"Tortuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him, he found himself harking back more and more to his own kind. The reeking smells of the Chinese quarter were spicy to him. He sniffed them with satisfaction as he passed along the street, for in his mind they carried him back to the narrow tortuous alleys of Canton swarming with life and movement. He regretted that he had cut off his queue to please Stella Allendale in the prenuptial days, and he seriously considered the advisability of shaving his crown and growing a new one. The dishes his highly paid chef concocted ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... waiting and watching beside the burrows where scent was fresh, and where, notwithstanding the noises reaching her from above, she could readily distinguish the sounds of stretching, gliding bodies moving to the surface through the tortuous passages below. ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... him, he had set out to climb to the crater, vowing to show the flame-devil who was master. He had compelled the terrified Wadakimba to go with him a part of the way. The white tuan—was he really a god, as he declared himself to be?—had gone alone up the tortuous, fissured slopes, at times lost to sight in yellowish clouds of gas and steam, while his screams of vengeance came back to Wadakimba's ears. Overhead, Lakalatcha continued to rumble and quiver and clear his throat with great ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... gliding, The waters dividing, The indolent batteau moved slowly along, The rowers, light-hearted, From sorrow long parted, Beguiled the dull moments with laughter and song: "Hurrah for the Rapid! that merrily, merrily Gambols and leaps on its tortuous way; Soon we will enter it, cheerily, cheerily, Pleased with its freshness, ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... Vienna clogged the efforts of Morton Eden and Malmesbury to strengthen the Coalition against France. Eden complained that he behaved as an intriguing subaltern rather than as an ambassador; and rumour credibly ascribed his tortuous and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... they hiding him? Gall and wormwood! That he should slip through Boris Karlov's fingers, after all these tortuous windings across the world! Patience. Sooner or later the girl would lead the way. Still, patience was a galling hobble when he had so little time, when even now they might be hunting him. Boris Karlov had left New York rather ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... A.M. our muster was completed, and the party for the lower regions duly told off. As the carriage slowly crept down some of the steepest portions of the tortuous way, time and opportunities were afforded to steal a look under the cloudy canopy which the sun was quickly drawing upwards, and thus good assurance was afforded that the guide had ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine that forbid a passage south. Up through these the main road has been pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a mountain with ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the Divide in the Hahns Peak district, skirted Steamboat Springs on his way to Oak Creek. In his wanderings, he had panned the alluvium of many small streams and had recovered more than the usual amount of gold. Now he would work his way back home through the Middle Park and cross the tortuous windings of the Divide by the ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... the proper focus and might obtain the sun's altitude; whereby he had presently found our present position, the which he duly pricked upon the chart. He now showed me how, by standing out on direct course instead of following the tortuous windings of the coast, we could shorten our passage by very many miles. Hereupon we shaped our course accordingly and, the wind freshening somewhat, by afternoon the high coast had faded to a faint blur of distant mountain peaks, and by sunset ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the effect produced by a violent gale upon the tattered shreds of a shivered main-top-sail, bound up into the most tortuous knots that it is possible to conceive of, and so hard and solid that you might saw the canvas balls in slices like boards, may form some idea of the task the doctor had imposed upon himself to loosen the hide strands tied together by the furious fingers of the hurricane. Patiently ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... large and elegant mansion surrounded by trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, I found myself, after walking a few rods farther, in full view of the Merrimac. A deep and rocky channel stretched between me and the Dracut shore, along which rushed the shallow water,—a feeble, broken, and tortuous current, winding its way among splintered rocks, rising sharp and jagged in all directions. Drained above the falls by the canal, it resembled some mountain streamlet of old Spain, or some Arabian wady, exhausted by a year's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... night in a glowing sunset which was followed by a grand moon. The house was warm and clean and bright, with red curtains and open fires and everything was just as we had left it, so that it seemed as though we had just come out of a tortuous bad dream of asphalt and L. roads and bad air. I was never so glad to get away from ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... yet precisely what these were I could not say; my sense of them was indistinct. The city was dominated by a great castle upon an overlooking height whose name I knew, but could not speak. I walked through many streets, some broad and straight with high, modern buildings, some narrow, gloomy, and tortuous, between the gables of quaint old houses whose overhanging stories, elaborately ornamented with carvings in wood and stone, almost met ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... the proposal, and they accordingly proceeded to the cloisters of Saint George's Chapel, and threading some tortuous passages contrived among the canons' houses, passed through a small porch, guarded by a sentinel, and opening upon a precipitous and somewhat dangerous flight of steps, hewn out of the rock and leading ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... stood clear of the town at the end of a short but narrow and tortuous lane. This situation had tempted the burglars whom Seaton baffled; and now it ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... constitutionalism in 1867 the problem of the franchise became one of peculiar and increasing difficulty, and the process by which the Empire has been brought laboriously to its present condition of democracy has constituted one of the most tortuous chapters in recent political history. The conditions by which from the outset the problem was complicated were three in number: first, the large survival of self-assertiveness on the part of the various provinces among whom parliamentary representatives were to be distributed; second, the keenness ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... he had drifted to the south or the north, the east or the west; and, indeed, an intellect less obtuse than that of Tipperary Tom might have been puzzled upon the point. It has been already mentioned, that the Solimoes is so tortuous as to turn to every point of the compass in its slow course. The mere fact that the moon was shining at the time could be of little use to Tipperary Tom, whose astronomy had never extended beyond the knowledge that there was ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... hand at Grenoble could prove very useful. But of course I cannot possibly pretend to give you all the reasons which actuated M. de Talleyrand when he caused five and twenty millions of stolen money to be conveyed secretly to Grenoble rather than to Paris. His ways are more tortuous than any mere army-surgeon can possibly hope to gauge. Enough that he did it and that at this very moment there are five and twenty millions which are the rightful property of the Emperor locked up in the cellars of the Hotel de ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... That the tortuous channel of Wimbledon river be made straight, and the tyrant man be compelled to perform the labor ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... should admire the more: the simplicity of the multitude or the audacity of the adventurer. But such are the subtleties, such the quibbling reasons, with which he blinds and leads this people. How long a course so tortuous can be pursued with safety I am incapable of guessing; not long, one would suppose; and yet this singular man has been treading the mazes for five years, and his favour at court and his popularity among the lodges ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... began to appear and mark his course as favorable, at the very moment when the sun struck one end of the log, an eddy of the current struck the other, and sent the stanch little craft Good Luck and her captain by a wide curve back up the river. The backward journey was slow and tortuous, and twice when the Good Luck turned turtle, submerging Aladdin, he gave himself up for lost; but amidships of the island, fairly opposite to the spot where he had left Margaret, the log was again seized by the right current, and the voyage recommenced. But ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... Choulette lighted one of those long and tortuous Italian cigars, which are pierced with a straw. He drew from it several puffs of infectious vapor, then ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... the intake of the river. Along the tortuous course of that stream she knew a hundred hiding-places. The land trail followed the general direction of the river, but touched it only at one or ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... deliberation, turned into the path. Never before had he felt himself so completely the football of fortune. Destiny seemed to kick him here and there in no gentle manner, and to no purpose that he could fathom. As he stumbled through the blackness of the tortuous forest path, he tried to connect one thing with another, and find some meaning in the token that had brought him here. Evidently the sender was so far from being in league with his foes that he made a kind of contrary current, eddying him one way just when fate seemed to have ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... procession moved away. They came after a short journey to a natural opening leading to the heart of the plateau. The apes and gorillas, with the exception of the red leader, remained outside. The remainder of the party pushed through a tortuous tunnel until they reached a cavernous opening directly beneath the plateau. Vertical openings in the walls furnished light and air. The white chieftain spoke in a strange tongue to his followers, and they ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... and daisies. Tempered and secluded from the sun's rays by its lofty shadows, the delicious obscurity of the canyon was in sharp contrast to the fiery mountain trail that in the full glare of the noonday sky made its tortuous way down the hillside, like a stream of lava, to plunge suddenly into the valley and extinguish itself in its coolness as in a lake. The heavy odors of wild honeysuckle, syringa, and ceanothus that hung over it were lightened and freshened by the sharp spicing of pine and bay. The mountain ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... cool and refreshing from a branching tunnel in the rock. There was no lack of ventilation, as they well knew, throughout all the tortuous passages, but this came with a scent of outdoors that set both men a-tingle with hope. Jerry forgot even the dull ache in his arm as he breathed deep of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... all that was in the evening. Below me lay the white tortuous road leading downward to the shore in coils, and clothing the road, the many woods, all hoary white because the sharp sea-breeze had breathed on them. Evening had long since settled on the road and on the wintry trees; it lay ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... its depths. Continental Europe during these years passed through many convulsions. Bloody revolutions shook many states, and Prussia, Austria, Denmark, Turkey, and Italy were involved in wars. The hand that piloted England among the rocks of the tortuous channel of foreign politics for nearly a generation was that of Lord Palmerston, for nearly twenty years Foreign Secretary and twice Prime Minister ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... Valley to Johnson's position at West View; one through Harrisonburg; the second by Port Republic, Cross Keys, and Mount Sidney; the third, the river road, by Port Republic and Staunton. The first of these was already occupied by the Federals; the second was tortuous, and at places almost within view of the enemy's camps; while the third, though it was nowhere less than ten miles distant, ran obliquely across their front. In fact, to all appearance, Banks with his superior force blocked Jackson's march on ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... contemporary history compressed into the appearance of a pair of wheels engaged in their ordinary daily duty in the streets. It was in that central and crowded part of the city which is between the church of the Gesu and the Farnese palace, a labyrinth of tortuous streets and lanes, not often visited by foreigners unless when bent on some special expedition of sight-seeing. There are no sidewalks for foot-passengers in these streets. They are narrow, very tortuous and very crowded. Foot-passengers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... now a double line of communication with its base, yet the long haul from New Iberia and the scarcity of light-draught steamboats adapted to the navigation of the narrow and tortuous bayous made the task of supplying even the urgent wants of the troops both tedious and difficult. The herds near Opelousas were fast disappearing under the ravages of the foragers, authorized and unauthorized, yet had it not been for the beef obtained from this source ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... in the tortuous mountain road, both drew up sharply, with a gasp of astonishment. For a long time neither spoke, their bewildered minds struggling to comprehend the vast puzzle that confronted them. Even the fagged horse ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... side, and he resolved to persevere in his original intention. As for General Forey, whether his dullness of perception failed to grasp the true drift of his master's mind, or whether he was unable to steer his way through the tortuous policy which he was called upon to further, he seemed to regard his mission as fulfilled. After he had established the native provisional government, he complacently rested in the enjoyment of his new title of Marshal of France, apparently overlooking ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... vastly stronger, and for my own sake as well as yours I should abstain from any action against him. Mind, at present I have only vague suspicions, but if those suspicions turn out true, it will be evident that your father has been pursuing a very tortuous policy, to put it no stronger, in order to gain possession of Fairclose. I cannot say definitely as yet what I shall do, but at present I incline to the opinion that I shall ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... generosity? If you can speculate in the dying why exclude the dead? the principle would serve the same faith in Christianity. The heart that can purchase the dying must be full of sad coldness, dragging the woes and pains of mortality down to a tortuous death. Save us from the feelings of speculation,—call them Christian, if you will,—that makes man look upon a dying mortal, valuing but the dollars and cents that are passing away with his life," she interrupts, giving vent to ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... infinite annoyance. Though such a Patriarch might be deposed without any flagrant violation of the canonical formalities, the operation would necessarily be attended with great trouble and loss of time. Peter was no friend of roundabout, tortuous methods, and preferred to remove the difficulty in his usual thorough, violent fashion. When the Patriarch Adrian died, the customary short interregnum was prolonged for twenty years, and when the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... prevail and peace was to reign. But the outcome of this impracticable treaty was a five years' struggle between the Mohegan chieftain, Uncas, actively allied with the colony of Connecticut, and Miantonomo, sachem of the Narragansetts, which involved Connecticut in a tortuous and often dishonorable policy of attempting to divide the Indians in order to rule them—a policy which led to many embarrassing negotiations and bloody conflicts and ended in the murder of Miantonomo in 1643, by the Mohegans, at the instigation of the commissioners of the United Colonies. ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... secret intrigues, and the tactics of the 'gum-shoer' are discredited. The world wants none of them these days. It despises and loathes them. What the world asks are honest declarations openly proclaimed. The statesman who seeks to gain his end by tortuous and underground ways is foolish or badly advised. The public man who is sly and secretive rather than frank and bold, whose methods are devious rather than obvious, pursues a dangerous path which leads neither to ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... Guimic roared white between its tortuous shores, some of the loud-mouthed men did go away. Nevertheless, the big cat's rage waxed hotter than ever. Far worse than the men who went were three portable steam sawmills which came in their place. At three separate points ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... long before I espied him descending the Gusedub by that tortuous path, marking so strongly the character of a Scottish glen. He was easily distinguished, indeed, at some distance, by his jaunty swagger, in which he presented to you the flat of his leg, like the manly knave of clubs, apparently with the most perfect contentment, not only with his leg and boot, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... expression of the whole town. How much is suggested by the well-known, familiar cathedral spire at Antwerp, as, of some fresh morning, we come winding up the tortuous Scheldt, the sad, low-lying plains and boulders lying on either hand, monotonous and dispiriting, yet novel in their way; the cream-coloured, lace-worked spire rising ever before us in all its elegant grace, pointing the way, growing by degrees, never for an instant out of sight. It seems ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... pots and old tins, together with the presence of women and children, introduce a rustic and farmlike element, and it is always a matter of wonder to me how these floating curiosity shops are able to thread their ways unaided through tortuous channels and crowded shipping out to sea, and when once there, why they do not succumb to the first rough weather ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... been left behind and he turned at the forking beneath a big birch bluff that he tightened his grip on the bridle. There it was different, for the trail no longer led wide and trampled hard across the level prairie, but wound, an almost invisible riband, through tortuous hollow and over swelling rise, so narrow that in places the hoofs broke with a sharp crackling through the frozen crust of snow. That, Larry knew, might, by crippling the beast he rode, stop him then and there, and he pushed on warily, dazzled at times ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... and for the last mile actually dangerous, as it passed along the edge of a deep precipice, and was only a foot wide and considerably out of the horizontal, so that a single false step would have been fatal. Road continued same character all the way along, though much above the tortuous and noisy Jhelum, and its ups and downs were the roughest, longest, and most trying, I have yet experienced. I am pleased to know that the remaining two marches will be, in the words of my Coolies over "uch'-cha ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... to which he had assigned me—my life might have run its course in another channel. Now, as I look back, it seems as though my story became entangled with my line in that overhanging branch, as though there I picked up the strong, holding thread of it, and followed its tortuous ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... was carried out in a ghostly manner, in order, without a whisper, without a sound, through forests, ravines, and valleys. A tortuous and ill-omened march. A stealthy gliding onwards ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... does not amount to more than two or three degrees. Captain Wickham and the surgeon visited an inlet near the ship to-day, which had indeed been looked into, but not explored before. They proceeded to the south-west for about three miles, through a very tortuous channel, dry in many parts at low-water, thickly studded with mangrove bushes, over and through which the tide made its way at high-water, giving to that part of the country the appearance of an extensive morass. A slightly elevated table-topped range of land was seen from time ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... upheaval of defiant hills which were, if possible, more desolate and weird than any we had seen, we gained the boundary of California and gazed upon the Colorado River. It is a stream whose history thrilled me as I remembered how in its long and tortuous course of more than a thousand miles to this point it had laboriously cut its way through countless desert canons, and I felt glad to see it here at last, sweeping along in tranquil majesty as if aware that all its struggles were now ended, and peace and victory had ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... having to follow at the same moment two quite different impulses, is necessarily always in a zigzag or a curve. That is to say that at every erotic moment her action is the resultant of the combined force of her desire (conscious or unconscious) and her modesty. She must sail through a tortuous channel with Scylla on the one side and Charybdis on the other, and to avoid either danger too anxiously may mean risking shipwreck on the other side. She must be impenetrable to all the world, but it must be an ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... through which such a sea was running. Indeed, Hozier himself, sailor as he was, felt more than doubtful as to the fate of their argosy. But Marcel paddled ahead with unflagging energy once he was clear of the tortuous passage, and, before the catamaran had traveled many yards, even Iris was able to understand that the outlying ridge of rocks both protected their present track and created much ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... Small, the keeper, if there were any signs of fish alongshore. The pull was a long one, but I enjoyed every stroke of it. The tide was almost full, just beginning to ebb, so there was scarcely any current and I could make a straight cut across, instead of following the tortuous channel. My skiff was a flat bottomed affair, drawing very little, but in Denboro bay, at low tide, even a flat-bottomed skiff has to ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... or hurricane deck (as it is called) was very attractive. Flowing, as the river Hudson does, through a fine mountainous country, the magnificent scenery on the banks strikes the observer with feelings allied to awe. The stream being broad and tortuous, beetling crags, high mountains and bluffs, and dense forests, burst suddenly and unexpectedly into view; fearful precipices abound here and there, amidst luxuriant groves and uncouth pine barrens, forming altogether a diversity that gives the whole ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... invited to enter the inhospitable gates. In half an hour they were wending their way down the north side of the peak by gradually declining roads, headed for the much-talked-of home of the Witch in Ganlook Gap, some six miles from Edelweiss as the crow flies, but twice that distance over the tortuous bridle paths ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... tortuous, extending in a general direction south nine miles. No events occurred worthy of any remark during our examination, except one of a trifling character: the mosquitoes taking advantage of the calm, between the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... at Chazy Junction. The foothills were sparsely settled and the inhabitants too humble to be attractive to gentlemen of the road, while the rocky highways, tortuous and uneven, offered no invitation ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... Pass (2,700 feet) was reached in about four hours, and now the deep blue Adria was spread out before us, and our tortuous descent commenced. Commanding the pass still stands a mighty but much-battered fortress, taken by the gallant Montenegrins in that memorable battle. But nowhere could the historical old town and fortress of Bar, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... lagoons, with shelving and verdant shores, studded with white stone buildings, and well cultivated plantations, and then the passage would narrow again suddenly, and the masses of rock rose so high on each side of us, as almost to exclude the light of the day. The way was tortuous, but not abruptly so; and, as we wound through it, ever and anon we came to some picturesque inlet, some cool grotto, so beautiful that its very beauty must have peopled it with nymphs, for none could look ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles—Las Tours, the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was the way from France into Provence so that the silver grey olive leaves appeared like hair flying in ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... than a just tribute to commerce, when she accords to that agency important civilizing influences; yet it must be admitted that it has frequently pursued a tortuous course, has often been unscrupulous in the means that it has employed, and has not always been reciprocal in its advantages. Like religion, it has been used as an opening wedge to conquest. As the establishment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Yang-tse by a long and tortuous passage through which the "Great River" rushes with a force and a roar like the cataracts of the Rhine, only on a vastly greater scale. In some bygone age volcanic forces tore asunder a mountain range, and the waters of the great stream ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... seedlings, the probable nature of the fruit; for, as Van Mons remarks,[828] variations in the leaves are generally accompanied by some modification in the flower, and consequently in the fruit. In the Serpent melon, which has a narrow tortuous fruit above a yard in length, the stem of the plant, the peduncle of the female flower, and the middle lobe of the leaf, are all elongated in a remarkable manner. On the other hand, several varieties of Cucurbita, which have dwarfed stems, all produce, as Naudin remarks with surprise, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... revealed with unerring truth, as suffering under a cruel malady, strangely diverse in its operations, but all tending to the downward, dark, dreary road to misery temporal and eternal: but it also displays the antidote; an infallible remedy against all the subtilties of this tortuous disease. Reader, this treasure is in our hands. How great is the responsibility. How blessed are those who with earnest prayer for divine illumination read ponder and relying upon the aid of the Holy Spirit, understand and instantly obey the sacred precepts which its pages unfold. Weigh well their ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... through the streets, to see her face as she sat in the dim old cathedral; that softened, tremulous face, of which he had caught a glimpse once before, the memory of which lived with him still. When the service was over, he wanted to be her guide, to climb with her the tortuous staircase, and look down on the ant-like figures in the streets below; to descend with her to the subterranean vaults. ... He, Rupert Guest, wished to visit Saint Paul's on a grilling June afternoon, in preference to attending a fashionable rendezvous—what ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... tortuous paths, and the carved stone benches of the open garden gave place to rustic seats, and swings suspended from ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... human in any living animal. All nature, the universe as far as we see, is anti- or ultra-human, outside, and has no concern with man. These things are unnatural to him. By no course of reasoning, however tortuous, can nature and the universe be fitted to the mind. Nor can the mind be fitted to the cosmos. My mind cannot be twisted to it; I am separate altogether from these designless things. The soul cannot be wrested down ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... thinking now of the reddest chapter in the Indian wars of the Western plains. Out amid the dirge of landscape, framed within the valley of the Little Big Horn, where that historic river winds its tortuous way through the sagebrush and cactus of Montana, a weather-beaten cross stands on a lonely hillside, surrounded by a cluster of white marble slabs, and all marking the final resting-place of the heroes of the Seventh United States Cavalry, who perished to a man, "in battle ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... turns, brought the three into a black no-thoroughfare of a hall, whose further end was closed by a locked door. The girl here rubbed a brimstone abomination of a match into a mal-odorous green glow, and by its help the old man got a tortuous key into the snaky opening in the great lock, creakily shot back its bolt, swung open the door, and motioned ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... left La Union at dawn on the 15th of April. We found that the river enters the bay by a number of channels, through low grounds covered with mangrove-trees. It was at half-tide, and we experienced no difficulty in entering. Our course at first was tortuous, and it seemed as if the river had lost itself in a labyrinth of channels, and we were ourselves much confused with regard to our true direction. Keeping, however, in the strongest current, at the end of half an hour we penetrated beyond ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... inspection of that which was merely damp, revealed the fact that but one person could be made comfortable to-night. Our bachelor Doctor volunteered to be that one. So we bade him God-speed, and with toilet bag in hand I led my little family up a tortuous path, so slippery in the rain that we were obliged in our muddy climb to cling to grass-clumps and bushes. And thus, wet and bedraggled, did we sally forth upon the Ironton Bottom, seeking ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... answered Commines, as gravely as if his master's tortuous road to the consolidation of the kingdom had not been strewn with ruptured contracts, unscrupulous chicanery, and solemn pledges brazenly evaded. "But how am I to act? How can I, in the dark, parry a blow from ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the thunder-storm of the 24th extended very little to the north and north-west, having passed over from west to east. From time to time we crossed low ridges covered with scrub, and cut through by deep gullies, stretching towards the river, which became narrower and very tortuous in its course; its line of flooded-gum trees, however, became more dense. Within the reedy bed of the river, not quite five miles from the camp, we found wells of the natives, not a foot deep, but amply supplied with water, and, at four miles farther, we came to a ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... because they now turned from the broad highway into a narrower road, on which they traveled for a long time in silence on account of its tortuous course, and because in some places the snow formed drifts difficult to traverse. In the spring or summer, on rainy days, this road ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... a northern slope about Moamba's, lat. 10 deg. 10' S., but the streams are very tortuous, and the people have very confused ideas as to where they run. The Lokhopa, for instance, was asserted by all the men at Moamba's to flow into Lokholu, and then into a river going to Liemba, but a young wife of Moamba, who seemed very intelligent, maintained ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... on bravely for a good half-hour. More witnesses were called; each answered with wonderful aptness, ease, and clearness; none were confused or timid; these were not men to be the playthings of others who made tortuous cross-questionings their trade. They, also, were Frenchmen; they knew how to speak. The judge and the Coutances lawyer continued their jokes and their squabblings. And still only the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... intermediate state of sinning manhood; and though his nature told him that he was not of the temper that attains sanctity all at once, he felt that he owed to his mother's hopes for him a sort of loyalty in which Aurora had made him fail. The reasonings of innocent sentiment are more tortuous than the wiles of the devil himself, and have amazing power to torment the unfledged conscience of a ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... four miles away on our right front emerged a long black line with white spots. It was the enemy. It seemed to us, as we looked, that there might be 3,000 men behind a high dense zeriba of thorn-bushes. That, said the officers, was better than nothing. It is scarcely necessary to describe our tortuous movements towards the Dervish position. Looking at it now from one point of view, now from another, but always edging nearer, the cavalry slowly approached, and halted in the plain about three miles away—three great serpents of men—the light-coloured one, the 21st Lancers; a ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... It was a tortuous path and one in which the old man himself, knowing, as he thought he did, every foot of the country around, could easily have been lost. Above, through the trees, the moon shone dimly, and no path could be seen under foot. But Jack Bracken slouched heavily along, in a wabbling, awkward ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... that one should be chosen who is frank and good-natured, and congenial in his sentiments; one, in fact, who is influenced by the same motives, all of which qualities have a tendency to create sincerity. For it is impossible for a wily and tortuous disposition to be sincere. Nor in truth can the man who has no sympathy from nature, and who is not moved by the same considerations, be either attached or steady. To the same requisites must be added that he shall neither take delight ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... explore the now narrowing valley, following the stream over steep rocks and fallen trees, and pushing through tangled undergrowth and among briers and bushes and around slippery banks until they came to another tortuous turn, where a second spring, welling up from under a flat, overhanging rock, tumbled down to augment the supply for the future lake; and here they stopped and had a drink of the cool, delicious water, Sam making the girl a cup from a huge leaf which she said made ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... the afternoon, when the flicker and shine of many lamps in little shop windows brightened the tortuous streets, a man clad in tarpaulins, and carrying a big canvas bag on his back, passed rapidly through the village. He had come that day from London upon the paying off of his vessel; and while he left his two chests at the railway ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... upon the shore, and in twenty-four hours was so repaired as to enable them to continue their journey. As they entered more southern latitudes the floating ice disappeared, and the voyage became more pleasant, as they rapidly floated down the tortuous stream, by forests and headlands, and every variety of wild, sublime, and beautiful scenery, until they reached New Orleans, on ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... secret of the human heart, however studiously concealed, that she could not discover; no workings in the listener's mind that she would not penetrate; no intrigue, from the low cunning of vulgar intrigue to the vast combinations of politics, that she would not unravel; no labyrinth, however tortuous, that she would not thread. It was this comprehensive and searching faculty, this intuitive penetration, which made her so formidable; for under imaginary names, when she wished to show a person that his character and course of life were ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... built in 1683. William Pitt came to live here in 1801. St. James's Place is a medley of old and modern buildings, some having been built in the last decade. Wheatley speaks of it because of its tortuous course, as "one of the oddest built streets in London." Wilkes and Addison, and Mrs. Delaney, at whose house Miss Burney stayed, have been among the residents. Samuel Rogers lived for fifty years at No. 22, which looked ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... his horse, oversweet with its warm, fragrant breath, gray where it waved to the light, darker where the wind left it still, and beyond the wonderful haze-purple lent by distance. Far across that wide waste began the slow lift of uplands through which Deception Pass cut its tortuous ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... the trail. After a short distance a body had been dragged evidently. Roleau led the way through a tortuous path until they came in sight of a small vacant spot where sometime Indians had camped, as they could tell by the scorched and blackened trees. A nearly nude body had been fastened to one and a few dead branches ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... hospitably spread the board For her regale, while with my best dispatch I lay my bellows and my tools aside. He spake, and vast in bulk and hot with toil 505 Rose limping from beside his anvil-stock Upborne, with pain on legs tortuous and weak. First, from the forge dislodged he thrust apart His bellows, and his tools collecting all Bestow'd them, careful, in a silver chest, 510 Then all around with a wet sponge he wiped His visage, and his ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... her by the shoulders; but all without succeeding in making her show any sign of consciousness. He then tied a handkerchief over her eyes; and, leaving the stage, went about through the room, touching people here and there as he went, pursuing a most tortuous course, and ended at last by placing his hand upon Aunt Phoebe's diamond necklace. He then bowed to the Professor to intimate that we were ready to see the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... A tortuous double iron track; a station here, a station there; A locomotive, tender, tanks; a coach with stiff reclining chair; Some postal cars, and baggage, too; a vestibule of patent make; With buffers, duffers, switches, and the soughing automatic brake— This is the Orient's ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... castle, the barracks, the Saxon gardens, watched the winding river Vistula and the Praga suburb beyond, and did not fail to spy out the old town, lying beneath the guns of the fortress, a maze of red roofs and tortuous streets and alleys wherein the outcasts were hiding. To this latter he turned by some good instinct which seemed to say that he had an errand there. And here little Lois Boriskoff touched him upon the shoulder and bade him follow her—just as imagination had told him would be the ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... had thought her eyes held something just for me that night. She had not seen Beverly at the chapel beside the San Christobal River, and to me she had not given even a parting glance when she went away. If she had cared for me at all she would not have left me so. And I had climbed the tortuous trail with her and stood beside her in the zone of sanctuary safety that Father Josef had ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... a ship, by skilful steersman wrought Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the wind Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail,— So varied he, and of his tortuous train Curl'd many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... termed flexuose stems the stem twists alternately to one side or another, frequently in association with an oblique form of the leaf. This state is sometimes present to an extreme degree, as in some varieties of shrubs (Crataegus, Robinia, &c.) cultivated for their singularly tortuous branches. ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... the summit should be clear—water-courses here and there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks. Towards afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the range comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge, tortuous buttresses standing edged with sun. At all hours of the day they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my orders on setting out from Winchester—the alternative return to that place—was not touched upon, for the wisdom of having ignored that was fully apparent. Commenting on this recital of my doings, the General referred only to the tortuous course of my march from Waynesboro' down, our sore trials, and the valuable services of the scouts who had brought him tidings of me, closing with the remark that it was, rare a department commander voluntarily deprived himself of independence, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... they ascended a deep and tortuous river where the snow lay thick and soft. One man on snow-shoes broke trail for the dogs till they reached the foothills. It was hard work, but infinitely preferable to that which followed, for now they came into a dangerous stretch of overflows. The stream, ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... twilight shades grew dark; And read and read in the Arabian Nights, Till all the beautiful grew possible; And then when I had read them every one, To find behind the door, against the wall, Old volumes, full of tales, such as in dreams One finds in bookshops strange, in tortuous streets; Beside me, over me, soul of the place, Filling the gloom with calm delirium, That wondrous woman-statue evermore, White, radiant; fading, as the darkness grew, Into a ghostly pallour, that put on, To staring eyes, a vague and ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... prepared in advance by the agents of the King, and were only subscribed to and sealed by the assistants—were addressed, not to the Pope, but to the college of cardinals. The despatch of the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and unreasonable enterprises of him who, at present, is at the seat and government of the Church, and declares that neither the nobility nor the universities nor the people require correction or imposition of any trouble, whether by the authority of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... which Jones had played a part, Catherine said, with a different accent: "Ce Paul Jones etait une bien mauvaise tete." Certainly Jones's diplomacy, which was of a direct character, was not equal to his present situation, unfamiliar to him, and for success demanding conduct tortuous and insincere to an Oriental degree. Jones, in comparison with his associates in Russia, was remarkably truthful,—a trait which involved him in humiliating difficulties, and which was a source of irritation to the empress ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... Translated by Jacob S. Fassett, Jr. $2.00 net. Around Cordova, the fascinating and romantic "city of the discreet," Baroja has spun an adventurous tale. He gives you a vivid picture of the city with her tortuous streets, ancient houses with their patios and tiled roofs and of her "discreet" inhabitants. In a style that is polished where Ibanez' is crudely vigorous, and with sympathy and understanding, he portrays Quentin, the natural son of a Marquis and a woman of humble birth; Pacheco, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... about for an acquaintance who manufactured chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard classmate, in the dyeing business—just the man. But at the last moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course. Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... With the keen intelligence of the wounded wild ruminant, he chose the line of least resistance, and on three legs fled downhill. He went on down, and kept going, until he reached the bottom of the biggest and most tortuous coulee in his neighborhood. And then what? Instead of coming to rest in a reposeful little valley a hundred feet wide, he chose the most rugged branch he could find, the one with the steepest and highest banks, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... wild and lovely tangles of foliage and flower which Nature and her subject man succeed in working out together after considerable conflict and argument, one of the most beautiful and luxuriant is a Somersetshire lane. Narrow and tortuous, fortified on either side with high banks of rough turf, topped by garlands of climbing wild-rose, bunches of corn-cockles and tufts of meadow-sweet, such a lane in midsummer is one of beauty's ways through the world,—a path, which if it lead ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... the year 1267, says the continuator of Matthew Paris, a soldier by the name of Adam Gordon, who had lost his estates with other adherents of Simon de Montfort, and refused to seek the mercy of the king, established himself with others in like circumstances near a woody and tortuous road between the village of Wilton and the castle of Farnham, from which position he made forays into the country round about, directing his attacks especially against those who were of the king's party. Prince Edward had heard much of the prowess ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... same idea in two or three English words, if not one; there is a perpetual clumsiness in his construction of common sentences and his use of common words. Clarendon himself is not harder or more tortuous. Even in purely narrative parts, which ought to flow most easily, the understanding of the reader can seldom keep pace with his eye. Cyclopean epithets are piled together almost at random on any substantive which will ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise to reach a designated [spot], even if it were needed to pass under a trench or ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... southern slopes of the mountain on the old pretext of shooting for the pot. Hans accompanied me on these occasions, but was, I noted, very silent and thoughtful, as though he were hunting something up and down his tortuous intelligence. Once we got quite near to the mouth of the cave or tunnel where poor Savage had met his horrid end. As we stood studying it a white-robed man whose head was shaved, which made me think he must be a priest, came up and asked me mockingly why we did not go through ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... As she shrank, the broad moon in its third quarter crept into view over the rim of her disc. I looked for the constellations. Only that part of Aries directly behind the sun and the Lion, which the earth covered, were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky Way with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great Bear hung over the circle of the earth. And ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... building on the principal street of the city, with the battery-room in the rear; behind which was the office of the agent of the Associated Press. The plastering was about one-third gone from the ceiling. A small stove, used occasionally in the winter, was connected to the chimney by a tortuous pipe. The office was never cleaned. The switchboard for manipulating the wires was about thirty-four inches square. The brass connections on it were black with age and with the arcing effects of lightning, which, to young Edison, seemed particularly partial to Louisville. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of union, with them as with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noble families in Italy, prevented their founding a substantial dynasty. Their power, based on force, was maintained by craft and crime, and transmitted through tortuous channels by intrigue. While false in their dealings with the world at large, they were diabolical in the perfidy with which they treated one another. No feudal custom, no standard of hereditary right, ruled the succession in their family. Therefore ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... unaccompanied with exalted virtue, can never constitute greatness. In whatever position placed, or whatever inducements persuade, virtue and a conscientious conviction of right must regulate the mind and conduct of man to make him great. The tortuous course of politics, made so by unprincipled men, renders the truly upright man usually a poor politician. He who possesses the capacity to discern the true interests of a country, and who will virtuously labor to secure and promote those interests, defying opposition and fearlessly braving ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Tortuous little streets lead through the town of Coucy into a great green space which commands the castle. It is approached from the new and rather pretentious lodge in which the keeper of the castle now resides, through one of the finest and loftiest avenues in France. But the tallest ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... other's lord, And like a tyrant he demean'd himself, Laid forced exactions on his fellow's purse; And when that poor means fail'd, held o'er his head Threats of impending death in hideous forms; Till the small culprit on his nightly couch Dream'd of strange pains, and felt his body writhe In tortuous ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb |
