"Dead Sea" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at it," said Mrs. Evelyn, (Fleda knew with quivering lips,)—"but it seems to me I might as well try to find the Dead Sea!" ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... as they came up, but to no purpose. Armida reconciled them all in appearance, by feigning to be devoted to each in secret; and thus she rode on with them many a mile, till she came to a castle on the Dead Sea, where she was accustomed ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... Great Relief. Merrily they filled the little boats and sailed down Echo River, where abound the eyeless fish; crossed Lake Lethe, where all care is said to be left behind; passed the huge Granite Coffin; stood wondering before the Great Eastern; shuddered beside the Dead Sea and the Bottomless Pit; climbed Martha's Vineyard, where huge bunches of grapes in stone looked as natural as life; took lunch in Washington Hall; revelled in the snow-white crystals of Siliman's Avenue; crossed the Rocky Mountains to Traveller's Rest, and there wrote their names ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... with motherly solicitude, and a dumb brute which, as I later came to know, held in its poor ugly carcass more love, more loyalty, more gratitude than could have been found in the entire five million green Martians who rove the deserted cities and dead sea bottoms of Mars. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bit of comfort in this strangely-impressive place. We entered a little boat waiting to take us across the Salz Sea to the opposite shore. There was not a sound, save the dipping of the oar. We tasted the black water. The Dead Sea cannot be salter. We were hushed and oppressed, as if each felt the weight of the great ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... on every side. There Pleasure waits with her siren train, Her poisen flowers and her hidden chain; Flattery courts with her hollow smiles, Passion with silvery tone beguiles, Love and Friendship their charmed spells weave; Trust not too deeply—they may deceive! Hope with her Dead Sea fruits is there, Sin is spreading her gilded snare, Disease with a ruthless hand would smite, And Care spread o'er thee her withering blight. Hate and Envy, with visage black, And the serpent Slander, are on thy ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... at Mecca, Medina and at the port of Jiddah. Their communication with Turkey was by the recently opened railway to Damascus and Aleppo. This railway, south of Damascus, ran along the high plateau on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, through Maan, and along the desert to Medina. The intention was to carry the line ultimately through to Mecca, but at this time it was only open for traffic as far as Medina. The revolt broke out on the ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... however, war broke out with Moab, followed by other wars, which required all the resources of the Jewish kingdom, and taxed to the utmost the energies of its bravest generals. Moab, lying east of the Dead Sea, had at one time given refuge to David when pursued by Saul, and he was even allied by blood to some of its people,—being descended from Ruth, a Moabitish woman. The sacred writings shed but little light on this war, or on its causes; but it was carried ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... the peculiar dip of the mountains that guide the waters into its bosom. Place it in a colder position, ceteris paribus, and in time it would cut the canal for its own drainage. So with the Caspian Sea, the Aral, and the Dead Sea. No, my friend, the existence of the Salt Lake supports my theory. Around its shores lies a fertile country, fertile from the quick returns of its own waters moistening it with rain. It exists only to a limited extent, and cannot influence the whole region of the desert, which lies ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... a brigade being left in Hebron to watch that area, the natives of which were reported as not being wholly favourable to us. There were many rifles in the place, and a number of unarmed Turks were believed to be in the rough country between the town and the Dead Sea ready to return to take up arms. Armoured cars also remained in Hebron. The infantry and field artillery occupied the roads during the day, and the heavy guns came along at night and joined the infantry as the latter were about to set ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... men, he could best afford that one such pleasant chance should put forth no other blossom save that half-dreamed kiss;—and how can one ever foresee but that our so cherishable spray of bloom may in time add but another branch to that orchard of Dead Sea fruit which grows inevitably about ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... was October before Lord Lufton was made a happy man;—that is, if the fruition of his happiness was a greater joy than the anticipation of it. I will not say that the happiness of marriage is like the Dead Sea fruit—an apple which, when eaten, turns to bitter ashes in the mouth. Such pretended sarcasm would be very false. Nevertheless, is it not the fact that the sweetest morsel of love's feast has been eaten, that the freshest, fairest blush of the flower has been snatched and has passed away, when ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... principle, ideas 'introduce each other with a certain degree of method or regularity.' You are walking, let us suppose, through Hyde Park, thinking of nothing more particular than that the morning is a pleasant one, when you suddenly find yourself in imagination pacing the shore of the Dead Sea, and, pausing to ask yourself how you got there, you discover, perhaps, that it was by the following steps. Remarking some landscape effect in the distance, you were reminded of a similar one which you had remarked years before while ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... in their country, for they will never forgive it"; how "the dew comes down upon Hermon the Little, as David says, 'The dew of Hermon that fell upon the hill of Zion'"; how nothing can live or even float in the Dead Sea, "but is instantly swallowed up"—as exact an untruth as was ever told by traveller; how the Jordan opens a way for pilgrims "and stands up in a heap every year at the Epiphany during the baptism of Catechumens, as David ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... them lie in this case went to them, if peradventure he might awake them, and cried, You are like them that sleep on the top of a mast, for the Dead Sea is under you—a gulf that hath no bottom. [Prov. 23:34] Awake, therefore, and come away; be willing also, and I will help you off with your irons. He also told them, If he that "goeth about like a roaring lion" comes by, you will certainly become a prey to ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... Land area: 5,640 km2; includes West Bank, East Jerusalem, Latrun Salient, Jerusalem No Man's Land, and the northwest quarter of the Dead Sea, but excludes Mt. Scopus Comparative area: slightly larger than Delaware Land boundaries: 404 km total; Israel 307 km, Jordan 97 km Coastline: none - landlocked Maritime claims: none - landlocked Disputes: Israeli occupied with status to be determined Climate: temperate, temperature and precipitation ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... but they were the same that I had been seeing for many a league, and they reminded me too forcibly of the rapid flight of the summer days by their haste—their unnecessary haste, as I thought—in passing from the flower to the seed. A sprig of lithosperm stood like a little tree laden with Dead Sea fruit, for the naked seeds clung hard and flinty where the flowers had been. The glaucium, although still blooming, had put forth horns nine inches long, and the wild barley, so lately green, was now a brown fringe along the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... had given themselves up to penance and mortification till they believed themselves able, like Kehama, to have gained by self-torture the right to command, not nature merely, but the gods themselves. Among the Jews the Essenes by the Dead Sea, and the Therapeutae in Egypt, had formed ascetic communities, the former more "practical," the latter more "contemplative:" but both alike agreed in the purpose of escaping from the world into a life of poverty and simplicity, piety and virtue; and among the countless philosophic sects of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... and conquered, for the one dear prize; all my battle of life was fought for you; all my victories were won for you, and were laid at your feet. But when I found that all my love and hope had brought only grief and despair to you—then, dear, all my triumphs turned into Dead Sea fruit on my lips! Then I left all and came into the wilderness; left no trace behind me; effaced myself from your life, from the world, as effectually as I could do it; and so—believing it to be for your good and happiness—died to the world and ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... wound through rock-strewn valleys toward the Dead Sea. But rising out of that crumpled wilderness, a mile or two away, the smooth white ribbon of a chariot-road lay upon the flank of a cone-shaped mountain and curled in loops toward its peak. There the great cone was cut squarely off, and the levelled summit ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... out all his youthful ideas, who has been behind the scenes, and has seen the bare walls of the theater, without the light and paint, and has watched the ugly actors and gaunt actresses by daylight. The taste of life is very bitter in the mouth of such a man; his joys are Dead Sea apples—dust and ashes in the mouths of those who bite them. No flowers spring up about his path; he is very melancholy and suspicious, very hard and incredulous; he has faith neither in the honesty of man nor in the purity of woman. He is desillusionne—by far too ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... soon became an organised pandemonium, such as the world had never known since Sodom and Gomorrah disappeared in the Dead Sea, and the details of its history cannot be written. To mitigate its horrors the worst of the criminals were transported to Norfolk Island. The Governor there had not the power to inflict capital punishment, and the convicts ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... the ruins, should drive him forth in abhorrence. All unconsciously Lucien stood with the palm of genius on the one hand and a shameful ending in the hulks upon the other; and, on high upon the Sinai of the prophets, beheld no Dead Sea covering the cities of the plain—the hideous ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... there, but it had extremely few visitors, owing to its unapproachable surrounding of bushes, and its bad repute from a countless guard of huge and ferocious mosquitos. Without outlet for its extra-briny waters, and in its desolate solitude, it might have aspired to be a sort of tiny Dead Sea. With the advance of Sandridge this evil-omened southern Avernus came in for better consideration, and by 1854, with a cutting into the Bay, it had become a ready-made boat haven. The Melbourne maps now show me that it must have ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... the Dead Sea of neutral nothingness, wherein a man merely avoids sin by doing nothing and being nothing. The stirring of the imagination by sorrow for sin, sometimes causes the soul to wing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... correspondent had written to me. If it had not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated cawing over the pond and the fields, and the tapping in the carpenter's shed, this bit of the world about which such a fuss was being made would have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all so still, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... tell you that the boat's locker yet held a chunk or two—less than a pound—of brined pork, hard as wood and salt as the Dead Sea, that none of the crew at the last had a thought to boil in the sea water, which only made it more intolerable. None of us, indeed, after a trial, had been able to get a morsel past our swollen tonsils. But I had a boxful of matches in my trouser pocket, half-emptied: and, as it turned ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Gentlemen," said the lawyer, one of whose conversations with Harley we have already recorded, "here's a pretty fellow for you! to have heard him talk some nights ago, as I did, you might have sworn he was a saint; yet now he games with sharpers, and loses his money, and is bubbled by a fine tale of the Dead Sea, and pawns his watch; here are sanctified ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on the ancient Mariner: in sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... hundred thousand, and with the cakes and ale of one week in Gotham turning bitter on his tongue, the Man from Nome sighed to set foot again in Chilkoot, the exit from the land of street noises and Dead Sea ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... the Senate. I cannot pause on individual hate, In the absorbing, sweeping, whole revenge, 420 Which, like the sheeted fire from Heaven, must blast Without distinction, as it fell of yore, Where the Dead Sea hath quenched ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... had won her love. Of all men, that he should be the one to recognize the truth of her, the womanhood yet unsullied—how strange, how terrible, how overpowering! False, indeed, was she to the Jorths! False as her mother had been to an Isbel! This agony and destruction of her soul was the bitter Dead Sea fruit—the sins of her parents visited ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... benefit thereof.' It is manifest, you see, that this diabolical young woman hath renounced her baptism, for the water rejecteth her. Non potest mergi, as Pliny saith. She floats like a cork, or as if the clear water of the Calder had suddenly become like the slab, salt waves of the Dead Sea, in which, nothing can sink. You behold the marvel with ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Formera, beautiful as painted Chaos; yes, her;—and why not, after a while, the Orzelska too, all the same? A wonderful Armida-Garden, sure enough. And cannot one adore the painted divine beauties there (lovely as certain apples of the Dead Sea), for some time?—The miseries all this brought into his existence,—into his relations with a Father very rigorous in principle, and with a Universe still more so,—for years to come, were neither few nor small. And that is the main ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... To the east the Dead Sea lay, a stretch of silk. At its edge was the flutter of ospreys feasting on the barbels and breams of the Jordan, which as they enter, die. Beyond was a glitter of white and gold, the scarp of Moriah and its ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... discoverer failed as a governor and administrator makes nothing against his merits as a discoverer. That his light at last went out in darkness—that the world he discovered brought nothing to Spain but disappointment and Dead Sea ashes—that he dragged out a miserable old age in rotten and unseaworthy ships, lying ill in the torrid heats of the West Indies, racked with excruciating pain, and in absolute penury and want—all this but adds point to a life so full of paradox that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... She clings around the wondering Chief;— "Alas, poor wildered maid! to me "Thou owest this raving trance of grief. "Lost as I am, naught ever grew "Beneath my shade but perisht too— "My doom is like the Dead Sea air, "And nothing lives that enters there! "Why were our barks together driven "Beneath this morning's furious heaven? "Why when I saw the prize that chance "Had thrown into my desperate arms,— "When casting but a ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... falls on Lord Lilburne's head—if he is fated still to eat, and drink, and to die on his bed, he may yet taste the ashes of the Dead Sea fruit which his hands have culled. He is grown old. His infirmities increase upon him; his sole resources of pleasure—the senses—are dried up. For him there is no longer savour in the viands, or sparkle in the wine,—man delights ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and never looked at them again until we were two days out—when I found they were chiefly congratulations from my committee, the proprietor of my newspaper, and the Royal Geographical Society, all welcome enough in their way, but Dead Sea fruit to a man ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... if you write this. Oddly enough, Ezekiel xlvii. 10 seems to say the Dead Sea shall have fish like the great Sea (i.e. Mediterranean). Zechariah xiv. speaks of two rivers, one going to Dead Sea, the other ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... for mothers-in-law. The reported mobilization of eighty goats on Mount Tabor shows pretty clearly which way the wind is blowing; whilst it is persistently rumoured in Joppa that five camels were seen passing through Jerusalem yesterday. Suspicious dredging operations in the Dead Sea are also reported by a Berne correspondent. The future ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... Druses in the Lebanon, and slept in native dwellings of all qualities, as well as in convents of different sects: in the open air at the foot of a tree, or in a village mosque—in a cavern by the highway side, or beneath cliffs near the Dead Sea: although more commonly within my own tent, accompanied by native servants ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... lent its golden hue to intensify the sharp contrasts. Off to the westward lay the lake, making an impressive, uninviting picture in its severe, unliving beauty; from its blue wastes somber peaks rose as precipitous islands, and about the shores of this dead sea were saline flats that told of the scorching heat and thirsty atmosphere of this parched region. A turbid river ran from south to north athwart the valley, "dividing it in twain," as a historian of the day has written, "as ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... in trying to understand them, for believe me, they are not so vile as the precious litterateurs and others would have us believe. Bitterness is no preparation for sympathetic study. And without sympathy our works, however clever and lovely, are but Dead Sea apples, crumbling to ashes at the touch of a ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... scale the walls, And suddenly surprise them unawares. Y. Mor. I'll give the onset. War. And I'll follow thee. Y. Mor. This tatter'd ensign of my ancestors, Which swept the desert shore of that Dead Sea Whereof we got the name of Mortimer, Will I advance upon this castle ['s] walls— Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport, And ring aloud the knell of Gaveston! Lan. None be so hardy as to touch the king; But neither spare you ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe
... gnawed my soul; the glimpse into that hidden life was agonizing to a young heart new to social emotions; it was an awful thing to find this abyss at the opening of life,—a bottomless abyss, a Dead Sea. This dreadful aggregation of misfortunes suggested many thoughts; at my first step into social life I found a standard of comparison by which all other events and ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... must rise all of 25,000 feet from the valley floor," decided the aviator, "and I should imagine this valley is a good mile below sea level. Yes! That must be it: this nightmare country lies in a huge geographical fault—something like the Dead Sea." ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... darkness without; and just at that moment our young knight had got into one of those green and golden glimpses of sunshine that here and there checker life's rather dark pathway, and with Leoline beside him would have thought the dreary whores of the Dead Sea itself a ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... his "law," construct his "jury," to indict and try me. Try me! No, Gentlemen, it is you, your wives and your children, who are up for swift condemnation this day. Will you wait, will you add sin to sin, till God shall rain fire and brimstone on your heads, and a Dead Sea shall cover the place once so green and blossoming with American Liberty? Decide your own fate. When the Judges are false let the Juries be faithful, and we have "a crowning mercy" without cannon, ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... atonement for the temple. The whole description is a striking counterpart to the earlier vision of the desecration of the temple (viii.). The last section (xlvii., xlviii.) deals with the land which in these latter days is to share the redemption of the people. The barren ground near the Dead Sea is to be made fertile, and the waters of that sea sweet, by a stream issuing from underneath the temple. The land will be redistributed, seven tribes north and five south of the temple, and the city will bear the name "Jehovah is there"—symbolic of the abiding presence ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Plague and its terrors like a gentleman, but shows us, through the vicarious torments of the cowering Levantine that it was courage and coolness, not insensibility, which bore him through it. A foe to marriage, compassionating Carrigaholt as doomed to travel "Vetturini-wise," pitying the Dead Sea goatherd for his ugly wife, revelling in the meek surrender of the three young men whom he sees "led to the altar" in Suez, he is still the frank, susceptible, gallant bachelor, observantly and critically studious of female charms: of the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... interesting question as to how much Christianity owes to Essenism. It would seem that there was room for definite contact between John the Baptist and this Brotherhood. His time of preparation was spent in the wilderness near the Dead Sea; his preaching of righteousness toward God, and justice toward one's fellow men, was in agreement with Essenism; while his insistence upon Baptism was in accordance with the Essenic emphasis on lustrations." In this very conservative ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... side acquires an undue importance. The truth is that Fate does not go out of its way to be dramatic. If you or I had the power of life and death in our hands, we should no doubt arrange some remarkably bright and telling effects. A man who spilt the salt callously would be drowned next week in the Dead Sea, and a couple who married in May would expire simultaneously in the May following. But Fate cannot worry to think out all the clever things that we should think out. It goes about its business solidly and unromantically, and by the ordinary laws of chance it achieves every now and ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... met for a great length of time, and whom I did wish to see, was to be in town the next day. There were many other things to keep me, but none of them had the least effect. I could no more keep myself there than a man could sink himself in the Dead Sea, and so I had ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... throughout the course of their national existence a sense of the closest brotherhood. According to the traditions, the original territory of the two tribes was the country lying immediately on the east of the Dead Sea, and of the lower half of the Jordan, having the Jabbok for its northern boundary; and of this tract the Ammonites laid claim to the northern portion between the Arnon and the Jabbok, out of which they ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... solitude She used to haunt a dead sea-wood Where among boulders lifeless trees Stuck rigid fingers to the breeze— That stream of faint hot air that flits Aimless at noon. 'Tis there she sits Hour after hour, and as a dove Croons when her breast is ripe for love, So sings ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... glaciers, only that these tremendous cracks in the surface are produced by the shrinkage of the crust consequent on cooling. Can we point out some analogies to this on the Earth? Certainly. The defile of the Jordan, terminating in the awful depression of the Dead Sea, no doubt occurs to you on the moment. But the Yosemite Valley, as I saw it ten years ago, is an apter comparison. There I stood on the brink of a tremendous chasm with perpendicular walls, a mile in width, a ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... victim of a heartless, selfish society in which the abuse of love has made its world a desert and its products Dead Sea fruit. Out of a sheer impulse for self-protection she flies to the nunnery, which is ready to give her life at the price of ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... Against my honour, in the which our Captain Was, I believed, prime Agent. The wind fell; We lay becalmed week after week, until The water of the vessel was exhausted; I felt a double fever in my veins, Yet rage suppressed itself;—to a deep stillness Did my pride tame my pride;—for many days, On a dead sea under a burning sky, I brooded o'er my injuries, deserted By man and nature;—if a breeze had blown, It might have found its way into my heart, And I had been—no matter—do ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... where, as in my case, it brings the outward and material essentials of a moderate success in life. Now in my case, though the definite aims, the plans for the future, the desired goals, had merely ceased to exist, the present was Dead Sea fruit—null and void, a thing of nought. Just where does my poor personal equation enter in, and how far, I wonder, is all this typical of twentieth-century human experience, for us, the heirs of all the ages, with our wonderful ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... shirt-less, or ill-shirted workers sit enchanted in work-house Bastiles, five millions more (according to some) in Ugoline hunger-cellars; and for remedy, you say—what say you? 'Raise our rents!' I have not in my time heard any stranger speech, not even on the shores of the Dead Sea. You continue addressing these poor shirt-spinners and over-producers in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... breast, she would apparently give way to inconsolable despair. This silent grief, which could no longer control itself and no longer wished to be controlled; this powerful will, which had once been able to quell the most violent storms, and now going adrift on a dead sea and in an unruffled calm—this, said Arthur, was the most painful spectacle he had ever beheld. Edmee seemed to wish to have done with life. Mademoiselle Leblanc, in order to test her and arouse her, had brutally taken upon herself to announce that her father was dead; she had replied by ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... got to his feet and the dead sea-leopard, as he called it, fell over on the snow. It was a ponderous creature, much like a seal, but with huge tusks and a savage expression, even in death. It was ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Chedorlaorner king of Elam, and Tidal "king of nations," made war with Bera king of Sodom, Birsha king of Gomorrah, Shinab king of Admah, Shemeber king of Zeboiim, and the "king of Bera, which is Zoar." A great battle was fought in the vale of Siddim, which is alleged to be now covered by the Dead Sea. The four kings were victorious over the five. The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, and the victors spoiled their cities, taking with them many captives, among whom was "Lot, Abram's brother's son." How Abraham went out with a handful of men, defeated the triumphant ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... the thing was still possible, the light burned, though distant, feeble, flickering. He had told himself that he despaired; but he had not known what real despair was until this moment, until he sat, as he saw now, among the Dead Sea splendours of his parlour, the fingers of his right hand drumming on the arm of the abbot's chair, his shaggy eyelids drooping over his ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... the glittering eye of the uncoiled adder. It is the sparkle of a serpent's skin, the foam of the froth of death. Here I must confess that for the past five or six years I have not been able to attain one moment's pleasure from drinking. Every glass that I have touched has proven to be the Dead Sea's fruit of ashes to my lips. I drank wildly, insanely, and became oblivious for days and weeks together to all which was about me, and finally awoke to the horrors which I had sought to drown, but now intensified a thousand fold. No man ever buried sorrow in drunkenness. He can not bury it that ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... shore of the Dead Sea, The army lay one night. Lord Archibold rose; and out he goes, Walking in ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... Jerom (tom. vi. p. 73, 76) describes, in lively colors, the regular and destructive march of the locusts, which spread a dark cloud, between heaven and earth, over the land of Palestine. Seasonable winds scattered them, partly into the Dead Sea, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... place—melancholy, yet with a beauty of its own. An endless flat, with just a slight swelling of the ground, like an ocean set fast, wave behind wave as far as the eye can see. And all things grey, dead grey, to where this dead sea meets the grey horizon. Clouds race across the sky, the wind lashing ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... one's back to purchase precedence, which nowadays is scarcely obtainable at any price even in England where traces of by-gone days linger longest: and so it falls out that many who have prayed for long years for the day to come for their return to England, find the coveted change but Dead Sea fruit when it is gained at last. A few even return to the land they had so long prayed to be allowed to leave, and take up their final abode among the hills. For these people I cannot help feeling deeply sorry. It is impossible ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... as these words were, and loving the kiss that accompanied them, Rose went downstairs again with a sore heart. She was like those who pluck Dead Sea apples, and find the fruit that looked so fair when out of reach turning to ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... the sad, soul-searing blight, Which comes upon us when we tread the ways Of sin, may not be suffered to alight On thy pure spirit in its youthful days; Or like the fruitage of the Dead Sea shore, Tho' outward bloom and freshness thou may'st be, Stern bitterness and death will gnaw thy core, And thou wilt be a heart-scathed thing like me, Bearing the weight of many years, ere thou Hast lost youth's rosy cheek and ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... have no boat to sail, no star to guide. You have loved and reverenced him. He has been your concrete of truth and nobleness. Unwittingly you touch a secret spring, and a Blue-Beard Chamber stands revealed. You give no sign; you meet and part as usual; but a Dead Sea rolls between ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... for magistrates, and thus they justify the judgment which they read literally. But the traveller cannot accept it. I have carefully examined the lands at the North and at the South of that most beautiful lake, the so-called Dead Sea, whose tranquil loveliness, backed by the grand plateau of Moab, is an object of admiration to all save patients suffering from the strange disease "Holy Land on the Brain."[FN390] But I found no ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... without copulation. With such a system sexual love and maternal love lose their raison d'etre, for the young fish are capable of providing for themselves as soon as they are born. There are, however, a few exceptions, one of the most curious being that of certain fish of the Dead Sea, in which the male incubates the eggs by taking them into ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... one of the most marked spots on the earth's crust. That remarkable stretch of land going by swift, steep descents almost from Jerusalem's very door down to the Dead Sea. It was once described as "the garden of God," that is, as Eden, for beauty and fertility, like the fertile Egyptian bottoms. For long centuries no ghastlier bit of land can be found, haggard, stripped bare, its strata twisted out of all shape, blistering peeling rocks, scorching furnace-heat ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... Phocis—Fa-Hian explores Kan-tcheou, Tartary, Northern India, the Punjaub, Ceylon, and Java—Cosmos Indicopleustes, and the Christian Topography of the Universe—Arculphe describes Jerusalem, the valley of Jehoshaphat, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem, Jericho, the river Jordan, Libanus, the Dead Sea, Capernaum, Nazareth, Mount Tabor, Damascus, Tyre, Alexandria, and Constantinople—Willibald and the Holy Land—Soleyman travels through Ceylon, and Sumatra, and crosses the Gulf of Siam and the China Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... should have been so happy; but we have only three days to do Bethlehem, the Dead Sea, and Jericho. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... stones. Then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters (God bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choaking and death-doing, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on if they go before bed time. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner, but if you come, never go. The fact is, this interruption ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... out at all; but was a salt-water lake, like the Caspian, or the Dead Sea. Perhaps it ran out over what is now the Sahara, the great desert of sand, for, that was a sea-bottom ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... and gay—except for one depressing thought. The nearer you get to the New York custom-house, the heavier becomes the load of luggage on your mind. Dresses, hats, wraps, lingerie, so gaily bought in Paris, lie withering like Dead Sea fruit in the forlorn cold storage ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... locality of the cave Adullam, where we next find him, is doubtful; but several strong reasons occur for rejecting the monkish tradition which places it away to the east, in one of the wild wadies which run down from Bethlehem to the Dead Sea. We should expect it to be much more accessible by a hasty march from Gath. Obviously it would be convenient for him to hang about the frontier of Philistia and Israel, that he might quickly cross the line from one to the other, as dangers ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... seen phantoms there that were as men 15 And men that were as phantoms flit and roam; Marked shapes that were not living to my ken, Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam: The City rests for man so weird and awful, That his intrusion there might seem unlawful, 20 And phantoms there may have ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... replied her cousin. "Every month, every day, should have its purpose. My father has got into a dull, heartless, apathetic mode of life, which suits my mother and Selina, but which will never suit you. Grey Abbey is like the Dead Sea, of which the waters are always bitter as well as stagnant. It makes me miserable, dearest Fanny, to see you stifled in such a pool. Your beauty, talents, and energies—your disposition to enjoy life, and power of making it ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... and desecration; he saw his own young hands, strong, pure, and undefiled by any form of bribery or political corruption, wielding the sceptre that should—please God!—bring everlasting honor and fame to the little principality. He saw all this, and yet it did not thrill him any more! It was all Dead Sea fruit, dust and ashes in his hand. He wanted but one thing now—and his whole kingdom did not ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... no mistake; his keen insight was well nigh infallible; but his triumph was costly. The luscious fruit of professional success left an acrid flavor; the pungent dead sea ashes sifted freely. He set his heel on the embroidered butterfly, and in his heart cursed the hour he had first seen it. His coveted bread was petrifying ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... was so terrifying, that the crews of the vessels attacked by this strange weapon frequently forsook every means of defence, and ran themselves ashore. One of the principal ingredients of this dreadful fire was supposed to be naphtha, or the bitumen which is collected on the banks of the Dead Sea, and which, when in a state of ignition, could only be extinguished by a very singular mixture, and which it was not likely to come in contact with. It produced a thick smoke and loud explosion, and was capable, says Gibbon, of communicating its flames ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... respects, through the careers of all three we can trace the same life-spirit. It is the career of the river Jordan rising like any other stream from the springs among the mountains only to fall after a brief existence into the Dead Sea. For their vital force had spent itself more than a millennium ago. Already, then, their civilization had in its deeper developments attained its stature, and has simply been perfecting itself since. We may liken it to some stunted tree, that, finding ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... the lean fare proscribed by Mother Church, it was a very dispirited Boccadoro that wandered aimlessly whither his dulling fancy took him. But in Holy Week, at last, we received an abrupt stir which set a whirlpool of excitement in the Dead Sea of our lives. It was the sudden ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... before and after its preparation. The plan and accomplishment must both be perfect in all their parts—for if either fail only in a single point, all is lost, and the pleasure arising from them resembles the fruit which is said to grow by the banks of the Dead Sea—it is beautiful and tempting to the eye, but bitterness ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... states that the family was ennobled by Richard Coeur de Lion, and has maintained itself in a high place for eight centuries. Privilege is a bough of the social tree from which we expect mere dead sea-fruit rather than a wholesome yield, but now and then the product holds something better than ashes. As we trace this stock through the ages, apples of Sodom, no doubt, will be found in abundance, but now and then it flowers into heroic manhood ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... and west by the Mount of Olives, it enjoys a delightful exposure to the southern sun. The grounds around are obviously of great fertility, though quite neglected; and the prospect to the south-east commands a magnificent view of the Dead Sea and the ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... announced to his tribe that at sunset the encampment would break up, and they would commence their return to the Syrian wilderness, through the regions eastward of the Dead Sea. The Lady Eva would accompany them, and the children of Rechab were to have the honour of escorting her and her attendants to the gates of Damascus. A detachment of five-and-twenty Beni-Rechab were to accompany ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... Syria had not yet attained its highest point when a Knight of the Red Cross was pacing slowly along the sandy deserts in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. At noon he joyfully hailed the sight of two or three palm trees, and his good horse, too, lifted up his head as if he snuffed from afar off the living waters which marked the place of repose and refreshment. But a distant ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... things in life. The questions, "What have I missed? What have I lost? What birthright have I renounced?" are bound to make themselves heard. They beat upon the heart like hail upon the sand—and fall buried in the scars they cause. Things of the flesh may and do become dead sea fruit; but things of the spirit often become stale and meaningless also. What is more weary than a tired mind? What joys and labours are more exhausting than those of the intellect, and the intellect only? Does an idle week ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... outlook by saying to Mr. Lydiard that the Tories of our time walked, or rather stuck, in the track of the Radicals of a generation back. Note, then, that Radicals, always marching to the triumph, never taste it; and for Tories it is Dead Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths! Those Liberals, those temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify themselves in the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit, for which they pay with their souls. They have no true ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to the Duc d'Abrantes, Marshal Junot's son. On sitting down to table, I found myself between H.I.H. and Monsieur de Saulcy, member of the French Institute, who made that famous expedition to the Dead Sea, and is one of the gayest, pleasantest persons I have ever met. Of course there was a great deal of laughing and talking, as well as much speculation with regard to the costume of the Icelandic ladies we were to see at the ball. It ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... south, John the Baptizer was imprisoned in King Herod's fortress at Machaerus. Through the bars of his tiny window he could see the green waters of the Dead Sea far below and the rocky hills of Judea beyond. He did not expect to lie in this dungeon long. At any moment the Day of Judgment might come; God would send hosts of angels to punish wrongdoers and to reward his ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... song of that far-sounding sea Which breaks upon the utmost shore of Thought, They who have drunk at Song's immortal spring Walk with glad feet the upland path of dreams That whitely winds thro' long low-lying lands— By one, yclept the Way of Fools—a plain Of dust and ashes and of Dead Sea fruit; But by another called the Path of Hope That leads far up the slope of heart's desire;— And haply both speak truth—for oft the way Is set with stones that tear the climbing feet, And oft for roses there is bitter rue, And oft for singing there is idle scorn, And sneers full oft for smiles. ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... obtained. The Russians have erected a lofty stone tower here. After climbing the spiral stairway leading to the top of it, one is well rewarded by the extensive view. Looking out from the east side, we could gaze upon the Dead Sea, some twenty miles away, and more than four thousand feet below us. We visited the chambers called the "Tombs of the Prophets," but the name is not a sufficient guarantee to warrant us in believing them to be the burial places of the men by whom God ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... Babylonia, Canaan, and Egypt. The first and last are fitted by nature and situation to be the seats of powerful civilizations, destined to reach out in every direction. Canaan, on the contrary, is shut in, with no good harbors along the Mediterranean; and its largest river system leads to the Dead Sea, far below the surface of the ocean,—an effective negation to all commerce. Although thus shut in by itself, Canaan lies on the isthmus of fertile land that connects the great empires of the Nile and the Euphrates. On the east and south it is always subject to the influences and ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... taught me to know it. When I thought of you, not blood, but burning fire, coursed in my veins, and now you have filled them with poison; and here in this breast, in which your image dwelt, as lovely as that of Hathor in her holy of holies, all is like that sea in Syria which is called the Dead Sea, in which every thing that tries to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bitterness, that is intermingled with all earthly delights, swallows up the sweetness of them,) yet it will but carry you down ere you be aware, into the sea of death and destruction, as the fish that swim and sport for a while in Jordan, are carried down into the Dead sea of Sodom, where they are presently suffocated and extinguished,(210) or, as a malefactor is carried through a pleasant palace to the gallows, so men walk through the delights of their flesh, to their ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... go up the steep rocky road that leads from the plain where the Dead Sea is, to Jerusalem. Let us follow the Master, as He strides before us, the Forerunner and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... that day shall come, as come it must, You then will think of me, sweet Geraldine, my Queen, And of the faithful heart there tossed away one day, Before thy dead sea ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... it is shut in by the plateau, and on the east the ridge breaks steeply down into the plain. Vineyards cover the hillsides with green and purple, and wheatfields wave in the valleys. In the distant east, across the Dead Sea, the mountains of Moab are penciled in ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... possible. A genuine original opinion, even though it were so heretical as to assert that Jenny Lind is a little lower than the angels, or that Shakspeare is rather dull reading, would be better than such a universal Dead Sea of acquiescence. ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Union, above all other systems of government the world has ever known, confers upon its people; sees all the glories of the Union dimmed, all its harmony destroyed, all its substantial benefits turned like Dead sea fruit to ashes and bitterness, when he beholds "the mean and miserable rivulet of black African slavery, stealing along turbid and muddy from its stagnant sources in ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... is a triple one, and embraces the three great evangelical counsels of perfect chastity, poverty and obedience. The cloister is necessary for the observance of such engagements as these, and it were easier for a lily to flourish on the banks of the Dead Sea, or amid the fiery blasts of the Sahara, than for these delicate flowers of spirituality to thrive in the midst of the temptations, seductions and passions of the every day world of this life. Necessity makes a practice of ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... craters of Etna have spread out, and reared themselves in stiffened ridges against opposing mountain buttresses. After toiling for about three hours over the dismal waste, a point between the native rock of Etna and the dead sea of lava is reached, which commands a prospect of the cone with its curling smoke surmounting a caldron of some four thousand feet in depth and seemingly very wide. The whole of this space is filled with billows of blackness, wave on wave, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... always think they know what is best for you. Well, perhaps they do, if the "best" be a circumspect kind of goodness. But they rarely know what you want, and, until you have got what you really want, even though you find it is "Dead Sea fruit" after all, the thought always haunts the disappointed Present by ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... seemed interminable. The moon rose round and bright as the shield of Achilles, and lighted up the vast, lonely tundra with noonday brilliancy; but the silence and desolation, the absence of any dark object upon which the fatigued eye could rest, and the apparently boundless extent of this Dead Sea of snow, oppressed us with new and strange sensations of awe. A dense mist or steam, which is an unfailing indication of intense cold, rose from the bodies of the reindeer and hung over the road long after we had passed. Beards ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... face; his expression was like that he wore on that dreadful morning when he was examined by Claverhouse at Tillietudlem. Ask your sister, ask Lady Emily, if she did not see him as well as I. I know what has called him up,—he came to upbraid me, that, while my heart was with him in the deep and dead sea, I was about to give my hand to another. My lord, it is ended between you and me; be the consequences what they will, she cannot marry whose union disturbs the repose ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... who said: "Palestine is the world in a nutshell," told the exact truth. Between snow-capped Mount Herman on the north, which is ten thousand feet above the ocean, and the Dead Sea on the south, which is thirteen hundred feet below the level of the ocean, are found all the zones and climates that can be found on the globe. The geologist finds here not only all the formations of rock found on the earth, but all the geological ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols |
