"Dervish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when the crash came. He had stood buoyantly expectant; he received it flamboyantly calm. A smile of ineffable pleasure then seized upon his features, and with the breaking forth of the chorus he rose to joyous action. He spun on his heels like a dervish. He threw handsprings, he walked on his hands, he exhausted, in short, all that he had been able to acquire in the abandon of the previous weeks; and then gravely righting himself, he went over and began to pick up squabs. These he offered to the American with a perfectly wooden ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... with fugitives. The pasha called for troops from Constantinople, though no violence had been even threatened, and several battalions of Turkish regulars with eight thousand Egyptians arrived and disembarked. With one of the battalions was a dervish fanatic, carrying a green banner, who spread his praying carpet in every public place in Canea, preaching extermination of the infidels. I took a witness and went to the general in chief, Osman Pasha, and protested against this outrage, and the dervish ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins returned from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin took up the carpets in her house, heroically sold all ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the saint of Israel is also the spirit of that wise Dervish of Browning's invention (1884), the Persian Ferishtah. The volume is frankly didactic, and Browning, as becomes a master who would make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures. In reading Ferishtah's Fancies we might suppose that we were in the Interpreter's House, and that ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... personage who capered about shouting. Long curly hair waved over his face; his dress was hung round with corks and tassels; he swung a long life-line round his head, and screamed at me words which were of course utterly lost in the breeze. This dancing dervish was the "life saver," marine preserver, and general bore of the occasion, and he seemed unduly annoyed to see me profoundly deaf to his noise as I stood on the after-deck to get a wider view, holding on by the mizen-mast, steeling with my feet, and ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... Chronicles" mentions that Nimrod taught the Assyrians or Babylonians to worship fire. The priests of Ammon, named Petor or Pator, used to dance round a large fire, which they affected in their dancing to describe. Probably from this the Dervish dances all over the East may be traced ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... manifestations. The audience was rich in the possession of the whole of her individuality, which was a great deal. She sang, danced, chattered, froze, melted, laughed, cried, flirted, kissed, kicked, cursed, and turned somersaults with the fury of a dervish, the languor of an odalisque, and the inexhaustibility of a hot-spring geyser.... And at length Mr. Prohack grew aware of a feeling within himself that was at war with the fresh, fine feeling of physical well-being. "I have never seen a revue before," he ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... performed it without grace; not a single word had he exchanged with his partner during the promenade, and his genuine listlessness was even more offensive than affected apathy. Von Sohnspeer, on the contrary, danced in the true Vienna style, and whirled like a Dervish. All our good English prejudices against the soft, the swimming, the sentimental, melting, undulating, dangerous waltz would quickly disappear, if we only executed the dreaded manoeuvres in the ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... minor poets, some fairly good actors, scholarly fellows who chanted the "Odyssey," and both oath-ripping and taciturn, quiet-mannered fellows who could neither read nor write found a home in the African Braves' muster-roll. Their spirit of corps had a dervish fatalism. They had begged to have a share in the war and Partow had consented. In the night after their long journey, while Westerling's ram was getting its death-blow, they had detrained and started for the front. But the Grays were going as fast as the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... cheer for Sanford." Then he lifted his arms above his head, flinging the megaphone aside with the same motion, and waited tense and rigid until the students were on their feet. Suddenly he turned into a mad dervish, twisting, bending, gesticulating, leaping, running back and forth across the platform, shouting, and finally throwing his hands above his head and springing high into the air at ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... the bridal suite in the leading hotel, got hold of a fleet of motor cars and a host of boon companions, lived on a diet of champagne cocktails and splashed himself about with the carefree abandon of a dancing dervish. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... or capture they might have. Under the influence of the intense excitement of this critical interval it is to be feared that the performance degenerated from a high-toned concert and variety show into something very like a Howling-Dervish exhibition. But, at any rate, it answered its purpose until, after a period that seemed like a dozen eternities, the West-bound overland express with a tremendous roar and rattle drew up beside them, in response to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... which is part and parcel of a hasheesh jag, was tremendous. Every one thereupon had something to say on the subject. The contagion could not be checked. And Khalid was called "the dervish of science" by one; "the rope-dancer of ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... has never hitherto done. You will, or let us say you may, need my aid. You will learn where and how to find the Sheikh Burrachee—which is my real name—from Yusuff, the sword dealer, in the armourers' bazaar, at Cairo. But you will more certainly do so by applying to the head Dervish at the mosques of Suakim, Berber, or Khartoum. At the last town, indeed, you will have no difficulty in learning where I am, and being conducted to me; and, indeed, in any considerable place above the second cataract of the Nile, you will probably learn at the ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... spellings are standard for the book: acrostick, chearful dervise [for dervish], Lybia, Scheich ...
— The Story of the White Mouse • Unknown
... no man can improve upon it. There have been, he admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or "lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. Meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives. Let each ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... no wife, praise be to God," said Dicky; "but if I had, her soul would be saved before my own, or I'm a dervish!" Then something moved him further, and he unbuttoned his pocket—for there really was a button to Dicky's pocket. He drew out a five-piastre piece, and held it down to the young Arab. "For the home-coming after Mecca," he said, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... interpose. On Earth I should never have been fool enough to meddle in a woman's quarrel. The weakest can take her own part in the warfare of taunt and innuendo, better and more venomously than could dervish, priest, or politician. But Eveena could no more lower herself to the ordinary level of feminine malice than I could have borne to hear her do so; and it was intolerable that one whose sweet humility commanded respect from ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... had no difficulty in making out groves of hemlock, and the circular openings. And although he could not make out my thirty-seven flies, still when 10.15 came he saw distinctly the black square crossing from hole Mary to the edge, and beginning its Dervish dances. They were on his edge more precisely than on mine. For Orcutt knew nothing of Tamworth, and had thought his best chance was to display for No. 9. So was it that, at the same moment with me, Haliburton also was spelling out Orcutt ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... of any hole in the lining but, duly obedient, I reached inside and found an opening. Some papers rustled in my hand. I clutched them like a madman, violently drew them forth and, perceiving that they were the precious documents, waved them about like a dancing dervish. The soldiers were distinctly disappointed and cast an evil eye on Marie, as though holding her personally responsible for cheating them out of ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... have dispensed with the torch-bearers, who ran before the carriage and preceded the donkeys, after we adopted that humbler mode of locomotion. Our row across the river to the chant of the boatmen invoking the aid of a sainted dervish, and our ride through the fertile borders of the Nile, covered with crops and palm-trees, were very lovely, and, after about an hour and a half from Cairo, we emerged upon the Desert. The Pyramids seemed then almost within reach of our outstretched arms, but lo! they were in fact some four ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... "Well, old whirling dervish," Mr. Gibney demanded calmly when Scraggs paused for lack of breath to continue his dance, "what about it? We're up Salt Creek without a paddle; all hell to pay and ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... rage, crying from sheer excess of emotion, shrieking out inarticulate denunciations, he flung himself on McCarty with the recklessness of a mad dervish, crying: ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... a Dervish, and making yourself too hot to eat anything," he says, putting a stop to her evolutions. "Let's saunter along the beach, and sit down a bit, my ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... excitement. Dr. Livingstone has testified to his complete unconsciousness to pain during his struggle with a lion; although he was torn by teeth and claws, his fear overcame all other impressions. By frequently repeated stimulation the Dervish secures a low threshold to the emotions caused by the thought of God or the devil, and his emotional excitement is increased by the presence of others under the same stimulation; emotion, therefore, secures the final common path and ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... manner a week slipped by, and at length he found himself crossing a desert with great rocks scattered here and there. In the shadow cast by one of these was seated a holy man or dervish, as he was called, who motioned to the youth to sit ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... beast, sonny," Martha pleaded as she knelt on the grass and caught the dancing boy by his arm and brought his dervish gyrations to a halt. ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... tramped-down paths, with snow three feet deep on either side. By way of being cheerful we went to see two tombs. One was an old, old place, where slept "the first great physician" who ever lived. In it a dervish kept watch in the bitter cold, and some slabs of dung kept a smouldering fire not burning but smoking. These dervishes have been carrying messages for Germans. Mysterious, like all religious men, they travel through the country and ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... thoughts were being raised from a deep well. Usually, they are men of extraordinary power, and are worth any dozen of that individual who scuttles about like a water bug, making an exhibition of great energy but, like the whirling dervish, keeping in such constant motion that he has no chance to observe what goes on under his nose. Here, as in all things, it is steadiness that does it. The blunt soldier, the old sea-dog type of naval officer, is endurable ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... even one such, and I, thus defenseless and feeble! Such is not the work that wise masters confide to fierce slaves. But that is the least of the reasons which exclude them from my choice, and fix my choice of assistant on you. Do you forget what I told you of the danger which the Dervish declared no bribe I could offer could tempt him a ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the five hundred or so authentic quatrains one asks, Which is the real Omar? Is it he who sings of wine and of pleasure, who seems to preach a life of sensual enjoyment? or is it the stern preacher, who criticises all, high and low; priest, dervish, and Mystic—yea, even God himself? I venture to say that the real Omar is both; or, rather, he is something higher than is adequately expressed in these two words. The Ecclesiastes of Persia, he was weighed down ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... is this fellow driving at, Paret?" he demanded. "It sounds to me like the ranting of a lunatic dervish. If he thinks so much of us, and the way we run the town, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... penetrated the soul without neglecting the body, or rather it grasped so well the exterior details that it straightway passed above and beyond them; it gave me the faculty of living the life of the individual on whom it was exerted, by permitting me to substitute myself for him, just as the dervish in the Thousand and One Nights took the body and soul of those persons over whom ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... Hood brought him an Indian summer of inspiration and success. 'The Rose of Persia' (1900), if not upon the level of his early masterpieces, contained better music than he had written since the days of 'The Gondoliers,' and at least one number—the marvellous Dervish quartet—that for sheer invention and musicianship could hardly be matched even in 'The Mikado' itself. There was a great deal of charming music, too, in 'The Emerald Isle' (1901), which Sullivan left unfinished at his death, and ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... and short old female of the coster-monger class, who, after a series of wild gyrations that might have put a dancing dervish to shame, bore down on Ned after the manner of a fat teetotum, and finally launched ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... with the kind messages he had sent us. Pipes and Coffee were served, and the conversation was rather slack. At his feet sat one of the most extraordinary figures I ever saw in my life; a countenance more devilish was never given to Dervish before. After we had been seated some time, this man, who had never opened his lips but had eyed us with the greatest attention and ferocity, at length began to mutter, "Kenkalis, Kenkalis, taib ben" ("English, ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... of one who has neglected such matters overlong; reversed his position; slept again. The young corn, deep green in the bottomland, moved with a staccato flurry, and the dust ghost of a mad whirling dervish sped up the main road to vanish at the bridge in a climax of lunacy. The stirring air brought a smell of blossoms; the distance took on faint lavender hazes which blended the outlines of the fields, lying like square coverlets upon the long slope of rising ground beyond the bottom-land, ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... dervish Hadji Omar was driven by his enemies out of Mocha into the desert, where they expected he would die of starvation. This undoubtedly would have occurred if he had not plucked up courage to taste some strange berries which he found growing on a shrub. While they seemed ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the story of a young enamoured Dervish who knew the whole Koran by heart, but forgot his very alphabet in presence of the princess. She tried to encourage him, but he only found tongue to say, "It is strange that with thee present I should have speech left me;" and having said that he uttered ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... trustfully petition that this wearisome psalm-sharp, this miauling meter-monger, this howling dervish of hymns devotional, may strain his trachea, unsettle the braces of his lungs, crack his ridiculous gizzard and perish of pneumonia starvation. And may the good Satan seize upon the catgut strings of his tuneful soul, and smite therefrom a ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... got a diabolical knack of picking up all the loose ends of the school; all the impossible fellows gravitate here: why, look at our Dervishes!" (Dervish was the slang ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... of emergency, and so I have upon a pair of socks; but there is no doubt that the proper thing is a towel. To dry oneself upon a sheet needs special training and unusual agility. A Nautch Girl or a Dancing Dervish would, no doubt, get through the performance with credit. They would twirl the sheet gracefully round their head, draw it lightly across their back, twist it in waving folds round their legs, wrap themselves for a moment in its whirling ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... round like a dancing Dervish, and finally fell into another arm-chair, overcome by the heat and the ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... wars in the Sudan. Though most of these relics are spurious, genuine helmets and coats of mail of old Persian and Saracenic times may occasionally be found, while large numbers of spears and swords are undoubtedly of Dervish manufacture. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... were thrown away. Several of the dervishes had fallen, but the process of clearing away the hedge proceeded with alarming rapidity. The work was, however, speedily abandoned at the face where Edgar was stationed, for at each crack of his rifle a dervish fell. Leaving three of the men to defend that face the rest joined the defenders at the sides, the sheik taking the command on one side, Edgar on the other. The fire now became more steady, the sheik enforcing his orders by vigorous blows ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... done injustice to them, we know not; but they seem to us the very reverse of decoration. The adoption, too, of new modes of spelling the Oriental names, is wholly unnecessary. Harem, turned into Hhareem—Dervish into Derweesh—Mameluke into Memlook, give no new ideas, and only add perplexity to our knowledge of the name. These words, with a crowd of others, have already been fixed in English orthography by their natural pronunciation; and the attempt to change them always renders their pronunciation—which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... I mean it," shouted Jack. "Why else do you think I'd be dancing around here like a whirling dervish? Come on and join the crowd. The armistice has ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... want to part with him in an unfriendly fashion. Her last words to Bill Nairne must be such as she herself could think of without pain. So she rummaged among her Christmas gifts, and found a dancing Dervish and a brightly-embroidered ball. These she wrapped up with the letter, and made a small parcel of the whole, after she had added this postscript: "Please give the enclosed toys as cheap New Year's ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... you are so comfortable here with us, and you have your own way, and I never tease you now about going to balls. It is so silly of you trying to make yourself miserable, and living in poky lodgings. You might as well be a fakir, or a dervish, or a Protestant nun, or ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of ...
— Unborn Tomorrow • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... by Ned, Dick being last of the party. Dick heard a sudden shout and a heavy blow, and rushed in. Mr. Johnson lay on the ground, his skull beaten in with a blow from the iron-bound staff of a dervish, a wild figure with long hair and beard reaching down to his waist. Dick was in time to see the terrible staff descend again upon Ned's head. Ned guarded it with his rifle, but the guard was beaten down and Ned stretched ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... threatened to triumph over all obstacles. Ali immediately ordered a sortie of all his troops, announcing that he himself would conduct it. His master of the horse brought him the famous Arab charger called the Dervish, his chief huntsman presented him with his guns, weapons still famous in Epirus, where they figure in the ballads of the Skipetars. The first was an enormous gun, of Versailles manufacture, formerly presented by the conqueror of the Pyramids to Djezzar, the Pacha ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... thousand armed guards. Pausanias indeed was noble, and known to the prince, but Ferdinand of Spain was stabbed in the neck by a poor and miserable Spaniard; and though the wound was not mortal, it sufficed to show that neither courage nor opportunity were wanting to the would-be-assassin. A Dervish, or Turkish priest, drew his scimitar on Bajazet, father of the Sultan now reigning, and if he did not wound him, it was from no lack either of daring or of opportunity. And I believe that there are many who in ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... essence of the successful "spectacle." Just as the scarlet dervish whirl was at its height the character of the music changed, slackened, softened, died from the angrily sensuous into an ethereal delicacy. The stage filled with clouds that faded in golden light, and a huge and glittering stairway rose towards ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... dark and windless as any, and the first watch held a record for hauling yards and changing sheets. "'Ere ye are, boys," was the call at eight bells. "Out ye comes, an' swigs them b——y yards round; windmill tatties, an' th' Old Man 'owlin' like a dancin' —— dervish on th' lid!" The Old Man had been at the bottle, and was more than usually quarrelsome; two men were sent from the wheel for daring to spit over the quarter, and M'Kellar was on a verge of tears at some coarse-worded aspersion on his seamanship. The middle watch ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... dervish fanatics who find ecstasy in vertigo, so thought, turning on itself, exhausted by the stress of introspection and tired of vain effort, falls terror-stricken. So it would seem that man must be a void and that by dint of delving unto himself he reaches ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... thought him coarse and raw. He talked the jargon of the agitator with the enthusiasm of a dervish and the vernacular of the mine and the shop and the forge. But in him she could see the fire of a mad ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Beyrout on the morning of the 22d. Our caravan consisted of three horses, three mules, and a donkey, in charge of two men—Dervish, an erect, black-bearded, and most impassive Mussulman, and Mustapha, who is the very picture of patience and good-nature. He was born with a smile on his face, and has never been able to change the expression. They are both masters of their art, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... but at every humble door; Its branches lend you their immortal food, That fills you with the sense of what ye are, No servants of an altar hewed and carved From senseless stone by craft of human hands, Rabbi, or dervish, Brahmin, bishop, bonze, But masters of the charm with which they work To keep your hands from that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a Highland home, framed with rude art, You'll find his portrait, rough-hewn, stern and square; It's graven in the Fuyam fellah's heart; The Ghurka reads it at his evening prayer; The raw lands know it, where the fierce suns glare; The Dervish fears it. Honor to his name Who holds aloft the ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Meshed in an unlucky hour, and determined to leave it. Dressed as a dervish I joined a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... the baronet demanded. "What jugglery is this? Are you dressed for an Eastern dervish in a melodrama, and have you come here to play a practical joke? I am afraid I can not appreciate the humor of the ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... replied the Sheikh; "only two that will be smaller; but everything necessary for their Excellencies' comfort will be done. It will be right, and impress the Baggara and others of the Mahdi's followers. For the Hakim is not a poor dervish who tries to cure; he is a great Frankish doctor who travels to do good. He does not treat the sick and wounded to be paid in piastres, or to receive gifts, but because he ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... from the Rajah and the High Priest. Mr. G. H. Damant (pp. 357-360 of the "Indian Antiquary" of 1873) relates the "Tale of the Touchstone," a legend of Dinahpur, wherein a woman "sells" her four admirers. In the Persian Tales ascribed to the Dervish "Mokles" (Mukhlis) of Isfahan, the lady Aruya tricks and exposes a Kazi, a doctor and a governor. Boccaccio (viii. 1) has the story of a lady who shut up her gallant in a chest with her husband's sanction; and a similar tale (ix. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... on the desk started to slide, slithering onto the floor, danced a crazy dervish across the room. Liquids in the laboratory bottles were climbing the sides of glass, instead of lying at rest parallel with the floor. A chair skated, bucking and ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... October, 1826. But the spirit of infatuation had seized the Sultan, or a secret hope that the Western Powers would in the last resort throw over the Court of St. Petersburg led him to hurry on hostilities by a direct challenge to Russia. A proclamation which reads like the work of some frantic dervish, though said to have been composed by Mahmud himself, called the Mussulman world to arms. Russia was denounced as the instigator of the Greek rebellion, and the arch-enemy of Islam. The Treaty ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... danced our landlady, in propria persona, jumping and screaming and laughing, and snapping her fingers, and spinning round like a Turkish dervish, "mira el fandango, mira el fandangodexa me baylar, dexa me baylar—See my fandango, see my fandangolet me dance let me ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... of Omdurman, the solid lines of infantry, the mighty Dervish array, bright with flashing spears and waving flags, were excluded. Rows of tiny dots hurried forward a few yards and vanished into the brown of the earth. Bunches and clusters of brown things huddled among the rocks or in sheltered spots. The six batteries of artillery unlimbered, and ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... curious, had been watching a certain dust cloud for half an hour. At first he had thought it only a whirling dervish—one of those restless columns of sand that continually shift over the arid lands. But it was following the course of the trail below him on the desert—rounding each bend ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... half paralyzed Ulema was there among them, the dervish Mohammed, and he it was who at ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... compensated by the scrupulous exactitude of the dramatic properties with which is invested each incident in the tale. The hero, a characteristic Persian adventurer, one part good fellow, and three parts knave, always the plaything of fortune—whether barber, water-carrier, pipe-seller, dervish, doctor's servant, sub-executioner, scribe and mollah, outcast, vender of pipe-sticks, Turkish merchant, or secretary to an ambassador—equally accepting her buffets and profiting by her caresses, never reluctant to lie or cheat or thieve, or get ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... country, four years before, Arabi pasha had revolted, and been crushed at Tel-el-Kebir, and a dervish in the Soudan, Mohammed Ahmed by name, had made himself famous by proclaiming himself mahdi, the expected prophet of the whole Mahometan world. Thousands flocked to the standard that he raised, and his armed ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... announced. He was a powerfully built man, displaying a physique of which a Roman gladiator might have been proud. His grizzled beard reached down to his waist, and his flowing black robes gave him the appearance of a dervish. Alexei enjoyed the reputation of being very devout, and the cloister of which he was the head was known as the most thoroughly religious in the Empire. To this man the future of the Jewish lad was ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... down to the foot of the cataract. The long, fantastic shadow moved across the grey sand. Scotty could hear the rider's voice urging the animal forward. As they came out into the open, the two figures were silhouetted against the pale sky; a splendid mark for a prowling Dervish, he reflected. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... the grievous assaults made upon it last night, Nicholas," observed Sir Ralph. "Perhaps you are not aware that your crowning act was whisking wildly round the room by yourself, like a frantic dervish." ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... saw the newcomers. He let out a squeal, dropped his line in the mud and bounced up to the surface, dancing like a dervish on his broad webbed feet as he stared in unabashed curiosity. A dozen more followed his lead, squirming up and staring, shaking gobs of ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... lively gentlemen and ladies in their Memoires. His story is told to point the old and dreary moral of the instability of human prosperity. It is, indeed, like a tale of the "Arabian Nights." The Dervish is made Grand Vizier. He marries the Sultan's daughter. His palace owes its magical beauty to the Genies. The pillars are of jasper, the bases and capitals of massive gold. The Sultan frowns, waves his hand, and the crowd, who kissed the favorite's slipper yesterday, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... course. "Your story is great," this note had read. "Keep it up." Trotter merely gave the scrawl a second hurried glance. It did not excite him; it did not intoxicate. He was already drunk with the wine of creation, as delirious as a whirling dervish. And he knew he still had ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... lakati 'l-Hilal shay misl al-Jinnah." [I have no doubt that "Kulah" is meant for "Kulah," a Dervish's cap. "Busah" puzzles me. I am inclined to take it for a reed used as a case or sheath, as we shall see p. 263 of the MS. Prince Yusuf uses a "Kasabah" or reed to enclose a letter in it. "Mi'lakat (popular ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... THE PRINCE. The dervish calls all life a pilgrimage, And that, a brief one. True!—Of two short spans This side of earth to two short spans below. I will recline upon the middle path. The man who bears his head erect today No later than tomorrow on his breast Bows it, all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... low, depraved parasite, the African black seemed quite a striking figure,—a scamp, if you like, yet full of character. He was a dervish, with drunken habits and a fierce nature when under the influence of drink, but with many good points when sober. On one occasion an Englishman was attacked by a crowd of Persians, and was in danger of losing ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Yard, Westminster, a small King's Scholar, waving his gown and yelling, collided with an old gentleman hobbling round the corner, and sat down suddenly in the gutter with a squeal, as a bagpipe collapses. The old gentleman rotated on one leg like a dervish, made an ineffectual stoop to clutch his gouty toe and wound up by bringing his rattan cane smartly down on ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... son, "Say, art thou indeed resolved to travel and wilt thou not turn back from it?" Quoth the other, "There is no help for it but that I journey to Baghdad with merchandise, else will I doff clothes and don dervish gear and fare a-wandering over the world." Shams al-Din rejoined, "I am no penniless pauper but have great plenty of wealth;" then he showed him all he owned of monies and stuffs and stock-in-trade and observed, "With me are stuffs and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... and the women saw next appeared to be the dance of a whirling dervish; as a matter of fact, it was merely a man, mad with delight, clasping two infants in long clothes and circling the room ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... breathing and balancing apparatus: a waltz, or a dive or a gallop may indeed be highly exciting, thanks to its resultant organic perturbations and its concomitants of overcome difficulty and danger, but even a dancing dervish's intoxicating rotations cannot afford him much of the specific interest of movement as movement. Yet every movement which we accomplish implies a change in our debit and credit of vital economy, a change in our balance of bodily and mental expenditure ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... composition, do that to me! So it is not for you to complain; your curses simply fly back to roost. Where do you pigeon-hole them? In a pie? (I mean to write now until I have made you as giddy as a dancing dervish!) Your letters are much more like blackbirds: and I have a pie of them here, twenty-four at least; and when I open it they sing "Chewee, chewee, chewee!" in ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... completely the external details that it went beyond them. It gave me the faculty of living the life of the individual over whom it obtained control, and allowed me to substitute myself for him like the dervish in Arabian Nights assumed the soul and the body of persons over whom he pronounced certain words." And he adds, after describing how he followed a workman and his wife along the street: "I could espouse ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... Once a dervish stopped a long while before the house of the English ambassador, and refused to go away. But a plan was thought of to make ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... influence in Abyssinia, owing largely no doubt to the conquest of the Sudan, the destruction of the dervish power and the result of the Fashoda incident, was sensibly on the increase. Of the remaining powers France occupied the most important position in the country. Ras Makonnen, the most capable and civilized of Menelek's probable successors, died in March 1906, and Mangasha died later in the same ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Dervish whirl, The Brahmin's rite, the Lama's spell; God knew the heart; Devotion's pearl ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... weeds!" shouted the incorrigible No. 5, jumping up from his seat and performing two or three Dervish-like turns. ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... exceedingly stubborn about choosing the direction in which he went. After numerous changes I came across an excellent syce to look after them. He was a wild, unkempt figure, with a long black beard—a dervish by profession, and certainly gave no one any reason to believe that he was more than half-witted. Indeed, almost all dervishes are in a greater or less degree insane; it is probably due to that that they have become dervishes, ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... had never met a people of a more peaceful temperament, and, on the other hand, none more easily frightened. A dread of the evil eye is one of their characteristics. We had not been settled long before the ishan, or itinerant dervish, was called in to drive away the evil spirits, which the "devil's carts" might possibly have brought. Immediately on entering, he began to shrug his shoulders, and to shiver as though passing into a state of trance. Our dervish acquaintance was a man of more than average intelligence. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... crushed against the gold braiding of his uniform. He was so tall, and his shoulders were so square, that she could not see over them, and to add to her discomfort, he danced, not as did the Italians, but round and round like a whirling dervish. Before they had gone ten yards she was so dizzy and uncomfortable ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... wheel, pinwheel, gear; roller; flywheel; jack; caster; centrifuge, ultracentrifuge, bench centrifuge, refrigerated centrifuge, gas centrifuge, microfuge; drill, augur, oil rig; wagon wheel, wheel, tire, tyre [Brit.]. [Science of rotary motion] trochilics^. [person who rotates] whirling dervish. V. rotate; roll along; revolve, spin; turn round; circumvolve^; circulate; gyre, gyrate, wheel, whirl, pirouette; twirl, trundle, troll, bowl. roll up, furl; wallow, welter; box the compass; spin like a top, spin like a teetotum^. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner-parties and miseries. How we can put up with those things, passes my imagination! It is a perfect bondage... I would sooner live 'like a Dervish with the Mahdi, than go out to dinner every night in London. I hope, if any English general comes to Khartoum, he will not ask me to dinner. Why men cannot be friends without bringing the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... to wilder exertions. A climax is reached when Drinkwater, let loose without a stain on his character for the second time, is rapt by belief in his star into an ecstasy in which, scorning all partnership, he becomes as it were a whirling dervish, and executes so miraculous a clog dance that the others gradually cease their slower antics to ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... love. Men who know history and humanity and have reasonably open minds are not surprised at the treatment visited upon Paine by the country he had so much benefited. Superstition and hallucination are really one thing, and fanaticism, which is mental obsession, easily becomes acute, and the whirling dervish runs amuck at sight of a man whose religious opinions ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... everything. Home-made rag mats covered the planed boards. At one end a screen of cheesecloth veiled off the corner. Sitting bolt upright on a low bench, and leaning against the partition, was a very aged-looking woman, staring fixedly in front of her, and swaying forwards and backwards like some whirling Dervish. She ceaselessly monotoned what was intended ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... you would have heard," he said. "Didn't Daisy know? He came back to us from Simla—got himself attached to the punitive expedition. I was on the sick list myself, so did not see him, but they say he fought like a dancing dervish, and did a lot of damage too. Every one thought he would have the V.C., but there was a rumour that he ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... about him an illusion of black and white; he moved his arm as though it were clad in the sleeve of a surplice. "I am not often denunciatory," he said, "but I denounce this weary going to and fro, this turning like a dervish, this finding that every straight line is but a fraction of a circle, this squirrel cage with the greenwood never reached, this interminable drama, this ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... so," grumbled the dervish. And, at a sign from him, the others again went and brought, as at the first time, purses of ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... the Bronco Kid. "I've known it for a long time, but I—I—well, you understand I couldn't let her know. All I can say is, I've gambled square till the night I played you, and I was as mad as a dervish then, blaming you for the talk I'd heard. Last night I learned by chance about Struve and Helen and got to the road-house in time to save her. I'm sorry I didn't kill him." His long white fingers writhed about the arm of ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... to every kind of ceremony, whether it was a circumcision, or a wedding, or a funeral, or a dervish dance, or anything that was going on; and we mixed with all classes, and religions, and races, and tongues. I remember my first invitation was to a grand fete to celebrate the circumcision of a youth about ten years of age. He was very pretty, and was dressed in gorgeous garments covered with jewellery. ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... in my Pilgrimage and described it (iii. 315). Some Orientalists derive Taylasan from Atlassatin, which is peculiarly inappropriate. The word is apparently barbarous and possibly Persian like Kalansuwah, the Dervish cap. "Thou son of a Taylasan"a barbarian. (De ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... in the other stream bed, certainly and without hazard, you could dig up little caskets, containing talismans which gave length of days and peace; and alabaster vases of precious balms, which were better than the Arabian Dervish's ointment, and made not only the eyes to see, but the mind to know, whatever it would—I wonder in which of the stream beds there would ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... the Brightest wanes; Who were she to reveal her perfect Beauty, The Sun and Moon would craze; Zuhrah," he said, "The Sweetness of the Banquet—none in Song Like Her—her Harp filling the Ear of Heaven, That Dervish-dances at her Harmony." Salaman listen'd, and inclin'd—again Repeated, Inclination ever grew; Until The Sage beholding in his Soul The Spirit quicken, so effectually With Zuhrah wrought, that she reveal'd herself In her pure Beauty to Salaman's Soul, And washing ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... striking with a club, or hurling a spear, and other acts. To such elements many other things have been added, but the fact remains that our own formal dances, as well as the sun-dance of the Indian and the mad whirl of the Dervish, are modern products ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... upon his transports with about the same amount of interest which she would have bestowed upon a whirling dervish ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... their triumph, and seeing how slight were the apparent defences of the town, they demanded clamorously to be led to the assault. Napoleon consented. Kleber, who was of gigantic stature, with a head of hair worthy of a German music-master or of a Soudan dervish, led his grenadiers to the edge of the breach and stood there, while with gesture and voice—a voice audible even above the fierce and sustained crackle of the musketry—he urged his men on. Napoleon, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... a good fellow by the suggestive name of Sunday who works the religious graft. Sunday is the whirling dervish up to date. He and Chapman and their cappers purposely avoid any trace of the ecclesiastic in their attire. They dress like drummers—trousers carefully creased, two watch-chains and a warm vest. Their manner is free and easy, their attitude ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Sikh-guarded courts. Long lines of yellow-robed priests will chant their last processional hymn to Buddha, and the smoking incense to waning gods shall be quenched forever. Where Tao rites were celebrated, silence shall fall; where fakir and dervish tortured and immolated their lives, happy children shall play. Instead of the lotos of the Ganges and the Nile, there shall bloom the Rose of Sharon and the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... picture as he ran, of an old crone, crazed by excitement, whirling like a dervish, rocking her skinny arms and twisting her neck into attitudes ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... American forces in Siberia and his chief bid for distinction was a noisy dislike for the Worker's & Peasants' Republic of Russia, and the I.W.W. which he termed the "American Bolsheviki". During the 1918 raid on the Centralia hall Grimm is said to have been dancing around "like a whirling dervish" and waving the American flag while the work of destruction was going on. Afterwards he became prominent in the American Legion and was the chief "cat's paw" for the lumber interests who were capitalizing the uniform to ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin |
