderness. His eyes were as merciless. At times Falkner caught the same red glint in them. And above his despair, the utter hopelessness of his situation, there rose in him an intense hatred ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... Plants deliquescent. Time of growth, summer. autumn. Habitat In woods, in uncultivated places, on ground. In grass and fields, on ground. On other plants—epiphytal. On stumps. On wood. On manure. Gills, free. adnate. decurrent. sinuous. serrated. distant. in folds. Volva. Veil adhering to margin of cap. Ring. Stem, cartilaginous. lateral, or eccentric. none. brittle. Pileus, scaly or warted. campanulate. silky, cracked or fibrillose. umbonate. umbilicate. ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... attain—the lights flashed in vivid, tiny pencils, intersecting each other in sharply drawn, brilliant figures, which changed with dizzying speed; when the tempo was slow, the beams were soft and broad, blending into each other to form sinuous, indefinite, writhing patterns, whose very vagueness ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... there gushes forth, from beneath a huge and precipitous rock, a large spring of pure and clear water, cool and refreshing as the dark forest through which it glides, and which, after a sinuous course along the centre of the dell, receiving as it flows the contributions of numerous lesser springs and streams, communicates its waters to the foaming current of the Oswego. Whether this singular but beautiful region now presents the form in which it was first ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... arms he describes lines as angular as if he were tracing figures with geometrical precision; the affected dancer, on the other hand, glides with an excess of delicacy, as if he feared to injure himself on coming in contact with the ground, and his feet and hands describe only lines in sinuous curves. The other sex, which is essentially in possession of true grace, is also that one which is more frequently culpable of affected grace, but this affectation is never more distasteful than when used as a bait to desire. The smile of true grace ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... proud memories of Poland were mine, the spirit of her music, arts, and poetry had cast its witchery over me. Her history, the tragedy of a crownless queen of sorrows, had transported me into a dreamy idealism. I was soon the confidant of our seductive mobile Polish beauties. Sinuous, insincere, changeful, passionate, and burning with the flames of Love and Life, I was, at once, their idol and their plaything, their hero, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... and I, lying in the snow that melts all around us in the fierce, scorching glare. Through the lurid rift of smoke I can see the friendly stars. Against that curtain of blaze, strangely beautiful in its sinuous strength, I watch the black silhouettes of men running hither and thither like rats, gutting the houses, looting the stores, tearing the hearts out of the homes. The fire seems a great bird, and from its nest of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... covered with coarse grass six or seven feet high, relieved at intervals by solitary palm trees. This is all Portuguese territory, the Congo State here possessing only a narrow strip of land along the northern bank. The course of the river here is very sinuous, winding in and out among the hills, the curves being cut more sharply each day as the water eats into the sand and carries it to be digested in the great stomach ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... powerful and sinister figure. Ned felt that he was in the presence of genius, but it belonged to one of those sinuous creatures, shining and terrible, that are bred under the vivid sun of the tropics. There was a singular sensation at the roots of his hair, but, resolved to show neither fear nor apprehension, he stood and gazed directly ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... doctor spoke of, and suddenly it occurred to him that in a way it was just like that pool at Upolu where Ethel had been in the habit of bathing every evening. A clear highland stream ran down a sinuous course, rocky, splashing gaily, and then formed a deep, smooth pool, with a little sandy beach. Trees overshadowed it thickly, not coconut trees, but beeches, and the sun played fitfully through the leaves on the sparkling water. It gave him a shock. With ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... men were ascending from the cabin to the deck. Turjun, the panthan, crept close to the companionway, his sinuous fingers closing tightly upon the hilt of his dagger. Could he despatch them both before he was overpowered? He smiled. He could slay an entire utan of her enemies in ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... trembled and glowed with extraordinary radiance, . . the prevailing color of its skin was creamy white, marked with countless rings and scaly bright spots of silver, purple, and a peculiar livid blue,—and all these tints came into brilliant prominence, as it crouched before Lysia and twisted its sinuous neck to and fro with an evidently fawning and supplicatory gesture; while she, keeping her sombre dark eyes fixed full upon it, moved not an inch from her position, but, majestically serene, continued ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... frizzle; crimp, crape, indent, scollop^, scallop, wring, intort^; contort; wreathe &c (cross) 219. Adj. convoluted; winding, twisted &c v.; tortile^, tortive^; wavy; undated, undulatory; circling, snaky, snake-like, serpentine; serpent, anguill^, vermiform; vermicular; mazy, tortuous, sinuous, flexuous, anfractuous^, reclivate^, rivulose^, scolecoid^; sigmoid, sigmoidal [Geom.]; spiriferous^, spiroid^; involved, intricate, complicated, perplexed; labyrinth, labyrinthic^, labyrinthian^, labyrinthine; peristaltic; daedalian^; kinky, knotted. wreathy^, frizzly, crepe, buckled; raveled ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Ten-Pound Island on one side and the old fort on the other, our friends found that most of the points from which a good view could be obtained were occupied by spectators waiting for the sinuous monster, who was not long in making his appearance, and seemed to enjoy the occasion as well ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... little less than two-thirds of the way down, issued a rather considerable stream. It seemed to come from under the wall fronting the plain. Its course, straight rather than sinuous, lay toward the south-west, and was marked by long lines of giant date-palms and pale-stemmed eucalyptus trees, till it lost itself in ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... for her beauty and swear that it is of the kind that drives to distraction. She is fire and flesh and carnal—she is more than beauty. There is allurement about her body; sylph-like, sinuous; the olive tint of her complexion, the wonderful glory of her hair and the glowing night-black of her eyes. Men pause; she is of the superlative kind that robs the reason, a supreme glory of passion and life and beauty, at whose feet fools ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... orations—say, that was a classic! He tells 'em confidential how Gopher is the comin' metropolis of the great West; how, "with its main boulevard laid out along the sinuous, lovely banks of the pellucid Pinto River, and its western boundaries stretching off to the sunset-tinted tops of Soup Kettle Range, it has a scenic setting unsurpassed anywhere this side of Switzerland." And when it comes to predictin' how prosperity ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... and gorgeous blossom was supported by a long, flexible, writhing stem, and its base was composed of many and highly specialized leaves. There were saws and spears and mighty, but sinuous tendrils; there were slender shoots which seemed to possess some sense of perception; there was the massive tractor base composed of extensible leaves which by their contraction and expansion propelled the mass ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... journey downstream, stopping when an unusually succulent root showed itself above the oozy bed. He had traveled far, lured by tempting food always just ahead. Suddenly his heart seemed to stand still and he gazed down stream with bulging eyes. Coming swiftly toward him, swimming with a sinuous ease which struck terror to the muskrat's heart, was a long, brown animal whose keen eyes seemed to bore into every nook and corner of the stream. The ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... As a pitcher, a weaver, a sunfisher, this roan had no equal. Its ill-shaped nose and wicked red eyes were enough to give one bad dreams. But the lean-flanked young miner appeared clamped to the saddle. Lithe and sinuous as a panther, he rode with a perfect ease that was captivating. Teddy tried all its tricks. It went up into the air and came down with all four legs stiff as iron posts. It shot forward in a series of quick sharp bucks. It flung itself against the wall of ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... thin, clearly separated from the pileus, and easily removed. They are more or less angular, and while elongated transversely at first, become nearly isodiametric as the pileus becomes fully expanded, passing from an elongated form to rectangular, or sinuous in outline, the margin more or less upturned, especially in age, when they begin to loosen and "peel" from the surface of the cap. They are lighter in color than the pileus and I have never observed the yellow tint in them. The gills are white, broad at the middle, ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... with a shake of her head on its sinuous neck; "for I must be collecting my things ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... state of Washington. If the Strait mentioned, together with Hood Canal and a portion of the Strait of Georgia are included, and they will be in this article, nearly 2,000 square miles of mirror like surface are encompassed within the green wooded shore lines of as many lineal miles. With sinuous arms, these waters reach in every direction, reflecting in their depths sometimes the lofty mountains, at other times gardens and farms of unusual attractiveness, and again the modern cities located upon ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... not hesitate. A movement of the helm thrust the ship into the narrow and sinuous channel. In this place the sea was still more furious, and the ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... extent of water disappeared under enormous fields of ice, upon which hummocks rose up as regularly as a crystallisation of the same substance. Shandon had the steam put on, and up to the 11th of May the Forward wound amongst the sinuous rocks, leaving the print of a track on the sky, caused by the black smoke from her funnels. But new obstacles were soon encountered; the paths were getting closed up in consequence of the incessant displacement ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... this process of selective arrangement goes into matters of the most minute detail. Here, for instance, he would observe a mile or two of a particular kind of seaweed artistically arranged in one long sinuous line upon the beach; there he would see a wonderful deposit of shells; in another place a lovely little purple heap of garnet sand, the minute particles of which have all been carefully picked out from the surrounding ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... marking out more clearly upon the sky the outline of the trees and the crest of the hills; a melancholy shade was falling upon the woods, and a whitish fog chilled the grass on the meadows, while a thicker mist indicated the sinuous course of the little river. As I remained absorbed in the contemplation of the scene which reminded me of better days, I discovered suddenly Madame ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... there were days of drifting, breezes soft as a sigh; Night trailed her robe of jewels over the floor of the sky. The moonlit stream was a python, silver, sinuous, vast, That writhed on a shroud of velvet—well, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... was shining down on a treeless landscape, across which the yellow, foam-flecked Smoky Hill River wound its sinuous way. Beside this stream was old Fort Harker, a low quadrangle of quarters, for military man and beast, grouped about a parade-ground for companionship rather than for protection. The frontier fort had little need for defensive strength. About its walls the Indian crawled ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... too tall, lithe and slim and sinuous as a mermaid, yet well enough rounded to make each delicate curve a charm, not merely of promise but of fulfilment. She wore a flowing morning-gown that made negligee seem to the suddenly intoxicated secretary the glorified costume for a woman. It was a richly embroidered thing from China and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... knew but what the double-headed snake might start up from each blackberry-bush—that wicked, cunning, accursed creature in the service of the Indian wizards, that had such power over all those white maidens who met the eyes placed at either end of his long, sinuous, creeping body, so that loathe him, loathe the Indian race as they would, off they must go into the forest to seek but some Indian man, and must beg to be taken into his wigwam, abjuring faith and race for ever? Or there were spells—so Nattee said—hidden about the ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... shore, keeping just behind the canoe and close to the water's edge, followed a small, dark, sinuous creature, its piercing eyes, bead-black with a glint of red behind them, fixed in savage curiosity upon the canoemen. It was about two feet in length, with extremely short legs, and a sharp, triangular head. As it ran—and its ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... I wish men would not dance. It is the most unbecoming exercise which they can adopt. In women you have the sweep and wave of drapery, gentle undulations, summer-cloud floatings, soft, sinuous movements, the fluency of pliant forms, the willowy bend and rebound of lithe and lovely suppleness. It is grace generic,—the sublime, the evanescent mysticism of motion, without use, without aim, except its own overflowing and all-sufficing fascination. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the shallow, amber pool. The mud of his digging had no more than cleared away before the under-water creatures of the place, jackals on the lion's spoor, came forward, eager to feast on the remnants of his meal. Bream, sunning themselves on the shallow margins of the other side, give a sinuous swish to their tails and dart up. A yellow perch poises, slips forward a yard, poises again and then thinking the place safe, comes forward for his share. In beauty and intelligence the yellow perch is easily the king of the brook waters and I can ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... soft waxy hymenium, which is incompletely porus, or arranged in reticulate, sinuous, dentate folds. This genus grows on wood, at first resupinate, expanded; the hymenophore springing from a ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... play, and with a feint of striking him, and a 'Down, Rover! do hush!' she looked towards the window where we were standing, as if to reassure herself that no one had been disturbed by the noise, and seeing us, she coloured all over, and hurried away, with Rover still curving in sinuous lines about her ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... hollow, but more what the Yorkshire people call a 'bottom,' or 'botham.' I left Keighley in a car for Haworth, four miles off—four tough, steep, scrambling miles, the road winding between the wavelike hills that rose and fell on every side of the horizon, with a long illimitable sinuous look, as if they were a part of the line of the Great Serpent, which the Norse legend says girdles the world. The day was lead-coloured; the road had stone factories alongside of it,—grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages belonging to these factories, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... flesh, whilst roaring for mercy he moved and rocked on his knees before me. Instinctively he approached me to hamper my movements, whilst I moved back to give my lash the better play. He held out his arms and joined his fat hands in supplication, but the lash caught them in its sinuous tormenting embrace, and started a red wheal across their whiteness. He tucked them into his armpits with a scream, and ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... the slopes of the sky. Presently it began to waver, bending back and forth, sometimes slowly, sometimes with a quick, springing motion, as if testing its elasticity. Now it took the shape of a bow, now undulated into Hogarth's line of beauty, brightening and fading in its sinuous motion, and finally formed a shepherd's crook, the end of which suddenly began to separate and fall off, as if driven by a strong wind, until the whole belt shot away in long, drifting lines of fiery ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... are rooting out, are horrified at their want of 'moderation.' But though violence is always unchristian, indifference to rampant evils is not conspicuously more Christian, and, on the whole, you cannot throttle snakes in a graceful attitude or without using some force to compress the sinuous neck. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... before he died, tell you his intention to do this?" pressed Marie, feeling less interest in the Dutch embalmer's method than in the sinuous motive of a man who could leave ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... concurrently, the apologist of philosophic light. Engaged to a powerful mechanism of romantic dogma, the nett article of its creed; the neochromatic acoustic regalia of stage eloquence, the key, or longest recurrent note; the van or middle the next, the sinuous lever of stage discipline. After all, concurrently may it not, be said that this colour instinct aspect of cosmically conceived romanticism is never wilfully vulgarized. For its incomparable, iconographical purpose it exists, ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... just in front made it plain to me that we were to suffer for a moment's indiscretion, I felt neither fatigue nor hunger. The searching shells fell nearer to us. We ran in couples, with a fair distance between each couple, according to instructions, along the rough, sinuous inequalities of the deep trench. After each visitation we had to lie still and count five till all the fragments of shell had come to rest. At last a shell seemed to drop right upon me. The earth shook under me. My eyes and nose were affected by the fumes of the explosion. ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... luminaries, the ancient Astronomers, in conformity to the requirement of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, as inculcated in the Egyptian Version of the Exoteric Creed, divided it into an upper and an under, or nether world, which they connected by a sinuous and tenebrious passage. ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... she held the attention of all; everybody's eyes followed her sinuous movements, now indicative of glowing passion, now of frolicsomeness. Not until she ceased her rhythmic swayings was the spell interrupted. The audience went mad with rapture, and the entire dance had to be ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... altar. And afterwards she lighted the two candles. As she went off with her broom, she gave a glance round her to make sure that the abode of the Divinity had been put in proper order. All was still, save that the bell-rope near the confessional still swung between roof and floor with a sinuous sweep. ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... hand from both of those he had closed upon it, and went back from him across the room with a sinuous spring. "ME!" Whatever potential complicity had lurked in her heart, his words brought her ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... bewilderment as he took the hand she was cordially extending. Could this full-blown rose of young womanhood, this startling beauty, be the slip of a timid girl he had so lightly treated three years ago? What hair, what eyes, what palpitating, sinuous grace! She was fast recovering calmness. There was a womanly dignity about her which seemed incongruous in one ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the hermit spoke of, and followed its sinuous downhill course, now running when the ground was open, now moving more cautiously, yet always swiftly, when it led me ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... was amazed, but from the second time quieted down, became tractable. It is known, that "women of love" never know a mean in love relations. They are either hysterical liars, deceivers, dissemblers, with a coolly-perverted mind and a sinuous dark soul; or else unboundedly self-denying, blindly devoted, foolish, naive animals, who know no bounds either in concessions or loss of self-esteem. The sempstress belonged to the second category, and Horizon was soon successful, without great effort, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... and sinuous progress of between two and three hundred yards brought us to a blockade of logs and shallow water. Determined to float in my canoe upon the surface of the lake towards which we were paddling, I directed ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... hillside, and on both margins of the graveled way, ancient elm trees stood at regular intervals, throwing their boughs across, to unite in lifting the superb groined arches, whose fine tracery of sinuous lines were here and there concealed by clustering mistletoe—and gray lichen masses—and ornamented with bosses of velvet moss; while the venerable columnar trunks were now and then wreathed with poison-oak vines, where red trumpet flowers insolently blared defiance ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and, just as abruptly the apparition reappeared—not alone the head this time, but the entire sinuous form as it glided into the room and came to rest in the middle of the floor. The eyes brooded on Cocky, and the entire body was still save for the long tail, which lashed from one side to the other and back again in an abrupt, ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... perfume enhance; And supple charms the third spring flowers ornate; Softly is wafted one streak of fragrance! A light mist doth becloud the tortuous way! With moist the clothes bedews, that verdure cold! The pond who ever sinuous could hold? Dreams long and subtle, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... eyelids, such as Titian painted him in the Adonis. The foreground is filled with prophets and saints of the first dignity, and a kneeling woman, whose face is not visible, but whose attitude and drapery are drawn with the sinuous and undulating grace of that hand which could not fail. Every figure is turned to the enthroned Deity, touched with ineffable light. The artist has painted heaven, and is not absurd. In that age of substantial faith ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... illusions more strange and tragical than these,—resembling those mormos and bugbears which they themselves laugh at and deride, as they are described by Empedocles to be, "with sinuous feet and undeveloped hands, bodied like ox and faced like man,"—with certain other prodigious and unnatural phantoms, these men have gathered together out of dreams and the alienations of distracted minds, and affirm that ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... adventure, of sympathy for the picturesque and the unknown surging through his veins. A billion stars glowed like yellow, passionless eyes in the polar cold of the skies. Behind him, white in its sinuous twisting through the snow-smothered wilderness, lay the icy Saskatchewan, with a few scattered lights visible where Prince Albert, the last outpost of civilization, came down to the river ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... European Staff College, and with an originality which if it had been displayed by a young British officer in an examination for promotion would probably have injured that officer's prospects, Delarey dug his trenches not at the foot of the hill but in sinuous lines some little way in advance of it, by which he gained the power of meeting an attack with grazing or skimming fire, and which also removed the firing line from physical features on which the ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... for two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a pretty steep hill, with a back-ground of dun and purple moors, rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is built at the very summit of the long narrow street. All round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors—grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... favor—soft, with a reverent hand, (Not lightly touching your person, lord of the land!) Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand On the firm-packed sand, Free By a world of marsh, that borders a world of sea. Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band Of the sand beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land. Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight, Softly the sand beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... and could make known instantly, by means of an electric wire, the position of a fire, to the head station at Watling-street, in the same manner as the Americans do in Boston. This plan is, however, open to the objection, that London is intersected by a sinuous river, which renders it difficult to tell on which bank the conflagration is raging. Nevertheless we imagine that the northern part of the town could be advantageously superintended from such a height, whilst the southern half might rest under the surveillance of one of the tall ...
— Fires and Firemen • Anon.
... so, handsomer, every day. Your trip to the Eastern Shore last spring did you no end of good," and the young attorney crooked his long neck and elevated his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth in the effort to give to his sinuous ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... somewhat ruefully rubbing his aching head where it had come into violent contact with the deck. He looked dazed, and, upon being questioned by Dyer, admitted that he believed he had been momentarily stunned by his fall. And all about him were wet sinuous marks upon the deck which sufficiently accounted for the furious banging sounds that had been heard, and which also conclusively demonstrated that the young captain had experienced an almost miraculous escape from the violent blows which had ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... refer you to his famous book "The Idea of a University" to read at length how Newman, in that sinuous, sinewy, Platonic style of his, works it out—the spread, through Rome, even to our shores, of the civilisation which began in ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... a lad of fifteen, yet his slender figure was sinuous in its every line, and its grace betokened much wiry strength. His face was that of a man in the early thirties,—all but his eyes. They looked as old as ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... the proud cities of men; I name my passage the Highway of Instant Death; I splinter world-old forests with my laugh, And whirl the ancient snows of Hecla sheer into Orion's eyes. I dance on the deep under the big Indian stars, And wrap the water spout about my sinuous hips As a dancer winds her girdle. The ocean's horrid crew, The octopus, the serpent, and the shark, with the heart of a coward, Plunge downward when they hear my feet above on the sea-floor, And hide in their slimy coverts. Brave ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... a roadside lime, With buttercups growing about its feet, And a footpath winding a sinuous line In and out of ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean |
