"Sirocco" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in which they had been enveloped in Corsica crossed the sea in their wake like the blast of a sirocco, followed them to Paris and blew madly through the apartments on Place Vendome, which were thronged from morning till night by the usual crowd, increased by the constant arrival of little men as dark as carob-beans, with regular, bearded faces, some noisy, buzzing and chattering, others ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... his life in alternations of ecstasy and agony, divided by dull spaces of misery, the ecstasies growing rarer and rarer, and the agonies more and more frequent, intense, and lasting; until at length the dethroned Apollo found himself chained to a pillar of his own ruined temple, which the sirocco was fast filling with ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... apartment. "All these spectacles my friends have witnessed!" exclaims the self-delighted Baptista Porta. When his friends drank wine out of the same cup which he had used, they were mortified with wonder; for he drank wine, and they only water! or on a summer's day, when all complained of the sirocco, he would freeze his guests with cold air in the room; or, on a sudden, let off a flying dragon to sail along with a cracker in its tail, and a cat tied on his back; shrill was the sound, and awful was the concussion; so that it required strong ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... escape. But besides these numerous fortifications, the whole coast of the island is protected by forts and batteries, towers and redoubts. We name those of the Red Tower, the Melleha, St. Paul, St. Julien, Marsa Sirocco, and St. Thomas; only to show how thoroughly the knights had guarded their convent, and how totally different the protection of the Maltese was under their rule, from what it was when they first landed; and found them with their ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... two of whom were mounted and armed with sabres and long guns. Our man, Mustapha, had charge of the baggage-mule, carrying our tent and the provisions for the trip. It was a dull, sultry morning; a dark, leaden haze hung over Jerusalem, and the khamseen, or sirocco-wind, came from the south-west, out of the Arabian Desert. We had again resumed the Oriental costume, but in spite of an ample turban, my face soon began to scorch in the dry heat. From the crest of the Hill of ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... "the army of the Naya possesses many pom-poms[A] of the English, each of which is equal in power to the fire of one of thy battalions. With them our people will sweep away thine hosts like grains of sand before the sirocco." ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... around its coasts, he describes it as lying under the equinoctial line, and possessing a circuit of 2100 miles. "Ella gira di circuito, secondo il calcole fatto da Mori, che modernamente l'hanno nauigato d'ogn'intorno due mila et cento miglia et corre maestro e sirocco; et per il mezo d'essa passa la linea equinottiale et e el principio del primo clima al terzo paralello."—L'Isole piu Famose del Monde, descritte da THOMASO PORCACCHI, lib. iii. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Abyssinia are long visible on our port side, while on the other we have a distant view of Arabia. Jeddah, the seaport of Mecca, with its bright minarets, is to be seen in the distance. In coasting along the shores of Nubia, the dense air from off the land is like a sirocco, suffocatingly hot. Suez is reached at last, a place which is all waste and barrenness, so we hasten on by railway to Cairo, a ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... I well remember, was exceedingly sultry. The air was sickly; and if the wind was not a sirocco, it was a withering levanter—oppressive to the functions of life, and to an invalid denying all exercise. Instead of rambling over the fortifications, I was, in consequence, constrained to spend the hottest ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... really her fiery eyes seemed to burn him; and her contempt dried up the stream of his commonplace flattery, as the breath of the sirocco parches ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... madness, bloodshed, and death. How hot, sultry, and enervating to the whole constitution of man, physically and mentally, is the atmosphere we have been breathing so long! The miasma of the swamp, the simoom of the desert, the merciless sirocco, are healthful when compared to such an atmosphere. And, hark! what formidable being is that who, with black expanded wings, flies about from place to place, and from person to person, with a cup of fire in his hands, which he applies ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... the far West, or in the Pampas, the gorges of the Andes, or the Alleghanies; who have bronzed their epidermis in the fierce heat of the tropics, or moistened their fair chevelure in the diamond spray of Niagara; who have, in fine, journeyed through calm and hurricane, snow-storms, sirocco, and simoom; who have rubbed noses—male noses—of the tattooed savage; mounted donkeys, ostriches, camelopards, lamas, and dromedaries; mules, wild asses, negroes, and elephants; ask them all if once in their lives—one single once—they ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... sirocco wind can occur during winter and spring; widespread harmattan haze exists 60% of time, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... these, as fierce, Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent winds, Eurus, and Zephyr; with their lateral noise, Sirocco and Libecchio." ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... where he remained till the hour had nearly arrived. He tried to write some verses. But he found that, although the lovely form of its own Naiad lay on the brink of the Well of Song, its waters would not flow: during the sirocco of passion, its springs withdrew into the cool caves of the Life beneath. At length he rose, too much preoccupied to mind his want of success; and, going down the back stair, reached the library. There he seated himself, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... now getting very close, hazy, and oppressive, as the season approached for the hot winds from the Continent, named, on this coast, the Hermattan, similar to the Sirocco of the Mediterranean; yet, the thermometer was only 88 deg. F. in ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... wind has just changed,' said Captain Cadurcis. 'It seems to me that we shall have a sirocco. There, it shifts again! We shall have ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... awakened in her when she visited Beverly, her early home, just before she left England for Sweden. The passage, in its contrast to the oppressive narrative which it interrupts, is as refreshing as a cool sea-breeze after the suffocating sirocco ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Spirit of Noon might have come. She led me in, well refreshed, and in the cool north rooms of the palace the warm hours of the day slipped like beads from a leash. It scarcely seemed her fingers that touched the harp to tune, but as if some herald of sirocco, some faint, hot breeze, had brushed between the strings. It scarcely seemed her voice that talked to me, but something distant as the tone in a sad sea-shell. What I said I knew not; I was in a maze, bewildered with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... to do this. Daniel Granger, after going half way to Marseilles, with a notion of exploring Algiers and Morocco, had stopped short, and made his way by road and rail—through sirocco, clouds of dust, and much inconvenience—to Liege, where he had lingered to recover and calm himself down a little before going ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... little places here and there, few enough as the Arabs know, that the Sahara's deadly sand has never been able to devastate; and there are places even in the Somme that German malice, obeying the Kaiser as the sand of Sahara obeys the accursed sirocco, has not been able to destroy quite to the uttermost. That little cluster of trees at Behagnies is one of these; Divisional Headquarters used to shelter beneath them; and near them was a statue on a lawn which probably stood by the windows of some fine house, though there is no trace of ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... winding Sacred Way that leads to the Forum, or on his way home struggles against the crowd as it pushes its way down town amid the dust and din of the busy city. He shrugs his shoulders in good-humored despair as the sirocco brings lassitude and irritation from beyond the Mediterranean, or he sits huddled up in some village by the sea, shivering with the winds from the Alps, reading, and waiting for the first swallow to ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... visage, to requite which courtesy, I said, casting my features into a smiling, yet melancholy fashion, O divinest Urania! receive again that too fatal gift, which not like the Zephyr cooleth, but like the hot breath of the Sirocco, heateth yet more that which is already inflamed. Whereupon, looking upon me somewhat scornfully, yet not so but what the experienced courtier might perceive a certain cast ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... have a moist, cool climate. The black pine is a native of Southern Europe, growing all the way from Southern Spain to the Taurus Mountains in Asia Minor. In its native habitat it has become accustomed to the hot winds that often sweep across the Mediteranean, the burning sirocco of the Great Sahara. The dwarf mountain pine, Pinus Montana, grows in the Pyrenees, in the Alps, in the Carpathians and in the Balkan Mountains, so that it, too, often encounters the hot winds that come across from the ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... how I went, In Joppa, through the public street, One morn when the sirocco spent Its storms of dust ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... comedy; after fifteen or twenty minutes Mrs. Vervain opened her eyes and said, "But before you commence, Florida, I wish you'd play a little, to get me quieted down. I feel so very flighty. I suppose it's this sirocco. And I believe I'll lie down ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... the end and aim of her existence. Instead of an idol to adore, she secures some foolish eidolon whom she can scarce respect, and through days of disgust and nights of agony strives to "do her duty," to conceal from the world her disappointment. Thus is blood that might have been a sirocco to stir the soul of an anchorite, transformed into an icy mist—the Paphian Venus lies crushed, degraded, cold, amid the reeds of Pan. But this mesalliance, this mating with Davus the detested instead of with Oedipus the adored, is not ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... far advanced as to render the old stability of the breezes a little uncertain. The zephyr had come early, and it had come fresh; but there were symptoms of a sirocco about the barometer and in the atmosphere. This rendered all in the ships eager to secure their prize before a shift of wind should come. Now that there were three fast vessels in chase, none doubted of the final result; and Cuffe paced the quarter-deck of the Proserpine, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should have to go on ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... semiarid; mild, wet winters with hot, dry summers along coast; drier with cold winters and hot summers on high plateau; sirocco is a hot, dust/sand-laden wind especially ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... (this same desert), says Fa-hian, "there are a great many evil demons; there are also sirocco winds, which kill all who encounter them. There are no birds or beasts to be seen; but so far as the eye can reach, the route is marked out by the bleached bones of men who have perished in the attempt ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... emerging from its mists, heavy with sleep, dazed, motionless, with a quartz-like transparence, and myriads of rays fell upon the water as if arrow-points had pricked it, making a dazzling reflection, doubled in intensity by the whiteness of the cliffs and the soil, by a veritable African sirocco which raised the dust in a spiral column as the carriage passed. They reached the hottest, the most sheltered portions of the Corniche,—a genuinely tropical temperature, where dates, cactus, the aloe, with its tall, candelabra-like branches, grow in the fields. When he saw ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the house for three days, partly by indisposition, and partly by a vile sirocco, which brought, as usual, vapours, clouds, and blue devils in its train—this most lovely day tempted me out; and I walked with V. over the Monte Cavallo to the Forum of Trajan. After admiring the view from the summit of the pillar, we ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... the kitchen-gardens. Pretty as they are to the eye, they are not considered to be wholesome; and no Roman will live in a house near one of them, especially if it lie on the southern and western side, so that the Sirocco and the prevalent summer winds blow over it. The daily irrigation, in itself, would be sufficient to frighten all Italians away; for they have a deadly fear of all effluvia arising from decomposing vegetable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... a silent, sullen day, With a Sirocco, for example, blowing, When even the sea looks dim with all its spray, And sulkily the river's ripple's flowing, And the sky shows that very ancient gray, The sober, sad antithesis to glowing,— 'T is pleasant, if then anything is pleasant, To catch a glimpse ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... scattered village on the Calabrian side, the felucca containing Paul and his guests landed. The dress and those on board were put ashore and preparations were at once made for the start. A sirocco was blowing at the time, setting a heavy tide in the direction of the whirlpool of Scylla, or the Faro, as they call it there. The sea grew rougher while the little party stood on the beach and as Boyton was dressing the most anxious one in the group was the enthusiastic editor. His nerve was ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... forcedly. "I'm not very bright to-day. I think it was the sirocco of yesterday that has upset me a ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... in Italy that the clearing of the Apennines has very materially affected the climate of the valley of the Po. It is asserted in Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia that: "In consequence of the felling of the woods on the Apennines, the sirocco prevails greatly on the right bank of the Po, in the Parmesan territory, and in a part of Lombardy; it injures the harvests and the vineyards, and sometimes ruins the crops of the season. To the same cause many ascribe the meteorological changes ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... further, and well understood, that this is the regular effect of the traffic, and manufacture, and use of this article. It is not casual, incidental, irregular. It is uniform, certain, deadly, as the sirocco of the desert, or as the malaria of the Pontine marshes. It is not a periodical influence, returning at distant intervals; but it is a pestilence, breathing always—diffusing the poison when men sleep and when they wake, by day and by night, in seed-time and harvest—attending the manufacture ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... on all the higher mountain ranges, and on the highest the climate is thoroughly Alpine. The countries bordering the Sahara are much exposed to a very dry wind, full of fine particles of sand, blowing from the desert towards the sea. Known in Egypt as the khamsin, on the Mediterranean as the sirocco, it is called on the Guinea coast the harmattan. This wind is not invariably hot; its great dryness causes so much evaporation that cold is not infrequently the result. Similar dry winds blow from the Kalahari in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rapidly through the comparatively undisturbed beds of the Mississippi Valley than through the contorted strata of Europe. Meteorology is unable to indicate a coming earthquake, for there is no sure prophecy in sultry weather, sirocco wind, and leaden sky. The Lisbon shock came without a warning. Sudden changes of the weather, however, often occur after an earthquake. Since the great convulsion of 1797 the climate of the Valley ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... dictionary of details relating to that history. Such a title is an absurdity on the face of it. For, first, you can no more write the history of painting in Italy than you can write the history of the south wind in Italy. The sirocco does indeed produce certain effects at Genoa, and others at Rome; but what would be the value of a treatise upon the winds, which, for the honor of any country, assumed that every city of it had a ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... a vain girl; so could scarcely guess that I meant them for the light, unpursued vanities, which yet blind us, confused among the stars. One evening, as I came late into Siena, the fire-flies were flying high on a stormy sirocco wind,—the stars themselves no brighter, and all their host seeming, at moments, to ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... from branch to branch goes gathering on Through the pine forest on the shore of Chiassi, When Eolus unlooses the Sirocco. ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... of this vice exists, and is aggravated by purse-proud, high-born, aristocratic parents and friends, and even by the virtuous and religious, just so long, and exactly in the same ratio will this blighting Sirocco blast the fairest flowers of female innocence and lovliness, and blight our noblest specimens of manliness. No sin of ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... he might go thence and cool himself for an hour. "Why this mercy?" asked Judas Iscariot. Then the angel said to him, "Remember the leper in Joppa," and poor Judas recalled how once when the hot wind, called the sirocco, swept through the streets of Joppa, and he saw a naked leper by the wayside, sitting in agony from the heat and the drifting sand, Judas had thrown his cloak over him for a shelter and received his thanks. In reward for this, the angel ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... famous resort for phthisical patients, although during the winter and spring the weather is cold and variable, and in autumn the sirocco is frequent. When a sirocco has blown for some days, it lulls suddenly, and is succeeded by an equally strong breeze from the north-west, contrasting violently with the former in temperature and everything else. The extremes of heat and cold are as great here and in other places in the Mediterranean ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... ventilating and keeping fresh the atmosphere of the moon. At one time, and particularly on my first emergence from my prison, there was certainly a cold wind blowing down the shaft, and later there was a kind of sirocco upward that corresponded with my fever. For at the end of about three weeks I fell ill of an indefinable sort of fever, and in spite of sleep and the quinine tabloids that very fortunately I had brought in my ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... enhance its growth.—"A blistering sky, an excessive climate, an arid soil, rocks,... savage rivers, torrential or dry or overburdened," blinding dust, nerves upset by steady northern blasts or by the intermittent gusts of the sirocco. A sensual race choleric and impetuous, with no intellectual or moral ballast, in which the mixture of Celt and Latin has destroyed the humane suavity of the Celt and the serious earnestness of the Roman; "complete, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... began at two. Rather than cling to the straps of a crowded car they chose to walk, following the familiar route of the trolley past the car barns and the base-ball park to the bare field under the seared face of Torrey's Hill, where circuses were wont to settle. A sirocco-like breeze from the southwest whirled into eddies the clouds of germ-laden dust stirred up by the automobiles, blowing their skirts against their legs, and sometimes they were forced to turn, clinging to their hats, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... had passed by, we began to think it would be difficult to find the precise article of air which the captain desired. During this time it seemed to have become coquettish, giving us all kinds of northerly, all varieties of east, and a preponderance of westerly wind, finishing off with a sirocco from the south-west, ('a Boston east wind boiled,' and the only unpleasant summer wind on the coast,) after which it stopped short; the sand and the orange blossoms settled again, and every thing hung perpendicular. The next morning a puff came up from the south in a very blustering ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... of bloodshed and terror. Think only, without going further back, of that pillage by the Spanish and German soldiery under Bourbon; half a year's pandemonium. And all those other mediaeval scourges, epidemics and floods and famines. That sirocco, the worst of many Italian varieties: who shall calculate its debilitating effect upon the stamina of the race? Up to quite a short time ago, moreover, the population was malarious; older records reek of malaria; that, assuredly, will leave its mark upon the inhabitants for years to come. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... agitation—in my youth I felt the fierceness of the hatred directed against all those who stood by the Nation. I know that hell hath no fury like the vindictiveness of those who are hurt by the truth being told of them. I apprehend being assailed by a sirocco of contradiction and calumny. But I solemnly affirm in advance the entire and absolute truth of every material fact, statement and description. I assert that, so far from there being any exaggeration in any particular, that in no instance has the half of the truth been told, nor could it be, save ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... tiring. The scenery has been so monotonous; endless long undulating plains like the waves of the sea, covered with grass quite dried up, a few flowers, and a bee-shaped cactus. The heat was very oppressive, a hot sirocco, wind blowing which; obliged us to keep our windows shut on account of the fine alkaline dust. E—— had her window open last night, and awoke this morning to find herself in a layer ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... hour arrived when the doctor should have paid his visit, and no doctor came. I presumed that the sirocco detained him also; but as the state of Jadin appeared to me alarming, I resolved to go and rouse my Esculapius, and bring him, willing or unwilling, to the hotel. I took my hat and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... The sirocco of sorrow had fanned its hot breath over my soul; but, no grateful spring shower had cooled it through prayer. God, certainly, knows better than we what we should desire; but why does He not instruct ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the parapet of the Latomia, where the breath of the sirocco, the gnawing tooth of time, and the slow ravelling of rain had serrated the ledge, stood Leo, gazing into the dizzying depths of the charnel house that swarmed with the ghosts of nine thousand men, who once were huddled ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... rend the Woods and Seas upturn; 700 With adverse blast up-turns them from the South Notus and Afer black with thundrous Clouds From Serraliona; thwart of these as fierce Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent Windes Eurus and Zephir with thir lateral noise, Sirocco, and Libecchio. Thus began Outrage from liveless things; but Discord first Daughter of Sin, among th' irrational, Death introduc'd through fierce antipathie: Beast now with Beast gan war, & Fowle ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... temperature of central Europe in comparatively modern times, to which no allusion has yet been made; namely, the conversion of the great desert of the Sahara from sea into land since the commencement of the Pleistocene period. When that vast region was still submerged, no sirocco blowing for days in succession carried its hot blasts from a wide expanse of burning sand across the Mediterranean. The south winds were comparatively cool, allowing the snows of the Alps to augment to an extent which the colossal dimensions of the ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... delineate a bore in a narrative, for the very reason that he is a bore. A tale must aim at condensation, but a bore acts in solution. It is only on the long-run that he is ascertained. Then, indeed, he is felt; he is oppressive; like the sirocco, which the native detects at once, while a foreigner is often at fault. Tenet occiditque. Did you hear him make but one speech, perhaps you would say he was a pleasant, well-informed man; but when he never comes to an end, or ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... imagine, gentlemen," continued Hardy, as he again knocked the ashes off his cigar, "that going to sea is attended with some few discomforts, such as battening down the hatches in a sirocco in the Mediterranean off Tripoli; a simoom in the China Seas; a bitter northwest gale off Barnegat, with the rigging and sails frozen as hard as an iceberg; but if a man can catch forty winks of sleep once ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... city to-day there walk a thousand libertines. They are a moving pest. Their breath is the sirocco of the desert. Their bones have in them the decay of the pit. They have the eye of a basilisk. They have been soaked in filth, and steeped in uncleanliness, and consumed in sin, and they are all adrip with the loathsomeness of eternal death. I take hold ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... you will, it is a gem, it is a marvel, it is a miracle. Some of the effects are very daring, approaching even to the boldest flights of the rococo, the sirocco, and the Byzantine schools—yet the master's hand never falters—it moves on, calm, majestic, confident—and, with that art which conceals art, it finally casts over the TOUT ENSEMBLE, by mysterious methods of its own, a subtle ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The skies were dark and lowering, and ominous of tempest; for it was a sirocco, and the welkin was overcast with sheets of vapory cloud, not very dense, indeed, or solid, but still sufficient to intercept the feeble twinkling of the stars, which alone held dominion in the firmament; since the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... vine of Italy, and drink the waters of the Arno. You shall wander over ancient battle-fields, encounter the fierce Apennine blast, and be rocked on the Mediterranean wave, which the sirocco heaps up, huge and dark, and pours in a foaming cataract upon the strand of Italy. Finally, we shall tread together the sackcloth plain on which Rome sits, with the leaves of her torn laurel and the fragments of her shivered sceptre strewn around her, waiting with ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... whirlwind which had enveloped them in Corsica, crossed the sea behind them like a blast of the sirocco and filled the flat in the Place Vendome with a mad wind of folly. It was overrun from morning to night by the habitual element, augmented now by a constant arrival of little dark men, brown as the locust-bean, with regular features and thick ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... ill,—we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that "forgives" everything because it "understands" everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!... We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... The sirocco has been blowing all day, and it is a hot unwholesome evening with no cool sea-breeze. Mosquitoes and fire-flies are lively enough, but most other creatures are faint. The coquettish airs of pretty young ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... girds at an ancient established festival should reflect upon sundry obvious truths before he withers up the said festival by the sirocco of his contempt. These truths are as follows:—First, a festival, though based upon intelligence, is not an affair of the intellect, but an affair of the emotions. Second, the human soul can only be reached through the human body. ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... nerves of the party in the palace became more and more severe. During the second week in October it almost reached the breaking point. For four days the sirocco blew across the island. The sky was grey and seemed to press down on sea and land, heavy, unbroken, intolerably near. The wind blew strongly, but with none of the fresh boisterous fierceness of a northern gale. There was a sullen malignity about its force. Out at ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... and a lovely pink sunset, and there's a beautiful mild sirocco blowing off the African shore to make the 'ot night pleasant as we approach it in the boats. A man could 'ardly arsk to be torpedoed under more pleasant conditions, I say, and we continue to row toward the shore in 'igh 'opes. It's maybe two in the mornin' when ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... and that could not be dispensed with. I had just made use of one for the Vatican sculpture collection, one day, when I felt very unwell. I ascribed my sensations at first to the insufferable weather of that month, alternately sirocco and cold sleet, or both at once; then I was seized with a dread of the climate, of Rome, of all these strange surroundings, and I made up my mind to go home as quickly as possible. The illness that was upon me was, without ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes |
