"Moonless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them, and the course he should pursue with her. And through all the debate Love stood off but a little way—a strong temptation, the stronger of a gleam of policy behind. At the very moment he was most inclined to yield to the allurement, a hand very fair even in the moonless gloaming was laid softly upon his shoulder. The touch thrilled him; he started, turned—and ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... disappeared, taking advantage of the door being open. He did not want to listen, so much was he afraid, and he did not want his hopes to crumble with each obstinate refusal of his father. He preferred to learn the truth at once, good or bad, later on; and he went out into the night. It was a moonless night, a starless night, one of those foggy nights when the air seems thick with humidity. A vague odor of apples floated through the farm-yard, for it was the season when the earliest apples were gathered, the "soon ripe" ones, as they are called in the language ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... and Jane Crab wedged themselves together in the open window and leaned far out, peering into the moonless dark. As they watched, a search-light leapt into being, and a pencil of light moved flickeringly across the sky. Then another and another—sweeping hither and thither like the blind feelers of some hidden octopus seeking its prey. There was something horribly ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... that spell of foul weather were very dark and moonless, not because there was no moon, though she was now waning into her last quarter, but because of the quantity of clouds that muffled up the face of the heavens and hid the moon and the stars from us. But we made shift as well as we could, working hard all the time that the daylight lasted, and giving ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... black hall. There I found a great silent assembly. How it was visible I neither saw nor could imagine, for the walls, the floor, the roof, were shrouded in what seemed an infinite blackness, blacker than the blackest of moonless, starless nights; yet my eyes could separate, although vaguely, not a few of the individuals in the mass interpenetrated and divided, as well as surrounded, by the darkness. It seemed as if my eyes would never come quite ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... and the hour had already deepened into the darkness of a calm, moonless, summer night; the hearth, therefore, in a short time, became surrounded by a circle, consisting of every person in the house; the door was closed and securely bolted;—a struggle for the safest seat ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... must get rid of him as soon as you can," said Clementina, when again the moonless night of the pines had received them: "he is certainly more than half a lunatic. It is almost full moon now," she added, looking up. "I have never seen ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the pair had sufficiently refreshed themselves the gloom of the departing day was deepening into the darkness of a moonless, starless night; and as they entered their hut the first shimmer of sheet lightning which was the precursor of the coming storm flickered above the tree-tops ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... that journey in July, 1913, when we met that poor wandering young family of fugitives from the Natives' Land Act. A sharp pang went through us, and caused our heart to bleed as we recalled the scene of their night funeral, forced on them by the necessity of having to steal a grave on the moonless night, when detection would be less easy. Every man in this country, we thought, be he a Russian, Jew, Peruvian, or of any other nationality, has a claim to at least six feet of South African soil as a resting place after death, but those native outcasts, who in the country of ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon the shine, and very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, or sails, or smoke, or any lights, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... above me like a forest, shutting out all the starlight except what came from directly overhead. Many of the ears were a yard out of reach. One who has never seen an Alabama river-bottom cornfield has not exhausted nature's surprises; nor will he know what solitude is until he explores one in a moonless night. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... is deaf with age; A garden of moonless trees Would answer not though she should cry In ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... like a donkey's; and natives have ridden him, and he has no mouth in consequence, and occasionally shies. But his merits are equally surprising; and I don't think I should ever have known Jack's merits if I had not been riding up of late on moonless nights. Jack is a bit of a dandy; he loves to misbehave in a gallant manner, above all on Apia Street, and when I stop to speak to people, they say (Dr. Stuebel the German consul said about three days ago), 'O what a wild horse! it cannot be safe to ride him.' Such ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... back, and tramped drowsily down the dusty road beneath the moonless sky, and down through the steep, sleeping city, and across the Pont des Bergues, and so to the Quai du Seujet and the Alle Petit Chat, which lay dense and black and warm in shadow, and was full of miawling cats, ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... botany. God makes flowers breathing their freshening fragrance noiselessly up into your face. Man makes astronomy. God makes the stars, shaking their firelight out of the blue down into your wondering eyes on a clear moonless night. Man makes theology. And theology has its place, when it's kept in its ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... not inclined to argue about the matter. He sat silent, watching star after star shine out of the moonless sky. After a long silence Hope ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... the motley crowd assembled outside the synagogue to watch the arrival of Joseph Acosta and his beautiful bride; and there were those who said that Uriel's hands were raised as in blessing. And once on a moonless midnight, when the venerable Dona Acosta had passed away, the watchman in the Jews' cemetery, stealing from his turret at a suspicious noise, turned his lantern upon—no body-snatcher, but—O more nefarious spectacle!—the sobbing figure of Uriel Acosta across a new-dug grave, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... crash of the broadsides rolled and stormed To the Sally hid from view Under the tall liana'd boughs Of the moonless ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... observed with such satisfaction in all its manifold gradations of character and colour; its curious cold grayness in the beginning of an autumnal dawn; the illusion of warmth and depth which it sustained at noon, bringing up its burden of leviathans on the top of the flood; its sheen on moonless nights, when only little punctures, green and red and orange, and its audible stillness, reminded him that down in the obscurity the great polluted stream stole on wearily, monotonously, everlastingly to the sea. It was changeful and changeless. He thought he knew its effects by heart, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... the left hand, and a small scoop net in the right, walk waist-high through the water; the crayfish, dazed by the brilliant light, are whipped up into the nets and dropped into baskets carried by the women and children who follow. They can only be caught on dark, moonless nights. ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... lonely glens, amid the roar of rivers, When the dim nights were moonless, have I known Joys which no tongue can tell; my pale lip quivers When thought revisits them:—know thou alone, 535 That after many wondrous years were flown, I was awakened by a shriek of woe; And over me ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... this great height they were in themselves comparatively insignificant, but they at least suggested the vastness of the bastions of which they were no more than buttresses. As Percy turned, he could see the moonless sky alight with frosty stars, and the dimness of the illumination made the scene even more impressive; but as he turned again, there was a change. The vast air about him seemed now to be perceived through frosted glass. The velvet blackness of the pine forests had faded to heavy grey, the pale ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... he had indulged in that lofty little room, with his eyes wandering over the spreading roofs of the market pavilions! They usually appeared to him like grey seas that spoke to him of far-off countries. On moonless nights they would darken and turn into stagnant lakes of black and pestilential water. But on bright nights they became shimmering fountains of light, the moonbeams streaming over both tiers like water, gliding ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... first we rose very slowly, because the machine had to contend against the force of gravity; but as the weight of the car diminished the higher we ascended, our speed gradually augmented, and we knew that in the long run it would become prodigious. The night was moonless, and a thick mantle of clouds obscured the heavens; but the planet Venus was now an evening star, and after attaining a considerable height, we steered towards the west. Our course took us over the metropolis, which lay beneath us like ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... be a dark, moonless night. Only a few feebly gleaming stars, thinly scattered over the firmament, enabled him to distinguish the canopy of the sky from the waste of waters that surrounded him. Even a ship under full spread of canvas could not have been seen, though passing ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... was as silent as death. "I can't go to bed and not know where she is," he reflected. "I wonder what she meant when she talked to me so strangely—what she had in her mind! I must know, I must know!" He opened the door, and went out into the night. The sky was moonless, but for a wonder it was resplendent with stars. All the factory fires were low, and the air was no longer smoke-sodden. The wind came from the sea, and he breathed deeply. It seemed as though a great healing power passed over his heart. He went into the little garden ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... beginning of her voyage, rude Boreas kindly retired, and spicy breezes from Africa rippled the sea with just sufficient force to intensify its heavenly blue, and fill out the great square-sail so that there was no occasion to ply the oars. One dark, starlight but moonless night, a time of quiet talk prevailed from stem to stern of the vessel as the grizzled mariners spun long yarns of their prowess and experiences on the deep, for the benefit of awe-stricken and youthful shipmates whose ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... felt her arms fold around him he began to feel better. It was a moonless night, and very dark, with glimpses of stars when ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... her clothes, and made him take off all his, and they ran over the smooth, moonless turf, a long way, more than a mile from where they had left their clothing, running in the dark, soft wind, utterly naked, as naked as the downs themselves. Her hair was loose and blew about her shoulders, she ran swiftly, wearing sandals ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... younger: "Do what we may, our father will not condescend to follow our words of counsel, and nothing now remains but to bring him to a knowledge of the truth by the sacrifice of one of our own lives. To-night is fortunately moonless; and if I put on white garments and go to the neighborhood of the bay, he will take me for a stork and shoot me dead. Do you continue to live and tend our father with all the services of filial piety." Thus she spake, her eyes dimmed with the rolling tears. But the younger sister, with many ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... arose from the immense throng. Word had passed through it that the military was approaching. Pandemonium seemed suddenly to have broken loose, and shouts, and yells, and oaths arose from five thousand throats, as the men sprung behind their barricades. It was a moonless night, but the stars were shining brightly, and, in their light, the sheen of nearly a thousand bayonets made the street look like a lane of steel. The Twenty-seventh Regiment of National Guards, led by Colonel ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... Ret) when coffee had been served and the chairs pulled together, then with his elbow on the table, between sips of his coffee, our hero gave a moving description of all the dangers which awaited him "Over there" He spoke of long moonless watches, of pestilential marshes, of rivers poisoned by the leaves of oleanders, of snows, scorching suns, scorpions and clouds of locusts; he also spoke of the habits of the great lions of the Atlas, their phenomenal ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... on my mind; For clouds lay o'er the ocean of my thoughts In vague and broken masses, strangely wild; And grim imagination wander'd on 'Mid gloomy yew-trees in a churchyard old, And mouldering shielings of the eyeless hills, And snow-clad pathless moors on moonless nights, And icebergs drifting from the sunless Pole, And prostrate Indian villages, when spent The rage of the hurricane has pass'd away, Leaving a landscape desolate with death; And as I turn'd me to my vanish'd dream, Clothed in its drapery ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... black moonless sky brooded above the dying camp fires. Not until this wild world of swamp and Indian seemed asleep did the man in the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... low tones, and then fell silent. The night had come, starless and moonless, favorable to the designs of Tandakora, but they felt intense satisfaction, nevertheless. It was partly physical. Robert's making of an easy road to the water, the coming of the pigeons, to be eaten, apparently sent by Areskoui, and the ease with which they believed they could hold their ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... A moonless, cloudless night. The little praam takes the ground in the bay a few yards from the beach, and in the midst of a constellation of "jelly-fishes" spherical in form and varying in size. The larger are so many pale blue orbs ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... their pleasure was in war; Triumphs and hatred followed: I myself Bore, men imagined, no inglorious part: The gods thought otherwise, by whose decree Deprived of life, and more, of death deprived, I still hear shrieking through the moonless night Their discontented and deserted shades. Observe these horrid walls, this rueful waste! Here some refresh the vigour of the mind With contemplation and cold penitence: Nor wonder while thou hearest that the soul Thus purified hereafter may ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... sleepless London seemed very remote from us, as side by side we crept up the narrow path to the studio. This was a starry but moonless night, and the little dingy white building with a solitary tree peeping, in silhouette above its glazed roof, bore an odd resemblance to one of those tombs which form a city of the dead so near to the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... night came on moonless and dark; and it was the early spring season, when the days are not yet long, and so by night and cloud we fled away, and back again ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... name as by the one his parents had given to him. But he appeared less and less in public. He began to neglect his practice; he resigned from his club; he avoided the company of his former associates, taking his walks at night alone, even though the sky was moonless, storms were threatening, and the cut-throat crew were abroad that made life at some hours and in some quarters of the city not of a pin's fee in value. His housekeeper told a neighbor that on some nights he paced the floor till ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... And the moonless dark, When I sat in sorrow Over Sigurd; Better than all things I deemed it would be If they would let me Cast my life by, Or burn me up As they burn ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... of October I quitted Fort Garry, at ten o'clock at night, and, turning out into the level prairie, commenced a long journey towards the West. The night was cold and moonless, but a brilliant aurora flashed and trembled in many-coloured shafts across the starry sky. Behind me lay friends and news of friends, civilization, tidings of a terrible war, firesides, and houses; before me lay unknown savage tribes, long days of saddle-travel, long nights of chilling bivouac, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... woman says, "My days were sunless and my nights were moonless, Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's outbreak tuneless, If you loved me not!" And I who—(ah, for words of flame!) adore her, Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... stood to gaze his last over the possessions he was abandoning. He let his little taper die out by the hearth, and then crept toward the glimmer of the window, and looked out again. The conservatories and the dairies and the barns showed plain in the gray of the moonless, starless night; in the coachman's quarters a little point of light appeared for a moment through the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... moonless, and the thick-leafed masses of the oaks and hickories rose a wall of black to curtain half the hemisphere of starry sky. As always in our forest land, the hour was shrilly vocal, though to me the chirping din of frogs and insects hath ever stood for silence. ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... completely over her shoulders; her forehead was low and the roots of her hair were brushed back from it; her eyebrows, running from the very springs of her cheeks, almost met at the boundary line between a pair of eyes brighter than stars shining in a moonless night; her nose was slightly aquiline and her mouth was such an one as Praxiteles dreamed Diana had. Her chin, her neck, her hands, the gleaming whiteness of her feet under a slender band of gold; she turned Parian marble dull! Then, for the first time, Doris' ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... and enough gas is manufactured to supply two rows of lamps leading from the lop-maidan to the palace front, two rows on the east side of the palace, and a dozen more in the top-maid.an itself. The gas is of the poorest quality, and the lamps glimmer faintly through the gloom of a moonless evening until half-past nine, giving about as much light, or rather making darkness about as visible as would the same number of tallow candles; at this hour they are extinguished, and any Persian found outside of his own house later than this, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... sad are they who know not love, But, far from passion's tears and smiles, Drift down a moonless sea, and pass The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... there were some who said It moved its lips; And when they went away, the earth stirred And they heard it moan. Now it comes leaping down the tunnel roads Where the moss hangs like stalactites, Screaming out curses, snapping at the toads; Negroes who pass there on the moonless nights Behind them hear a sound that stops their breath. The keen wind whistles through its teeth, And the white skull goes bounding by ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... was dark and moonless, there was an inconveniently brilliant gas-lamp close to the Major's door, and that strategist, carrying his round roll of diaries, much the shape of a bottle, under his coat, went about half-past nine that evening to look at the rain-gutter which had ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... night could dawn on night, With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred, A sense more tragic than defeat and blight, More desperate than strife with hope debarred, 60 More fatal than the adamantine Never Encompassing her passionate endeavour, Dawns glooming in ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... brilliance break About the keel, as through the moonless night The dark ship moves in its own moving lake Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light; And to the clear horizon, all around Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright As though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and white, A million moons in ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... from out its dream Breaks with a sudden song, That stabs the sense like a sudden scream; The hound the whole night long Howls to the moonless sky, So far, and ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... midnight o'er the moonless skies Her pall of transient death has spread, When mortals sleep, when spectres rise, And none are wakeful but the dead; No bloodless shape my way pursues, No sheeted ghost my couch annoys, Visions more sad my fancy views, Visions of long ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... before he determined to make a still more attractive home of it by lighting it with a new-fashioned gas of domestic manufacture. He succeeded in lighting not only his house but the whole country-side, for one moonless night his mansion was burned to the ground. Nothing was left of the house but the foundations, and on these the owner felt no desire to build again. He departed from the Lethbury neighborhood and never ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... very edge of the high, precipitous cliffs, with no more between it and the rocks far beneath than a low wall. It was a road of dangerous curves and corners which needed careful negotiation even in broad daylight, and this was a black, moonless and starless night. But Copplestone had impressed upon his driver that he must get to Scarhaven as quickly as possible, and he and his companion were both so full of their purpose that they paid ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... one of enchantment, yet to Rose, leaning out into the moonless night, the beauty of it brought only pain. She wondered, dully, if she should ever find surcease; if somewhere, on the thorny path ahead, there might not be some place where she could lay the burden of her ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... was moonless to-night but crowded with stars which gave light enough so that the riders were able to follow the road without difficulty, although the shadows on either side were dense. The air was sweet, and so still that the sounds of revelry from Terranova were plainly audible. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... less than ten feet long. There, on the face of that precipice, one hundred miles from the nearest settlement, all through the lonely watches of the night, the strong-hearted wife, with tear-dimmed eyes, hung over the sufferer. Many a silent prayer in the weary hours of that moonless night did she send up to the Father of mercies. Many a plan for bringing succor or for alleviating pain on the morrow did ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... cleverest scoundrels of Europe, and the barbarians of Spanish America, where a few master spirits, all old Spaniards, did indeed for a season stick fiery off from the dark mass of savages amongst whom their lot was cast, like stars in a moonless night, but only to suffer a speedy eclipse from the clouds and storm which they themselves had set in motion. We shall see. The scum as yet is uppermost, and does not seem likely to subside, but it may boil over. In Cuba, however, all was ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... gleams on high—the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights, And many sounds, and much of life and death. In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, 130 In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them:—Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... slipped on down, now crossing a shaft of light flung on the water from some lamp or fire, now blending with the ghostlike shadows which lay in the moonless night. It passed out of the town itself, and edged into the shade of the forest that swept continuously for ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... The night was moonless. The fountain was lit up by torches, and many lamps also were lighted in the garden. Genji was taken to an airy room in the southern front of the building, where incense which was burning threw its sweet odors ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... nature reasserted itself in me, and I dozed again, that ghoul of a cockroach came back and proceeded with its fell banquet. At length, weakened no doubt by loss of blood and frantic with the thought that a mere piece of determined vermin should thus habitually sup off me, I rose in the dead of a moonless night, turned on the electric light, selected a handy shoe, and then started to have it out, once for all, with that man-eating cockroach. He broke cover from under some curiosities, and went away at a killing pace. But I had stopped his "earths" all round the cabin, and after a ten minutes' ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... pound gate had long ago disappeared; in its place were two or three little bars that could easily be let down. The trespassers would naturally enter by that gap, and on a moonless night would not see the wire fence on top of the wall. They would have more trouble in getting out of the place than they had had in getting into it if the gap ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... then that a black cloud from heaven Such blackness gave to your Nazarene's hair, As of a languid willow o'er the river Brooding in moonless night? Is it the shadow Of the profileless wing of Luzbel, the Angel Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling— Bottom he ne'er can touch—whose grief eternal He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason? Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... behind him. Oh, world-enchanting Benares! what happy man could have quitted thee on such an autumn night with satiated eyes? It is a moonless night. From the Ganges stream, in whatever direction you look you will see the sky studded with stars—from endless ages ever-burning stars, resting never. Below, a second sky reflected in the deep blue water; on shore, flights of steps, and tall houses showing a ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... near the hotel smoking their cigarettes. The wind had fallen, leaving a peace in the ears like the cessation of a hateful turmoil. There was the promise of a cool night in the unusual clearness of the stars. Morgan rode away into the moonless night, leaving the town to take care of its own dignity ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... spring Through chasms of horrid cloud, on scathless wing; Old Chaos round him, like a tiar, Swathed the long rush of immaterial fire; As thou, descending from afar, Wast canopied with living arch of light, Pale pillars of immortal star, Burst through the curtains of the moonless night. ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... new star was of fifth magnitude; by two it was of the first. As the faint flush of dawn began to come toward the close of that frosty, moonless November night, the new star was a great white-hot object more brilliant than any other star in the heavens. Phobar knew that when its light finally reached Earth so that ordinary eyes could see, it would be the ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... moonless night, and the air was chill, but they were certainly nowhere near the polar regions, for there was no trace of snow to be seen anywhere. All about them was sand, with here and there a spiny shrub standing up stiff ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... to be true, for the next moment the group turned, and began to retreat along the road, moving briskly out of our sight. We were left in the thick gloom of a moonless evening and the peaceful ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... along the river before he would be allowed to take charge of the wheel. He not only had to memorize the whole river, but be able to predict the changes in its course and the variations in its eddies. He had to be able to know exactly where he was at every moment, even in the blackest of moonless nights, simply ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... bullion wagons still travel the difficult roads. They look for safety to their armed horsemen; the four and six horse stages look to the armed guard, the wayfarer must look to his horse—and it should be a good one; the mountain rancher to his rifle, the cattle thief to the moonless night, the bandit to his wits, the gunman to his holster: these include practically all of the people that travel the Spanish Sinks, except the Morgans and the Mormons. The Mormons looked to the Morgans for ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... troubled spirits quite cast down They looked upon the royal town, And from their eyes, oppressed with woe, Their tears again began to flow. Of Rama reft, the city wore No look of beauty as before, Like a dull river or a lake By Garud robbed of every snake. Dark, dismal as the moonless sky, Or as a sea whose bed is dry, So sad, to every pleasure dead, They saw the town, disquieted. On to their houses, high and vast, Where stores of precious wealth were massed, The melancholy Brahmans passed, Their hearts with anguish cleft: Aloof from all, they came not near To stranger or ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... deduct the price of the horse from its aggregate bets, and arrange the remainder in a line of perhaps five figures. Whereupon the betting-men grow seedier and more seedy; some of the more mercurial go off in a fit of apoplectic amazement; some betake themselves to Waterloo Stairs on a moonless night; some proceed to the Diggings, some to St Luke's, and some to the dogs; some become so unsteady, that they sign the wrong name to a draft, or enter the wrong house at night, or are detected in a crowd with their hand in the wrong man's pocket. But by degrees everything comes ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... was surprised, she was woman enough not to show it. She picked up her gloves and handbag, locked her drawer with a click, and smiled her acquiescence. And when Pearlie smiled she was awful. It was a glorious evening in the early summer, moonless, velvety, and warm. As they strolled homeward, Sam told her all about the Girl, as is the way of traveling men the world over. He told her about the tiny apartment they had taken, and how he would ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... latter appears to be the literal meaning, though there can be no question, as is seen by a comparison with the Syriac, that the period of the full moon is referred to. No doubt it was because travelling was so much more safe and easy than in the moonless nights, that the two great spring and autumn festivals of the Jews were held at the full moon. Indeed, the latter feast, when the Israelites "camped out" for a week "in booths," was held at the time of the "harvest moon." The phenomenon of the "harvest moon" may be briefly explained as follows. ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... The night was moonless and half cloudy. The wind shrieked among the rim rocks and boomed against the cliffs. Our lantern would not stay lighted. Time and again we crept beneath a rock slab and relighted it only to have it snuffed out the instant we emerged into the wind. Across ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... night of February 13, 1797, an English fleet of fifteen ships of the line, in close order and in readiness for instant battle, was under easy sail off Cape St. Vincent. It was a moonless night, black with haze, and the great ships moved in silence like gigantic spectres over the sea. Every now and again there came floating from the south-east the dull sound of a far-off gun. It was the grand fleet of Spain, consisting of twenty-seven ships of line, under Admiral Don Josef de Cordova; ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... moor and moss and briar and brake, And in his heart their sorrow spake Whose lips were dumb as death, and said Mute words of presage blind and vain As rain-stars blurred and marred by rain To wanderers on a moonless main Where ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... opposite the fort, under the trees which overshadowed the strand, some distance back from high-water mark. Singly or in groups of two or three, the men had gone across in boats after sunset, successfully eluding observation, for the night was moonless and ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... many a moonless night, From Kingston Head and from Montauk light The spectre kindles ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... zummer, leaete at evenen tide, I zot to spend a moonless hour 'Ithin the window, wi' the zide A-bound wi' rwoses out in flow'r, Bezide the bow'r, vorsook o' birds, An' listen'd ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... those warm, still, almost tropical nights, so rarely seen on northern waters, when a profound calm reigns in the moonless heavens, and the hush of absolute repose rests upon the tired, storm-vexed sea. There was not the faintest breath of air to stir even the reef-points of the motionless sails, or roughen the dark, polished mirror of water around the ship. ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... that on moonless nights it was indispensable for me to have lights along. Now maybe the reader has already noticed that I am rather a thorough-going person. For a week I worked every day after four at my buggy and finally ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... the quiet waters of the great China Sea, while back of him loomed the rugged bulk of the mountain, the summit indistinct in the darkness of the moonless night. The growths of the tropics came up to where he stood and then died out from lack of soil. Elephant's Head stood out boldly, its rugged lines unsoftened by the growths which flourish almost everywhere in ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... which the sky could be seen completely swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right, indeed, where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a low stable building had a full drop of quivering silver just issuing from the mouth of the chimney. It was a moonless night, but the light of the stars was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman's form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed almost sternly, into the sky. She had come out into the winter's night, which was mild enough, not ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the "Philadelphia" is one of the most striking pictures in the series. The effect of the mounting flames against the moonless and midnight sky is impressive and spectacular, and their lurid reflection in the water, with a glimpse of the Algerian fort and batteries in the background to the right, and the little vessel of Decatur, fittingly named the "Intrepid," skimming along ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... of labor had been expended in building this curious place under a low hill. Yet the original builders had figured that their time so spent would yield large returns. This part of the Florida coast lay conveniently near to Cuba. On moonless nights a small sailing craft would put in along the coast, laden with smuggled Havana cigars. There being no safe place along the shore in which to store the cigars, this place, hidden well in a forest, had been constructed as a safe depository. For some time the cigar smugglers had prospered. ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... fire, mirth, and music were enlivening the party within the close-drawn curtains, without were moonless night and thickly-falling snow; and the morning opened on one vast expanse of white, mantling alike the lawns and the trees, and weighing down the wide-spreading branches. Lord Curryfin, determined not to ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... when the midnight Is heavy upon the land, And the black waves lying dumbly Along the sand; When the moonless night draws close, And the lights are out in the house; When the fires burn low and red, And the watch is ticking loudly Beside the bed: Though you sleep, tired out, on your couch, Still your heart must wake and watch In the dark ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... interior state of his soul I cannot even think without terror and confusion. Compared with the darkness of it, the other nights, he said, are but as clouds across the sun on a summer's day compared with a moonless midnight in winter. He had suffered a shadow of it before, when he was entering the contemplative state, or the prefect Way of Union. Now it fell upon him. Before I tell you how it came, I must tell you that this night, as he explained it, takes its occasion ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... the real object to be viewed-to wit: upon the moon. It has been easily calculated that, when the light proceeding from a star becomes so diffused as to be as weak as the natural light proceeding from the whole of the stars, in a clear and moonless night, then the star is no longer visible ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... glad it was a moonless evening as she walked side by side with her cousin down Hillside Avenue. It was one of the first warm evenings of the Spring and the neighbors were on their porches, or gossiping at ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... must have grown pretty tired of squeaking. It was a moonless evening, though not very dark. I could see objects at a little distance through the crack, but could not see so far as the stump. It got rather dull, watching there; and being amidst nice cozy straw, I presently ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... his nest on the top of the dam if the bacon smell had not stirred the new hunger in him. Since his adventure in the canyon, the deeper forest had held a dread for him, especially at night. But this night was like a pale, golden day. It was moonless; but the stars shone like a billion distant lamps, flooding the world in a soft and billowy sea of light. A gentle whisper of wind made pleasant sounds in the treetops. Beyond that it was very quiet, for it was Puskowepesim—the Molting Moon—and the wolves were not ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... on the sail that brings our friends up from the under world, and the last falls on that which sinks with all we love below the verge.' Even at night there is no cessation to this coming and going; only, a red light or a white, and the distant strokes of a paddle-wheel in the hush of the moonless void are then the sole signs of all this motion. What hopes and fears contend in unseen hearts under those moving stars! Is it nothing to have the opportunity to watch them from the ivied porch of the 'Outlook,' and to welcome the thoughts they arouse within ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... shuttle (which is jest as good to-day as it wuz at the creation). Silent days, quiet days, in a broad stripe, not glistenin' or shiny, but considerable good-lookin' after all. Then anon variegated with moon lit starry nights, blue skies, golden sunsets, deep dark, moonless midnights, all ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost in the air, and only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven; and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems perfect; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... window. This was a moonless night, and little enough illumination entered the room ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... night air. Her mistress and her mistress's daughter had not yet come out of their cabin, and the men had not yet finished their evening's tobacco. The awning had been removed, the stars were shining in the moonless sky, the poop guard had shifted itself to the quarter-deck, and Miss Sarah Purfoy was walking up and down the deserted poop, in close tete-a-tete with no less a person than Captain Blunt himself. She had passed and repassed him twice silently, and at the third turn the big fellow, peering ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... from the construction camp at the dam, a little cavalcade moved slowly through the darkness of a moonless, cloudy night. A southeast wind was blowing, but it was a drying wind, with no promise of rain. It had blown for days steadily, until it had sucked every vestige of moisture from the top earth, leaving it merely powdery dust. Because of it, too, no dew had fallen; the nights ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... with this one look. Will you pray for those to whom in the moonless night, at the altar by the temple, there is the sudden coming of that which they have sought—the "possession," the "afflatus," which for ever after marks them out as those whose correspondences reach beyond mortal ken. All devotees ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... for a vigorous defense, the Prince of Orange, on a dark and moonless night, entered the city quietly, and went to the Hotel de Ville, where his confidants had everything ready for his reception. There he received all the deputies of the bourgeoisie, passed in review the officers of the paid troops, and communicated his plans to them, the chief of which was ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... enjoys the musamarah or night-talk outside the Arab tents. "Samar" is the shade of the moon, or half darkness when only stars shine without a moon, or the darkness of a moonless night. Hence the proverb (A. P. ii. 513) "Ma af'al-hu al-samar wa'l kamar;" I will not do it by moondarkness or by moonshine, i.e. never. I have elsewhere remarked that "Early to bed and early to rise" is a civilised maxim; most barbarians sit deep ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... musicians, as they swayed to and fro in their red coats on the bandstand, floated towards the dome through the heavy summer air. In the near distance the fantastic shapes of chimney-cowls raised themselves against the starry but moonless sky, and miles away the grandiose contours of a dome far greater than Hugo's—the dome of St. Paul's—finished the prospect in solemn majesty. It was a scene well calculated to intensify a man's emotions, especially when a man ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... Valdedera would rise full-armed, and that no hostile power on earth would dare to touch the water. To her any miracle seemed possible. Whatever he ordered, she did. She had neither fear nor hesitation. She would slip out of her room unheard, and speed over the dark country on moonless nights on his errands; she would seek for weapons and bring them in and distribute them; she would take his messages to those on whom he could rely, and rouse to his cause the hesitating and half-hearted by repetition of his words. Her whole young life had caught fire at his; and her passionate ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... The night was moonless, and Cecilia, looking through the window, said whimsically, 'He has gone out into the darkness, and is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... once every nine years, watched the sky during a whole cloudless, moonless night, in profound silence; and, if they saw a shooting star, it was understood to indicate that the kings of Sparta had disobeyed the gods, and their authority was, in consequence, suspended till they had been purified by an oracle from Delphi ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... kept a very careful watch. On the Sabbath, as the people were returning from public worship, one or two Indians were seen on the neighboring hills, which led the people to suspect that an assault was contemplated. The night was moonless, starless, and of Egyptian darkness. The Indians, perfectly acquainted with the location of every building and every inch of the ground, crept noiselessly, three hundred in number, each to his appointed post. They spread themselves over all parts ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... still and silent night, moonless, very dark, and very tranquil. He went to the window to throw ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... I felt much better and stronger. I looked around for my companions. The fire had gone out—no doubt intentionally extinguished, lest its glare amid the darkness might attract the eye of some roving Indian. The night was a clear one, though moonless; but the heaven was spangled with its sparkling worlds, and the starlight enabled me to make out the forms of the two trappers and the group of browsing horses. Of the former, one only was asleep; ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... glorious line, Sitting by turns beneath Thy sacred feet We'll hold communion sweet, Know them by look and voice, and thank them all For helping us in thrall, For words of hope, and bright examples given To show through moonless skies that there is ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... first looked, and the sands which were marked by my earliest footsteps, are completely lost to my memory; and of those ancient walls among which I began to breathe, I retain no recollection more clear than the outlines of a cloud in a moonless sky. But of L——, the village where I afterwards lived, I persuade myself that every line and hue is more deeply and accurately fixed than those of any spot I have since beheld, even though borne in upon the heart by the association of ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle |
