"Rainless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... coming and going through its doors, yet all in sobriety and peace, Ascalon passed the burning, rainless summer days. But not without a little cheer in the hard glare of the parching range, not without a laugh and a chuckle, and a grin behind the hand. The town knew all about the rainmaker at work behind the shielding ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... Asia, just as the "hoe-people" of the Niger and upper Nile have so often been conquered by the herdsmen of the African grasslands. Thus, regardless of race or epoch—Hyksos or Kaffir—history tends to repeat itself in these rainless tracts, and involves the better watered districts along their borders when the vast tribal movements extend into these ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... a house wedding includes one in a garden, with a wedding procession under the trees, and tables out on the lawn—a perfect plan for California or other rainless States, but difficult to arrange on the Atlantic seaboard where rain is too likely to ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... of May; a bright, rainless, and at times bitterly cold month it has been. But now the chill east wind has almost died away. Summer has come at last. Once more I am making for the Downs. Very seldom am I there at this period of the year; but before going away ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... on the blaze. As night gathers without, the gale rises. It is a season of uneasy winds, and of strange, rainless storms, which perplex the fishermen, and indicate rough weather out at sea. As the house trembles and the windows rattle, we turn towards the fire with a feeling of safety. Representing the fiercest of all dangers, it yet expresses security ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... rising; but we laid this to the speed of the train, fully twelve miles an hour. But once outside the shelter of our carriage, it was impossible to deceive ourselves any longer. The wind was rising, and the dry dust of many rainless months was rising with it, flying in dense, enveloping clouds. It was a curious sight that presented itself: a long, straggling procession of two or three hundred men and women, beating their way, heads downward, across the plains of Chili ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... breaking a great number of pieces I found small crystals of olivine. Much of the granite was a deep red, but the exterior coating was in all cases decomposed, and crumbled at a blow; exhibiting a marked contrast to the hard-faced granite blocks in the rainless climate of Lower Egypt. We saw but little game during the march—a few nellut and tetel, and the smaller antelopes, but ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... could not have written the Pentateuch because writing was unknown in his day. Yet Prof. A. H. Sayce, D.D., LL.D., of Oxford University, one of the greatest archaeologists the world ever knew, writes: "Egypt was the first to deliver up its dead. Under an almost rainless sky, where frost is unknown, and the sand seals up all that is entrusted to its keeping, nothing perishes except by the hand of man. The fragile papyrus, inscribed it may be 5,000 years ago, is as fresh and legible as when ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... days in the house at this time and practiced an unskillful needle, while her thoughts wandered far and near through the sullen weather to this old cross and that. Then came a night of rainless darkness through which past augmentations of water still thundered. Nature rested for some hours before her final, shattering deluge, but the brief peace was more tremendous than rain or wind, for a mighty foreboding permeated it, and all men felt the end was not ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... named, relates that formerly God was very near to men. But a woman, who had been pounding banana fruit in a mortar, inadvertently entering His presence with a pestle in her hands, aroused His anger, and He withdrew into the high heavens and listened to men no more. Six rainless years brought famine and distress, whereupon they besought Him to send one of His counsellors who should be their daysman, and should undertake their cause and care for them. God sent his chief minister, with a promise that ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... rainless country grow anything? The secret is the Nile. Every year, when the rains fall in the great lake-basin of Central Africa, from which one branch of the great river comes, and on the Abyssinian hills, where the other ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... are they; not such shapes as Jove might have chosen to woo a goddess, nor such as peacefully range the downs of Devon, but lean and hungry Cassius-like bovines, economically got up to meet the exigencies of a six-months' rainless climate, and accustomed to wrestle with the distracting wind and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... minutes we reached a place where water exuded from a rock, especially at its top, and by following the stream upward for another twenty minutes we arrived at the larger one, where the ooze from the rocks overflowed the ground. Only tracks were seen, but our guide said that after three rainless days in succession birds and animals would be sure to come there. Myriads of yellowish-gray flies covered the ground as well as the rocks, and after having taken some specimens of algae, also some white gelatinous stuff with which the Malays ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... not be a very severe penance for an island on which the rainfall averages 124 inches per year; but when vegetation suffers from the cruelty of four almost rainless months, promises and slights amount to something more than mere discourtesy. How genuine the thanksgiving to the soft skies after an incense-stimulating shower. Insects whirl in the sunshine. Among the pomelo-trees ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... From the depth of thousand fathoms, 230 From the fiercely rushing torrents, From the seething of the whirlpool, And from Rutja's mighty cataract, Where the waters rush most wildly, From the further side of heaven, Where the rainless clouds stretch furthest, From the pathway of the spring-wind, From the ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... of man, plants, and animals given by the writer of the second chief constituent of the Hexateuch in the second chapter of Genesis. This extraordinary story starts with the assumption of the existence of a rainless earth, devoid of plants and herbs of the field. The creation of living beings begins with that of a solitary man; the next thing that happens is the laying out of the Garden of Eden, and the causing the growth ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... at night the warm-breath'd cows Do sleep by moon-belighted boughs; An' there the while the rooks do bring Their scroff to build their nest in Spring, Or zwallows in the zummer day Do cling their little huts o' clay, 'Ithin the rainless sheaedes, below The steadvast arches' mossy bow. Or when, in Fall, the woak do shed The leaves, a-wither'd, vrom his head, An' western win's, a-blowen cool, Do dreve em out athirt the pool, Or Winter's ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... North America, Asia, and Australia—three out of the five continental masses—have what we may call interior deserts. Africa has one such, though it is north of the centre, and extends to the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The only continent without this central nearly rainless field is South America, where the sole characteristic arid district is situated on the western slope of the Cordilleran range. In this case the peculiarity is due to the fact that the strong westerly setting winds which sweep over the country encounter no high mountains until they strike the Andean ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... reasoning about such matters), that it is not at all likely that it flows from snow. 29 The first and greatest evidence is afforded by the winds, which blow hot from these regions; the second is that the land is rainless always and without frost, whereas after snow has fallen rain must necessarily come within five days, so that if it snowed in those parts rain would fall there; the third evidence is afforded by the people dwelling there, ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... and miles away from railroads, telegraphs, newspapers—all the mighty, roaring music of civilization. Off toward the east the desert stretched its level expanse of vague coloring, and westward the rounded hills, green in the winter, yellow as ripe wheat fields through the long, rainless summer, reared their mounds higher and higher until they stopped, as if cowed and ashamed, at the flanks of Monte Pinos. And the mountain, majestic and vapor-veiled, seemed always to be watching them in their work of protecting and comforting ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... autumn. The vanished pepper trees were dim with dust in Orchardina streets as the long rainless summer drew to a close; but the social atmosphere fairly sparkled with new interest. Those who had not been away chattered eagerly with those who had, and both with the incoming tide of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... through the skies of evening, was reflected in flaming colour nearer home, for, lo! the lamp in the tea-basket exploded with a terrific bang and a tongue of flame which brought us all to our feet in an instant. Here was a calamity to occur on such a dry night, in a long rainless summer, and in a pine forest, too, where if the trees once ignited, flames might spread for miles and miles, causing incalculable damage. We all knew the danger, and each prepared to assist in putting out the fire. Grandpapa, with the agility of a cat, seized the burning basket ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... drier and hotter upper districts as far as Bhamo, where there is a great infusion of other types of the Tibeto-Burman family. North of the apex of the delta and the boundary between the deltaic and inland tracts, the rainfall gradually lessens as far as Minbu, where what was formerly called the rainless zone commences and extends as far as Katha. The rainfall in the coast districts varies from about 200 in. in the Arakan and Tenasserim divisions to an average of 90 in Rangoon and the adjoining portion of the Irrawaddy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... company with him, and a muleteer undertook their transport to Shiraz. It was a terrible journey up the parching mountain paths of Persia, where Alexander's army had suffered so much, with the sun glaring down upon them, never, in that rainless belt around the Persian Gulf, tempered by a cloud. They travelled only by night, and encamped by day, sometimes without a tree to spread their tents under. The only mode of existing was to wrap the head in a wet cloth, and the body in all the heavy clothing to be had, to prevent the waste of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... shall notice that one of its most typical features is the alkali-pool. Every few miles we come to a shallow basin of stagnant water saturated with salts of soda and potash. Still another characteristic of the Plains is their tremendous rainless thunder-storms. If we are fortunate enough to encounter one of these, we shall witness in one hour more atmospheric perturbation than has occurred within our whole previous experience on the Atlantic slope. The lightning for half a night will light the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... rainless noon three days later. At the back of the scene, northward, rise the Michaelsberg heights; below stretches the panorama of the city and the Danube. On a secondary eminence forming a spur of the upper hill, a fire of logs is burning, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... difference worth noting; for with tree-fruits the cream of the crop goes to the fresh fruit market, while with the grape the entire crop of raisin varieties may go into the cured product. The raisin industry is dependent on a sunny and rainless climate and hence in America is confined to the grape regions of certain parts of California. In this state, raisin-making is a rich resource of the grape-grower, the annual output now averaging well above 200,000 pounds, grown on ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... week of April, the badger's spring-cleaning began in downright earnest. The old bedding of fern, and hay, and leaves was cleared entirely from the winter "oven," and, after a few windy but rainless days and nights, when the refuse of Nature's woodland garden was dry, new materials for a cosy couch were carried to the lair, and arranged on the floor of the roomy chamber where Brock's mother had brought him into ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... sticky moisture, and to set at defiance the persistent attacks of all external enemies. The prickly pear, in fact, is a typical instance of a desert plant, as the camel is a typical instance of a desert animal. Each lays itself out to endure the long droughts of its almost rainless habitat by drinking as much as it can when opportunity offers, hoarding up the superfluous water for future use, and economising evaporation by ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen |
