"Parching" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as bees, and immediately set about preparing breakfast. They gathered a capful of the pinon cones—the seeds of which Lucien knew how to prepare by parching and pounding. These, with the bear's meat, gave them a good hunter's breakfast. They then thought of their dinner, and dug up a quantity of "segos" and prairie-turnips. They found also a mallow—the Malva involucrata—whose ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... forces to go against Northampton. Over night one went about yelling and hooting to give notice of the design. Whereupon they fell to boiling of ground nuts, and parching of corn (as many as had it) for their provision; and in the morning away they went. During my abode in this place, Philip spake to me to make a shirt for his boy, which I did, for which he gave me a shilling. I offered the money to my master, ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
... plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists—over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead —about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... elevation, between which and the sea is a varying breadth of coast-land; the chief mountain range is in the E., and extends more or less parallel all the way with the E. coast; the rivers are few, and either in flood or dried up, for the climate is very parching, only one river, the Murray, 2345 m. long, of any consequence, while the lakes, which are numerous, are shallow and nearly all salt; the flora is peculiar, the eucalyptus and the acacia the most characteristic, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of moisture! silent when high noon Shows her tanned face among the thirsting clover And parching meadows, thy tenebrious tune Wakes with the dew or when the rain is over. Thou troubadour of wetness and damp lover Of all cool things! admitted comrade boon Of twilight's hush, and little intimate Of eve's first fluttering star and delicate ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... most part comely were both men and women; the most of them light-haired and grey-eyed, with cheek-bones somewhat high; white of skin but for the sun's burning, and the wind's parching, and whereas they were tanned of a very ruddy and cheerful hue. But the thralls were some of them of a shorter and darker breed, black-haired also and dark-eyed, lighter of limb; sometimes better knit, but sometimes crookeder of leg and knottier ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... glowing as a brand; And faint before the parching heat, The strength forsakes the feeble feet: "Thou hast saved me from the robbers' hand, Through wild floods given the blessed land; And shall the weak limbs fail me now? And ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... have a fall there ere long,' Ratsey went on, 'what with this drought parching the ground, and the trampling at the edge when we move out the side stone to get in, but there is no mischief done beyond what can be easily made good. A gravestone or two and a few spades of earth will make all sound again. Leave ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... of other days, Serenely placid, safely true, And o'er the present's parching ways Thy verse distils like ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... slow and cautious progress across weathered slopes of loose rock. Madeline followed, finding in this ride a tax on strength and judgment. On an ordinary horse she never could have kept in Stewart's trail. It was dust and heat, a parching throat, that caused Madeline to think of time; and she was amazed to see the sun sloping to the west. Stewart never stopped; he never looked back; he never spoke. He must have heard the horse close behind him. Madeline remembered Monty's advice about drinking and eating as she ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... in the air, and a fine, misty rain drifted in at his windows as he sat at his breakfast. He took deep breaths of the moisture, and it seemed to water and revive his parching soul. He found himself, to his surprise, surveying with equanimity the pile of books in the corner which had led him to the conviction of the emptiness of the universe—but the universe was no longer empty! It was cruel, but a warring force was at work in it which was not ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was not his only solace. For now, under the parching African sun, we catch glimpses, for the first time, of Gordon's hand stretching out towards stimulants of a more material quality. For months together, we are told, he would drink nothing but pure water; and then ... water that was not so pure. In his fits of melancholy, he would shut himself ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some melodious tear. Begin then, sisters, of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring; Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string. Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse, So may some gentle muse ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... glass, returns, and, holding it to the sufferer's lips, supports his head while he drinks: "And did they let you lie here, my poor sir, racked with this parching thirst?" ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... house. So long as the brother and sister could spend their evenings in paying visits they managed to get along till bedtime; but after they were compelled to stay at home those evenings became like a parching desert. Sometimes persons passing through the quiet little square would hear unearthly noises as though the brother were throttling the sister; a moment's listening would show that they were only yawning. These two human mechanisms, having nothing to grind between their ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... charitably letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears, if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching, and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man, and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... saw himself lying on the white, hot sands with open mouth, protruding tongue, black face and sightless eyes. The picture sent a thrill of horror through him and moved his dizzy, flagging brain to fresh resolution. He stumbled on through the blazing, parching, cruel heat, sometimes falling and lying motionless for a time, then pulling himself up and going on with will newly braced by the fear that he might not rise again. Once he sank, groaning, his courage quite broken, and mumbled to himself that he could go no farther. As he ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... of the Harvest walked by the side of his cornfields in the early year, and a cloud was over his face, for there had been no rain for several weeks, and the earth was hard from the parching of the cold east winds, and the young wheat had not been able ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... car-warriors, encompassing the boy Abhimanyu in battle, slew him, whither had this virtue of thine then gone? If this virtue that thou now invokest was nowhere on those occasions, what is the use then of parching thy palate now, by uttering that word? Thou art now for the practice of virtue, O Suta, but thou shalt not escape with life. Like Nala who was defeated by Pushkara with the aid of dice but who regained his kingdom ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... pillow continually descending into the depths of infinity, but never getting any where—the bed rolling like a dismantled hulk upon a stormy sea—the room filled with steaming and hissing urns—a fearful thirst parching my throat, while myriads of horrid bearded Russians were torturing me with tumblers of boiling-hot tea dashed with vodka—thus I lay a perfect victim of tea. I could even see Chinamen with long queues picking tea-leaves off endless varieties ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the early summer heat; flies increased in myriads; clouds of locusts darkened the sky; and hot winds blew, scorching and parching everything. The infantry had vanished to the north, to perilous adventures in the unknown; and the mounted men were grieved to the very depths of their souls to be left thus behind to stagnate on this sun-baked Sahara. ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... with so much difficulty, nothing surely ought to be wasted; yet their method of clearing their oats from the husk is by parching them in the straw. Thus with the genuine improvidence of savages, they destroy that fodder for want of which their cattle may perish. From this practice they have two petty conveniences. They dry the grain so ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... confess The titillating joy. Thus on the air Depend the hunter's hopes. When ruddy streaks At eve forebode a blustering stormy day, Or lowering clouds blacken the mountain's brow, When nipping frosts, and the keen biting blasts Of the dry parching east, menace the trees With tender blossoms teeming, kindly spare Thy sleeping pack, in their warm beds of straw 370 Low-sinking at their ease; listless they shrink Into some dark recess, nor hear thy voice Though ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the agency of gradual heat in rendering clay fit for use in cookery and preferable to any previous makeshift. The modern Zuni name for a parching-pan, which is a shallow bowl of black-ware, is thle mon ne, the name for a basket-tray being thlae' lin ne. The latter name signifies a shallow vessel of twigs, or thla we; the former etymologically interpreted, although of earthenware, is a hemispherical vessel of the same kind and ...
— A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth. • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... that wan company since the pittance of the night before, and yet for nine long hours of that fearful day, the air so heated that it hardly fed the lungs, and the sun blazing so pitilessly upon the log structure that a faint odor of parching wood mingled with the torrid air within the Fort, yes, for nine long hours the elder prayed, or preached, or recited aloud the deep abasement of the penitential psalms, and the wail of the prophets, proclaiming, yet deprecating, the wrath of an ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... This is the process of our love and wisdom, To each poor brother who offends against us— Most innocent, perhaps—and what if guilty? Is this the only cure? Merciful God! 5 Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd up By Ignorance and parching Poverty, His energies roll back upon his heart, And stagnate and corrupt; till chang'd to poison, They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot; 10 Then we call in our pamper'd mountebanks— And this ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... human authority over our unhappy fellow-creatures." Torments, however, were always inflicted in these cases. The punishment was gibbeting alive, and exposing the delinquents to perish by the gradual effects of hunger, thirst, and parching sun; in which situation they were known to suffer for nine days, with a fortitude scarcely credible, never uttering a single groan. But horrible as the excesses might have been, which occasioned these punishments, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... father foster'd at his daughter's breast! O! filial piety!—The milk design'd For her own offspring, on the parent's lip Allays the parching fever. ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... may be again called hot. Dry parching winds prevail as the month advances, and squalls of thunder and lightning with rain or hail. The thermometer at day-light is seldom under 65 degrees, and frequently at noon rises to 80 degrees, 84 degrees, and even ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... the winds are low, and when the tides are still, And the round moon rises inland over the naked hill, And o'er her parching seams the dry cloud-shadows pass, And dry along the land-rim lie the shadows of thin grass, Then aches her soul with longing to launch and sink away Where the fine silts lift and settle, and sea-things drift and stray, To make the port of ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... hence they advanced three days' march, through much snow and a level plain, a distance of fifteen parasangs; the third day's march was extremely troublesome, as the north-wind blew full in their faces, completely parching up everything and benumbing the men. 4. One of the augurs, in consequence, advised that they should sacrifice to the wind; and a sacrifice was accordingly offered; when the vehemence of the wind appeared to every one manifestly to abate. The depth of the snow was ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... would look well to have come out by an eruption, and then to get our heads broken by bits of falling rock. Let us get down. Then we shall know better what we are about. Besides, I am starving, and parching with thirst." ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... they were at last under way. He gave no thought to the heat of the oil-dripping pit in which he stood. He was oblivious of the perilous steel that whirred and throbbed about him. He was unconscious of the hot hand rails and the greasy foot-ways and the mingling odor of steam and parching lubricant and ammonia-gas from a leaking "beef engine." He quite forgot the fact that his dungaree jumper was wet with sweat, that his cap was already fouled with oil. All he knew was that he and Binhart were ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... impede and to facilitate the physical degradation both of new countries and of old. If the precipitation, whether great or small in amount, be equally distributed through the seasons, so that there are neither torrential rains nor parching droughts, and if, further, the general inclination of ground be moderate, so that the superficial waters are carried off without destructive rapidity of flow, and without sudden accumulation in the channels of natural drainage, there is little danger of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... the afternoon of a sultry parching day when he at last arrived at Hillah. This dull little town, built at the beginning of the twelfth century out of the then plentifully scattered fragments of Babylon, has nothing to offer to the modern traveller save various annoyances in the shape of excessive heat, dust, or rather fine ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of the Harvest walked by the side of his cornfields in the springtime. A frown was on his face, for there had been no rain for several weeks, and the earth was hard from the parching of the east winds. The young wheat had not been able ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... fields,—these moved the inhabitants of India to the worship of the divine as the beneficent power of nature which blesses man. On the other hand, he changed under the impression of the harmful phenomena of nature, the dark and close-packed clouds which hold back the rain and intercept the sunshine, the parching heat of summer, which dries up the rivers and hinders growth and fruitfulness, and these also he erected into objects of awe and religious adoration. From this view of nature sprang the Indian mythology. The oldest divinity (Deva) of the Indians is Varuna, the all-embracing heaven, who ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... preceded and followed. It is then that Nature, who seems from the creation to have bestowed all of grandeur and sublimity on the stupendous Americas, looks gladly and complacently on her work; and, staying the course of parching suns and desolating frosts, loves to luxuriate for a period in the broad and teeming bosom of her gigantic offspring. It is then that the forest-leaves, alike free from the influence of the howling ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... icy wind which cracks the rocks, and leaves nothing alive on those deserted heights. It came in sudden gusts, more parching and more deadly than the burning wind of the desert, and again Ulrich shouted: "Gaspard! Gaspard! Gaspard!" Then he waited again. Everything was silent on the mountain! Then he shook with terror, and with a bound ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... my brother dear, To see your buried partner here; I come to tell you where to find A treasure, which I left behind: I had not time to let you know it, But follow me, and now I'll shew it." John trembled at the awful sight, But hopes of gain suppress'd his fright; Oft will the parching thirst of gold, Make ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... continue his narrative in his own words :—" I received from home," says he, "the sum of two hundred crowns for the expenses of myself and master; but before the end of the year, all our money went away in the smoke of our furnaces. My master, at the same time, died of a fever, brought on by the parching heat of our laboratory, from which he seldom or never stirred, and which was scarcely less hot than the arsenal of Venice. His death was the more unfortunate for me, as my parents took the opportunity of reducing my allowance, and sending me only sufficient ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Tlanqua cemilhuique, compounded of tlanqua, to set the teeth, as with strong determination, and cemilhuitia, to run during a whole day. Sahagun, Historia, Lib. iii, cap. iii, and Lib. x, cap. xxix; compare also the myth of Tezcatlipoca disguised as an old woman parching corn, the odor of which instantly attracted the Toltecs, no matter how far off they were. When they came she killed them. ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... light in silence, her face paler than ordinary, her hair blown about by the hot wind. The trees in the dark garden swayed and creaked, the air was parching and full of dust, the light glared brighter each moment. Surely it was very near? Surely it was nearer than Stralsund? "It's in Lohm," cried someone with conviction; and Anna turned and began ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... grateful dew that cools the upland air and moistens the bunch-grass that has been bleaching all day in the fierce rays of the summer sun, a little column of infantry is swinging steadily southward. Long and toilsome has been the march; hot, dusty, and parching the day. Halts have been few and far between, and every man, from the colonel down, is coated with a gray mask of powdered alkali, the contribution of a two hours' tramp through Deadman's Canon just before the sun went down. Now, however, they are climbing the range. ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... stones doe in the winter time, defend and keepe the sharpnesse of the Frosts and bleake windes from killing the heart or roote of the seedes, and also in the Summer it defends the scorching heate of the Sunne from parching and drying vp the Seede, which in this grauelly soile doth not lie so well couered, as in other soyles, especially if this kinde of earth be inuironed with any great hils (as most commonly it is) the reflection whereof makes the heate much more ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... her sunken eyes from the dust of the parching fields And tapped the door with her bony hands and her fingers gaunt and thin; Ah, Hearts grow faint at the hunger-cry and the arm of the master yields When all the world is a heap of dust that its ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... stems and branches of lavender being ligneous and strong are able to resist the force of the wind, and the plant thrives best in a perfectly open locality, where the air circulates freely; the oil and resin which it contains in abundance enable it to resist the parching action of the wind and sun. Thus, on the most arid and sterile ground on the mountain sides in the south, and especially in Spain, plants of this genus flourish with more vigor in the season when most other vegetation is scorched up by the ardent rays ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... on from gray to gray; the parching north wind poured down the plain and darkened the air with gritty dust; the sky, though cloudless, grew murkier every day. Then the wind shifted to the south, and the sky grew darker yet with surging heaps of clouds, and at last down came the late November rain; and next ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... the rising sun and continued till four o'clock P.M. A strong S. and S.E. wind blew all day, and very cold, parching my lips and mouth. This wind would have a veritable burning simoon in the summer! We traversed all day the plateau, now become an immeasurable plain. It slightly undulates in parts, but I think we continued to ascend. Some of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... this, although salt and bitter, is relished by camels. During the hot season in which we unfortunately travelled, the heat was intense, the thermometer ranging from 106 degrees to 114 degrees Fahr. in the shade. The parching blast of the simoom was of such exhausting power, that the water rapidly evaporated from the closed water-skins. It was, therefore, necessary to save the supply by a forced march of seven days, in which period we were to accomplish the distance, and to reach Abou Hammed, on the southern bend ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... red juice dyed his lips, and he closed his eyes in happy contentment, oblivious, for the time, of the sand and fallen trunks that seemed to dance in the parching rays of the sun, oblivious, even, of the loss ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... and fifty species of Opuntia, which elect to grow in parching sands, beneath a scorching sun, often prostrate on baking hot rocks, on glaring plains, beaches, and deserts, from Massachusetts to Peru - for all are natives of the New World - show so marvelous an adaptation ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... beyond a desert 'cross which hosts of Death are marching, And a hot sirocco wanders under skies all red and parching, Lined with skeletons of armies through the centuries fierce and acre Bones of heroes and of sages marking Time's lapse year by year, Unmoistened by the night-dews 'mid the solitudes of ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... season, which gradually passes into the dry; heavy fogs forming during the transition. These last till the end of September. Occasional showers, too, continue till November. Then the weather becomes really clear and dry, until, towards the end of January, the dry parching wind, called the Harmattan, sets in, with its over-stimulant action upon the human system, and clouds of penetrating impalpable sand. If this is not blowing, the atmosphere is loaded with moisture; and this it is, combined with the heat of an intertropical ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... jetty for the night. When darkness had set in, the wild melancholy howl of the jackal was borne across the desert by the evening breeze, a sound sufficiently startling and inexplicable if you don't happen to know its origin. What these animals can find to eat in a parching desert is, and remains ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... fall three or four feet from him without his perceiving it:—so they continued to fire as directed, until they are either sent down to the cock-pit themselves, or have a momentary respite from their exertions, when, choked with smoke and gunpowder, they go aft to the scuttle-butt, to remove their parching thirst. So much for the lower and main deck. We will now ascend to the quarter-deck, where we shall find old Adams at the conn, and little Willy standing ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... gloom of human agony, these heartrending scenes of real mourning, that the brilliant star shone to disperse the clouds which hovered over our drooping heads,—to dry the hot briny tears which were parching up our miserable vegetating existence—it was in this crisis that Marie Antoinette came, like a messenger sent down from Heaven, graciously to offer the balm of comfort in the sweetest language of human compassion. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... sprinkled with the tender green of young crops. Beside them trailed the ashen country roads over which farmers were crawling with their covered wagons; but, while Cyrus watched from his height, there was as little thought in his mind for the men who drove those wagons through the parching dust as for the beasts that drew them. It is possible even that he did not see them, for just as Mrs. Pendleton's vision eliminated the sight of suffering because her heart was too tender to bear it, so he overlooked all facts except those which were a part of the dominant motive of his life. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... this winter travelling is the want of water. We were obliged to content ourselves with the supply gotten from the snow, melted by the smoky fire. This water, together with the wind, had the effect of parching and cracking my swollen lips to such a degree, that when, after an interval of eight days, I had an opportunity of surveying my face in a piece of broken glass, I was at a loss to recognise my own features. The most scorching heat ...
— Georgie's Present • Miss Brightwell
... Owning the sway of Love's long-suffering eyes, Love's sweet self-sacrifice; The might of gentleness; the subduing force Of wisdom on her mid-way measured course Gliding;—not torrent-like with fury spilt, Impetuous, o'er Himalah's rifted side, To ravage blind and wide, And leave a lifeless wreck of parching silt;— Gliding by thorpe and tower and grange and lea In tranquil transit ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... woman. There are so few unaffected, natural children in this generation, that it is as refreshing to contemplate our little girl's guileless purity and ingenuous simplicity, as to gaze upon cool green meadows on a sultry, parching August day. Keep her a child, let ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... a thunder shower just before he had set out, and now, although rain had ceased, the sky remained blackly overcast and a curious, dull stillness was come. The air had a welcome freshness and the glistening pavements looked delightfully cool after the parching heat of the day. In the quiet square, no doubt, it was always restful in contrast with the more busy highroads, and in the murmur of distant traffic he found something very soothing. About him then were peace, prosperity, ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... hoofs sunk deep. Dismounting Hare labored beside him, and felt the heat steal through his boots and burn the soles of his feet. Hare plodded onward, stopping once to tie another moccasin on Wolf's worn paw, this time the left one; and often he pulled the stopper from the water-bag and cooled his parching lips and throat. The waves of the sand-dunes were as the waves of the ocean. He did not look backward, dreading to see what little progress he had made. Ahead were miles on miles of graceful heaps, swelling mounds, crested ridges, all different, ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... sudden sound Startled his apprehensions; from his heart Rose heavy suspirations, charged with prayer, Desire, and deprecation, and remorse;— Sighs like volcanic breathings—sighs that scorched His parching lips and spread his face with ashes,— Sighs born in such convulsions of the soul That his strong frame quaked like Vesuvius, Burdened ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... would obey the injunctions I might lay upon him. And, as a matter of course, he punctually and invariably violated that pledge when the crisis of the fighting was drawing to a head, and just when this "peace at any price" man could not control the bloodthirst that was parching him. ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... to agriculture in the Crimea and in these regions generally, has been greatly increased by the disappearance of the forests of central and southern Russia, which formerly to some extent protected the coast-provinces from the parching northeast wind. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... smooth hard brightness, now dissolved To infinite soft depth, and smoulder'd down Low as the roofs, dark burning blue, and soared Clear to that winking drop of liquid silver, The first exquisite star. Now the half-light Tidied away the dusty litter parching Among the cobbles, veiled in the colour of distance Shabby slates and brickwork mouldering, turn'd The hunchback houses into patient things Resting; ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... while. The things it does are apparently very futile and superfluous, some of them, but in the end something has been accomplished. After a March of whimsical suns and snows, an April of quite fantastical frosts and thaws, and a May, at least partially, of cold mists and parching winds, the flowers, which the florists have been forcing for the purpose, are blooming in the park; the grass is green wherever it has not had the roots trodden out of it, and a filmy foliage, like the soft foulard tissues which the young girls are wearing, drips from ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... precipitous, that there was rarely any place where the travellers could get down to drink of its waters. Frequently they suffered for miles the torments of Tantalus; water continually within sight, yet fevered with the most parching thirst. Here and there they met with rainwater collected in the hollows of the rocks, but more than once they were reduced to the utmost extremity; and some of the men had recourse to the last expedient to ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... of the air at sea-level, and the warm moist breezes it received from the tepid ocean. The climate was about the same as that of the Riviera or of Florida in winter, and there was, of course, no parching summer. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... age, and when weary of overwrought temples and tombs, when arid plains and malodorous towns lose their power to interest, they journey north to Rajputana to revel in Jeypore, the unique—at least, lovers of Kipling do. And the effect on jaded senses is like a cooling draught after a parching thirst. Kipling called Jeypore "A pink city, to see and puzzle over," It surely is pink, all of it that is not sky-blue, and for various reasons it is more satisfying than any ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... name given to this month which means end of the stem of the talo, or "arum esculentum." The month being unusually dry and parching, the scorching rays of the sun left little of the talo stem but a ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... you have cast him away, Stript of his stops and his musical strings, Battered and shattered, a broken old instrument, Shoved out of sight among rubbishy things. His garlands are faded, and what he deems worst, His tongue and his palate are parching with thirst. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... activities of the soul. Thus, when a person has come to know the advantages of contemplation, and of dwelling upon pictures derived from his own thought-world, he is apt to develop a tendency to withdraw himself from the impressions of the outer world. Yet such a step only leads to parching and withering the inner life; and he will go farthest who manages to retain an unchecked receptivity for all impressions of the outer world, while possessing the power to withdraw within his own inner self. It is by no means necessary to think only of the so-called important events ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... groaning here, it is the vicegerent of God, the father of Christendom, the holy and blessed pope! And if you knew, Lorenzo, what this vicegerent of God has to suffer and bear, how his blood like streams of fire runs through his veins, carbonizing his entrails and parching the roof of his mouth, so that the tongue fast cleaves to it, and he has no longer the power to complain of his misery! And such a crushed earth-worm this miserable, infatuated people call the vicegerent of God, before whom they bow in the dust! ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... "Parching summer hath no warrant To consume this crystal well; Rains, that make each brook a torrent, Neither ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. . . . . . . "O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede* Of marble men and maidens over-wrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... sense of a parching and suffocating heat. She started up with the idea of fire in her drowsy mind. But a glance at him revealed the real cause. His face was fiery red, and from his lips came rambling sentences, muttered, whispered, that indicated the delirium ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of the stems are generally close to the heating apparatus, it is advisable to bind them up with moss or haybands, neatly clipped, as far as the parching heat extends. The moss or haybands being damped morning and evening with the syringe, will keep the bark and stems in a healthy state, and will frequently induce a mass of roots to be produced there. That by watering occasionally with liquid manure will contribute ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... cast him down: and there he sat all alone, astonished and confounded, like Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, when she sat alone upon the parching rock. Like Rizpah, he watched the dead corpses of all his hopes and plans, all for which he had lived, and which made life worth having, withering away there by his side. But it was told David what Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, had ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... can appreciate the misery of bad water in a tropical country, or the blessings of a cool, pure draught. I have been in districts of Ceylon where for sixteen or twenty miles not a drop of water is to be obtained fit for an animal to drink; not a tree to throw a few yards of shade upon the parching ground; nothing but stunted, thorny jungles and sandy, barren plains as far as the eye can reach; the yellow leaves crisp upon the withered branches, the wild fruits hardened for want of sap, all moisture robbed from vegetation by the pitiless ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... meantime had become very hot. The southern sun beat down on Bellerivre, parching its hillsides, and tanning its people to a dusky brown. But the peasants complained not of the high temperature, for was not this torrid sun that burned so fiercely the very factor they were calculating upon to complete for them the final preparation of their cocoons for the market? This ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... upon the rocks some twelve days, without nourishment and exposed to all the horrors of starvation. Worse yet than that, deprived of shelter from a vertical sun, without water to restore the fluids which his fierce rays extracted from their parching bodies. An immense number of birds were flying over and around these jagged peaks, and who knows how greatly these may have added to the torture of the shipwrecked crew, when failing nature denied ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... scarlet-tinted sumach, she was still smiling quietly. The sun had risen higher, and a dry heat rose in waves from the earth. Already her shoes were white, and moist tendrils of hair curled about her brow. Before her loomed three miles of parching highway as barren of shade as the woodsman's axe could make it. The picture of Ellen's cool kitchen and breezy porch made the distance at that moment seem interminable. There was not a wagon in sight, and unless one came along, she would ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... After a while you begin to think of how delightful it is, and what a change from pacing over the burning sand in the daylight with the sun making the air quiver and glow like a furnace, and your mouth turn dry and lips crack with the parching you ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... the world. The next instant its blazing summit breaks into splinters on every side. Occasionally fearful hail-storms sweep over the plains; and at other times the air from the south comes heated, as from a furnace, drying up all moisture from the skin, and parching ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a bric-a-brac dealer's. It seemed a wonderful place to him; but, oh! was there one drop of water in it all? That was his single thought; for his tongue was parching, and his throat felt on fire, and his chest began to be dry and choked as with dust. There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice window grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge covered with snow. August cast ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought, Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there. The Town is taken by its rats—ship-rats And rats of the wharves. All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe— Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... stony plain lying between us and the hills, the heated and parching blasts that came upon us, were more than we could bear. We were in the centre of the plain, when Mr. Browne drew my attention to a number of small black specks in the upper air. These spots increasing momentarily in size, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... came with renewed horrors,—'weak, distracted, and wanting everything,' says one of the prisoners, a British officer, in his narrative, 'we envied the fate of those whose lifeless corpses no longer needed sustenance. The sense of hunger was already lost, but a parching thirst consumed our vitals.' ... 'Almost lost to a sense of humanity, we no longer looked with pity on those who were the speedy forerunners of our own fate, and a consultation took place, to sacrifice some one to be food to the remainder. ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... deaths our fellowship is thinned, Our flesh is withered in the parching wind, Wandering the earth from ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... corroding anguish in his bosom that neither could be soothed "by silence nor by speaking." A devouring melancholy preyed upon his heart, and seemed to be drying up the very blood in his veins. It was not a soft melancholy—the disease of the affections; but a parching, withering agony. I could see at times that his mouth was dry and feverish; he almost panted rather than breathed; his eyes were bloodshot; his cheeks pale and livid; with now and then faint streaks athwart them—baleful gleams of the fire that ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... a terrible quaking and noise as the old tree tried to rise from its recumbent position. The sun's rays were fast parching its roots, causing sharp pains to shoot ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... was studded thick with pin-point stars. In that myriad of little stars, filling in between the big ones, the milky way was lost and reduced to obscurity—the whole sky was a milky way. Wiley sank down in the sand and gazed up sombrely as he wetted his parching lips from his canteen, and the evening star gleamed like a torch, looking down on the world he had fled. Across the Funeral Range, not a day's journey to the east, that same star lighted Virginia ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... and consequently grew worse to bear, the parching and scorching of each day being carried over into the next. What the newspapers call a heat-wave was drawing to its culmination, which generally reaches the verge of the unbearable, even to the well ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... glad, for my own sake, to kindle a fire. And yet God knows, in such an open spot, and the country alive with savages, the act was little short of lunacy. Ballantrae seemed never to observe me; but at last, as I was about parching a little corn, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... around me; and, indeed, the prospect was anything but inviting. On both sides of the creek the soil showed evidences of the severity of the past drought. Great gaping fissures—usun cracks we called them—traversed and zig-zagged the hot, parching ground, on which not a blade of grass was to be seen. Here and there, amid the grey-barked ghostly gums, were oases of green—thickets of stunted sandalwood whose evergreen leaves defied alike the torrid summer heat and the black frosts ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... talking, or by hot rooms, are often exposed to cold, raw, and foggy winter air, and serious derangements of the respiratory organs are the natural consequence. If, moreover, this pernicious habit of breathing be once contracted, we shall soon also sleep with open mouths, thus parching our throats, and sowing the seeds of many ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... ranch to indicate the undercurrent of trouble Tresler had so quickly discovered to be flowing beneath its calm surface. The sun was pouring down upon the wiltering foliage with a fierceness which had set the insect world droning its drowsy melody; the earth was already parching; the sloughs were already dry, and the tall grass therein was rapidly ripening against the season of haying. But in spite of the seeming peace; in spite of the cloudless sky, the pastoral beauty of the scene, the almost inaudible murmur of the ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... ready, and Lanty is decidedly at this time the most important personage on the ground. He is stooping over the fire, with a small but long-handled frying-pan, in which he is parching the coffee. It is already browned, and Lanty stirs it about with an iron spoon. The crane carries the large coffee-kettle of sheet iron, full of water upon the boil; and a second frying-pan, larger than the first, is filled with sliced ham, ready to be placed ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... and then rejoined in an altered tone, "Then, then will this parching thirst be quenched at last. I tell you, woman, that it is many months since I have known a day—night—hour, in which my life has been as the life of other men. My whole soul has been melted down into one burning, burning ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stones the flock where it would tarry against his will. He mutilates the males, and drags the females away from their sucking babes. He shears their fleeces every spring, unheeding how the raw skin drops blood. He drives the halting, footsore, crippled animals on by force over flint and slate and parching dust. Sometimes he makes them travel ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... their parching thirst that induced the horses to remain anywhere near the camels, and immediately they got sufficient water, they de-camped, though short-hobbled, at a gallop over the high red sandhills from whence we had come; my riding-horse, Chester, the worst of the mob, went nearly mad at ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... days of Shah Jehan. The great red bastions of the Fort frown over the same placid Jumna, and watch each morning the pearly dome of the Taj Mahal rise like a moon in the dawn-glow, shimmer through the parching glare of an Indian day, and at eve sink, rosy, into the purple shadows of swiftly-falling night, as they did when Shah Jehan sat "in the sunset-lighted balcony with his eyes fixed on the snow-white pile at the bend of the river, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... when thou'rt far away, Wilt thou not cast a wish behind? Say, canst thou face the parching ray, Nor shrink before the wintry wind? Oh, can that soft and gentle mien Extremes of hardship learn to bear, Nor sad, regret each courtly scene, Where thou wert fairest ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... the drive to the gate, and out upon the sunny road. The dust rose in clouds, whitening the elder, the stickweed, and the blackberry bushes. The locusts shrilled in the parching trees. The sky was cloudless and intensely blue, marked only by the slow circling of a buzzard far above the pine-tops. There were many pines, and the heat drew out their fragrance, sharp and strong. The moss that thatched the ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... abounded. Through the scorching sunshine ran scorpions and lizards, pursued by enormous rattlesnakes. During the days the heat ranged from 100 to 115 deg. in the shade, while the nights were swept by winds as parching as the breath of an oven. The distant mountains glared at the eye like metals brought to a white heat. Not seldom they passed horses, mules, cattle, and sheep, which had perished in this terrible transit and been turned to mummies by the dry air and baking sun. Some of these carcasses, having ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the feel of the sun-warmed moss; And each cardoon, like a full moon, Fairy-spun of the thistle floss; And the beech grove, and a wood dove, And the trail where the shepherds pass; And the lark's song, and the wind-song, And the scent of the parching grass! ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... childhood's pain Could to me now the purest rapture yield; I pray for tears as in his parching field The husbandman ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... into the gloom of the haven. The orator paced homeward alone. Everything had favoured him. He had even cleared himself of the curse of the Furies and the pursuit of Nemesis. He had, he congratulated himself, shown marvellous qualities of mercy. Glaucon lived? Yes—but the parching sand-plains of Libya would be as fast a prison as the grave, and the life of a slave in Africa was a short one. Glaucon had passed from his ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... wherever fire heat is used in heating these cellars, if practicable, the furnace itself should be boxed off, by a thin brick wall, from the main cellar, and the pipes only introduced. This does away with the dust and noxious gas, and modifies the parching heat. ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... planted the roots of the shamrocks which were brought from Ireland, and which he luckily found in Mr. Gulvert's kitchen garden, where they had been thrown, after having been taken from Eugene. And to this very day these shamrocks flourish—neither frost, nor cold, nor parching heat, nor inclement seasons being able to retard their growth; as if their verdure and flourishing vegetation were supplied from the pure and genuine Irish clay to which the bodies of the three O'Clerys have been ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... shorter, the chill came back into the morning air, and the great thunder-caps which all Summer had mantled the Peaks, scattering precarious and insufficient showers across the parching lowlands, faded away before the fresh breeze from the coast. Autumn had come, and, though the feed was scant, Creede started his round-up early, to finish ahead of the sheep. Out on The Rolls the wild and runty cows were hiding their newborn calves; the spring twos were grown to the raw-boned ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... and gold. We should remember, however, that not only the glow of autumn and the flush of summer are beautiful, but that every season, every climate, every aspect in the shifting panorama of Nature, has a beauty as real. Our own region, be it arid with parching suns, or wet with frequent rains; be it always winter there, or always summer, is full of beauty. There is sunset on the desert, moonrise on mid-ocean, gorgeous coloring and crowding life in the tropics, dazzling starlight over ice-bound lands. Neither ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... fallow the summer before, and had served no further use than the grazing of some picketed cows. Then, one parching July day it had been cut, to kill the thistles and pigweed that overran it, and in the following May had been plowed, dragged, and sown to wild timothy. The few mounds dotting it had been turned under with the belief that, ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates |
