"Arid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence "heart-rending groans" and saw "anguished claspings of hands" as he lost his way among their arid intricacies. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... like a large lake below—it was tame in the extreme; the land dropped gently to scarcely more than half its depth, with barely a tree visible on its surface; and at the foot of the hill, stretched out as far as the eye could reach, was a howling, blank-looking desert, all hot and arid, and very wretched to look upon. It was the more disappointing, as the Somali had pictured this to me as a land of promise, literally flowing with milk and honey, where, they said, I should see boundless prairies of grass, large ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... should not be able to drag it within their walls, "for," said he, "if the men of Troy do any injury to the gift, evil will come upon the kingdom of Priam, but if they bring it into their city, all Asia will make war against Greece, arid on our children will come the destruction which we ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... where Gary lay—he had not yet been to that spot—and, dismounting, picked up Pete's rope. He glanced at Gary, shivered, and swung to his horse. Riding so that his trail would be easy to read he set off toward the open country, east. The fact that he had no food with him, and that the country was arid and that water was scarce, did not trouble him. All he hoped for was to delay or mislead the posse long enough to enable Pete to reach the southern desert. There Pete might have one chance in twenty ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... contains an area of 5306 sq. m. The district is a long narrow strip of country, 198 m. in length, sloping gradually from the hills which form its western boundary to the river Indus on the east. Below the hills the country is high and arid, generally level, but sometimes rolling in sandy undulations, and much intersected by hill torrents, 201 in number. With the exceptions of two, these streams dry up after the rains, and their influence is only felt for a few miles below the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... melodious with the music of birds, and saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last golden beams of the sun, whose setting rays awoke the humming beetles from their grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around directed my attention to the ground, and I there observed the arid rock compelled to yield nutriment to the dry moss, whilst the heath flourished upon the barren sands below me, all this displayed to me the inner warmth which animates all nature, and filled and glowed within my heart. I felt myself ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... suggestive of conjugal rights and duties. As for the suppers, the trail of the Neapolitan serpent is over them all. Honest eating is a lost art among the effete denizens of the Old World. Tantalizing ices, crisped shapes of baked nothing, arid sandwiches, and the feeblest of sugary punch, are the only supports exhausted nature receives for the shock of the cotillon. I remember the stern reply of a friend of mine when I asked him to go with me to a brilliant reception,—"No! Man liveth not by biscuit-glace ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Algeria arid to semiarid; mild, wet winters with hot, dry summers along coast; drier with cold winters and hot summers on high plateau; sirocco is a hot, dust/sand-laden wind especially ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... we were ordered to go to M———, and at 12.15 we were in convoy formation in the road by the barracks wall. The great route nationale from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun runs through a rolling, buff-brown moorland, poor in villages and arid and desolate in aspect. Now it sinks through moorland valleys, now it cuts bowl-shaped depressions in which the spring rains have bred green quagmires, and now, rising, leaps the crest of a hill commanding a ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... extent, which forms the highest peak in the Cheviot range. It has been described by Dr Teall as an augite-biotite-granite having strong affinities with the augite-bearing granitites of Laveline and Oberbruck in the Vosges. Both the granite and the surrounding lavas are traversed by dykes arid sills of intermediate and acid types represented ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... is not an absurdity in certain parts of Western United States. In Professor Ordahl's tests at Reno, Nevada, many children whose intelligence was altogether above suspicion gave this reply. The statement is, indeed, perfectly true for the semi-arid region in the vicinity of Reno known as "the desert." On the other hand, such sentences as "The desert is full of rivers and lakes," or "There are forty rivers and lakes in the desert," can hardly be considered satisfactory. Similar difficulties ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... stimulation of towns from undue lethargy; but, hitherto, it had not been famed as a stronghold of aesthetics. Lonny Briscoe's brush had removed that disability. Here, among the limestone rocks, the succulent cactus, and the drought-parched grass of that arid valley, had been born the Boy Artist. Why he came to woo art is beyond postulation. Beyond doubt, some spore of the afflatus must have sprung up within him in spite of the desert soil of San Saba. The tricksy spirit of creation must have incited him to attempted expression and ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... through the arid plain that had stretched before us yesterday. Few trees punctuated the sad song of its monotony; but always in the distance rose yellow hills like lions crouched asleep, lights and shadows sailing above their heads with ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... other side of the desert; and in another sense it is literally the other side. It is the other shore of that shifting and arid sea. Looking at it from the West and considering mainly the case of the Moslem, we feel the desert is but a barren border-land of Christendom; but seen from the other side it is the barrier between us and a heathendom far more ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... is very charming and satisfying. Its local descriptions of the wild and arid region of Corindah and pictures of Australian farm and domestic life are peculiarly ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... course of physical evolution, many important functions have undergone remarkable changes, and organs, once active and useful, have become stunted, impotent, and in some cases extinct; yet it is said that seeds have lain dormant in arid soil for hundreds of years, to spring into leaf and flower as soon as the rains have fallen and the climate changed. The faculty of pure vision is like the latent seed-life. It waits only the conditions which favour its growth and development; and though for hundreds of years it ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... embracing the flower of the infantry and all the cavalry, higher up towards the mountain-range, concealed by the bushes. On debouching from the mountains, the Romans saw the enemy in a position completely commanding their right flank; and, as they could not possibly remain on the bare and arid crest of the chain and were under the necessity of reaching the river, they had to solve the difficult problem of gaining the stream through the entirely open plain of eighteen miles in breadth, under the eyes of the enemy's horsemen and without light cavalry of their own. Metellus ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... wealth of arabesques and flowing traceries in white marble inlaid upon red stone; the Tomb of Altamsh; the Mosque of Koutab,—all these, lying in a singular oasis of trees and greenery that forms a unique spot in the arid and stony ruin-plain of Delhi, drew me with great power. I declared to Bhima Gandharva that it was not often in a lifetime that we could get so many centuries together to talk with at once, and wrought upon him to spend several days with me, unattended ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... subjecting a vast region to the most rigorous and least generous conditions possible, leaving it unshielded alike from Polar winds in winter or scorching heat in summer, divesting it of beauty and of charm, and then casting this arid, frigid, torpid land to a branch of the human family as unique as its own habitation; separating it by natural and almost impassable barriers from civilizing influences, and in strange isolation leaving it to work out its own problem ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... means of irrigation, the farmer has control of his water supply and is able to get larger returns than are possible where he depends upon the irregular and uncertain rainfall. It is estimated that in the arid regions of western United States there are 150,000 square miles of land which may be made available for agriculture by irrigation. Perhaps in the future the valley of the lower Colorado may become as productive ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... placed it in a low cup with a long snout like a locomotive oil can, designed to poke in out-of-the-way places. With this device she was able to get through my beard and find my mouth. As she gently tipped it, the goodly nectar trickled upon my desert tongue, to be quickly evaporated in that arid area before it reached far along the parched wastes. I wanted to swim in it, but these hospitals provide poor entertainment ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... the Tom, a little affluent of the Obi, which passes near Tomsk before losing itself in one of the great northern arteries. There water would have been abundant, the steppe less arid, the heat less severe. But the strictest orders had been given to the commanders of the convoy to reach Tomsk by the shortest way, for the Emir was much afraid of being taken in the flank and cut off by some Russian column descending from ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... also indorsed Secretary Lane's plan for the "Reclamation of arid, swamp, and cut-over timber lands." The resolution to that effect ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... spirit of economical husbandry which redeemed the rocky sierra from the curse of sterility, they dug below the arid soil of the valleys, and sought for a stratum where some natural moisture might be found. These excavations, called by the Spaniards hoyas, or "pits," were made on a great scale, comprehending frequently ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... look his usual hatred. A vision of countless rifles blinded his eyes. Every face in the audience, far as he could see, to the high dollar-seats, was transformed into a rifle. And he saw the long Mexican border arid and sun-washed and aching, and along it he saw the ragged bands that ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... Their conversations, interests, shallow mental attitude to life, bored her. That curious brief period of mental rejuvenescence had been due to the novelty and excitement of being in love again, after long and arid years. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... blossom of pure affection bloomed in the arid desert of Tommy's existence for all that. In the preceding fall a new family had come to Arundel and moved into the tiny house next to the Puffers'. It was a small, dingy house, just like the others, but before ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... dozen miles without crossing some stream with timber upon it, which they could see a long way off, and thus guide themselves to the water; but they little understood the nature of the country that was now before them. They knew not that they were entering upon the desert plains— those vast arid steppes that slope up to the foots of the Rocky Mountains—the ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... talent for sustaining and enlivening a conversation; there is something in that, I admit, but to do her justice, I must say that in this respect Madame de Maintenon is without a rival. She has quite a wealth of invention; the most arid subject in her hands becomes attractive; while for transitions, her skill is unequalled. Far simpler than myself, she gauges her whole audience with a single glance. And as, since her misfortunes, her rule has been never to make an enemy, since these easily crop up along one's ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and extravagant Anticipations. The mind may easily be allowed so to dwell on its scenes, that imagination shall take the place of reality. Circumstances often warrant but moderate expectations; yet amid the most arid waste you see, like the deceived traveller in the deserts of Zahara, the enchanting mirage, a beautiful lake of ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... atmosphere of his father's sterling industry was the best of Archie's education. Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted and depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant in ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... place. This has altered domestic architecture; it has changed the landscape, denuding the hill-sides that were once covered with timber; it has impoverished the country by converting fruitful plains into marshes or arid tracts of stone swept by irregular and intermittent floods; it has modified, if I mistake not, the very character of the people. The desiccation of the climate has entailed a ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... right the shadows were beginning to steal into the chasm. Towering on our left the great stratified wall caught at the top of the glow of the low sun in a rich, tawny tint, right under the dark blue strip of sky, that seemed to reflect the gloom of the ravine, the sepulchral arid gloom of deep shadows and gray rocks, through which the shallow torrent dashed violently with glassy gleams between the sombre masses ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... morning found us on the road right early. Our route lay over a high, arid plain covered, as far as the eye could see, with a prairie-dog town, and for hours my ears were ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... no warning whatever, be taken into the heart of Maine; let him land there a stranger and a partial orphan, with no knowledge of the underground methods of securing a drink, and to him the world seems very gloomy, very sad, and extremely arid. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... held up his train, and seemed to be somewhat longer than my middle finger; the other two stood one on each side to support him. He acted every part of an orator, and I could observe many periods of threatenings, and others of promises, pity, arid kindness. I answered in a few words, but in the most submissive manner, lifting up my left hand and both my eyes to the sun, as calling him for a witness; and, being almost famished with hunger, having not ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... these methods, upon the whole, but poorly adapted to the wants of our native grapes, however judicious they may be there. I will only mention a few of them here; one because it is to a great extent followed in Mexico and California, and seems to suit that dry climate and arid soil very well; and the other, because it will often serve as a pretty border to beds in gardens. The first is the so-called buck or stool method of training. The vine is made to form its head—i.e., ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... undoubtedly a little dust in the air most of the time, but I do not think that it extends very high. Where it would be the highest and most perceptible would be on the arid plans of Africa and Asia, when the simoom is passing, or in the track of a tornado. But from the multiplicity of these storm centers and the varied winds they would produce even this dust could not travel from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... iron-bound shores, and gave it the name of St. Sauveur. It is now called Frenchman's Bay. They saw a coast-line of weather-beaten crags set thick with spruce and fir, the surf-washed cliffs of Great Head and Schooner Head, the rocky front of Newport Mountain, patched with ragged woods, the arid domes of Dry Mountain and Green Mountain, the round bristly backs of the Porcupine Islands, and the waving outline of the ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... of the arid rocky borders of Turkestan, where flight would be easy and where capture would be most difficult. It was to that work that Ralston, looking far ahead, had in his mind dedicated young Linforth, knowing well that he would count its difficulties ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... window.) Is this real? Am I here alone? My mother gone? The army gone? brothers and sisters gone, and those woods full of armed Indians? I am awake. This is not the light of dreams,—'tis the sun that's shining there. Not the fresh arid tender morning sun, that looked in on that parting. Hours he has climbed since then, to turn those shadows thus,—hours that to me were nothing.—Alone?—deserted—defenceless? Of my own will too? ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... on the arid wastes of the Causse. There were trees, and birds in the trees, moving faintly. The great moon, which had now risen, shone also upon scanty grass and (from time to time) upon the trickle of water passing ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... growths; where pedestrians, riders, and animals had to move about along the embankments of countless canals. Now a land of roses, of the vine, olive, sugar-cane, and cotton, where the orange and lemon plants attain the size of our apple-trees, it was in primeval times an arid depression of the stony and sandy ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... soft moist air fanned our heated cheeks. The roar of the falls grew louder, and at any moment we felt that we might come upon the sight, but we had to travel on nearly half a mile along what seemed to be a steep slope. It was no longer arid and barren here, for every shelf and crevice was full of growth of the most vivid green. For a long time we had not seen a tree, but here tall forest trees had wedged their roots in the cracks and crevices, curved out, and then shot straight up into ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... nature into ridicule. Through these myths, as through a mist, we may discern the bitterness of that great, disenchanted, disappointed soul. The desert in which spirits of the stamp of Machiavelli wander is too arid and too aerial for the gross substantial bugbears of the vulgar conscience to inhabit. Moreover, as Varchi says, 'In his conversation Machiavelli was pleasant, serviceable to his friends, a friend of virtuous men, and, in a word, worthy of having received ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... mostly temperate, but tropical in Hawaii and Florida and arctic in Alaska, semiarid in the great plains west of the Mississippi River and arid in the Great Basin of the southwest; low winter temperatures in the northwest are ameliorated occasionally in January and February by warm chinook winds from the eastern slopes of ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... banks amid the sunny olive-clad regions of Andalucia, as the Ebro divides the levels of Arragon. Spain abounds with brackish streams, Salados, and with salt-mines, or saline deposits, after the evaporation of the sea-waters. The central soil is strongly impregnated with saltpetre: always arid, it every day is becoming more so, from the singular antipathy which the inhabitants of the interior have against trees. There is nothing to check the power of evaporation, no shelter to protect or preserve moisture. The soil becomes ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... which beset a study of the period. It is not a period to which the student of literature can turn with joy. One who would know Gustavus well must traverse a vast desert of dreary reading, and pore over many volumes of verbose despatches before he can find a drop of moisture to relieve the arid soil. Sweden in the early part of the sixteenth century was not fertile in literary men. Gustavus himself, judged by any rational standard, was an abominable writer. His despatches are in number almost endless and in length appalling. Page after page he runs on, seemingly ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... to whom the evoked shade of the soothsayer predicted a journey inland with an oar on his shoulder, till he met men who had never set eyes on ships and oars. It seems to me I can see them side by side in the twilight of an arid land, the unfortunate possessors of the secret lore of the sea, bearing the emblem of their hard calling on their shoulders, surrounded by silent and curious men: even as I, too, having turned my back upon ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of a long dead people loom, Obscene and savage and half effaced— An elephant hunt, a musicians' feast— And curious matings of man and beast; What did they mean to the men who are long since dust? Whose fingers traced, In this arid waste, These rioting, twisted, figures ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... whose mounts ambled tirelessly behind Alwa's plain-bred Arab pressed on past him, to curse the hag and bid her make horse-room for her betters. She sunk on the sand and begged of them. Laughingly, they asked her what a coin would buy in all that arid waste. ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... resembles a piece of good-for-nothing wrinkled parchment. The lips partake of the prevailing sallow tint, and the mouth hangs a little awry. From the cloth in which the head is so elaborately bandaged up strays forth, here and there, an arid lock of hair. The lack of united expression in his features produces an effect seldom observable in a living face. The eyes are lustreless, and densely black; or possibly (the suspicion is a startling ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... third day the drive had forced them from the hilly western woods, eastward and inexorably toward that level belt of shaggy forest, scrub growth, and arid, bowlder-strewn table-land where there was probably no water, nothing living to kill for food, and only the terrific ravines beyond where cliffs fell downward to the dim green world lying somewhere below under its blanket of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... of the coast beginning at Cape Blanco, and extending to the arm of the river Senegal, called the Marigot of the Maringouins; is so very arid, that it is not fit for any kind of cultivation; but from that Marigot, to the mouth of the river Gambia, a space, which may be about a hundred leagues, in length, with a depth of about two hundred, we meet with a vast country, which geographers ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... no longer founts, Ye have wept out the waters that did keep The body, soul, and spirit joined in one, And thou, reflecting crystal, which from without So much unto the soul made manifest, Thou art consumed by the wounded heart. So towards the dark and cavernous abyss, I, a blind arid man, direct my steps. Ah, pity me, and do not hesitate To help my speedy going. I who So many rivers in the dark days spread out, Finding my only comfort in my tears, Now that my streams and fountains all are dry, Towards ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... The formerly arid floor of the desert was carpeted with a soft green, with myriads of little flowers, all small, but delicately fashioned. There were poppies, dwarf daisies, expanses of buttercups, forget-me-nots, and diminutive red flowers whose name I did not know. It started ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... The arid plain around Salonica was crossed by numerous roads. The trains of artillery, the rosaries of automobiles, were rolling over recently opened roads that the rain had converted into mire. The mud was the worst calamity that could befall this plain, so extremely ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the little village below us the bells of the church are ringing for rain! Priests and peasants in long procession come forth and kneel on the arid plain. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... hands. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to understand that the ocean is not a limit, but the universal waterway that unites mankind. Shut in by Spain, they could not extend on land, and had no opening but the Atlantic. Their arid soil gave little scope to the territorial magnate, who was excluded from politics by the growing absolutism of the dynasty, and the government found it well to employ at a distance forces that might be ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... await her anywhere else than in Mexico? Only there can the apocalypse happen. I will take a ticket for Mexico, I will buy a Mexican grammar, I will be a Mexican.... On a hillside, or beside some grey pool, gazing out across those plains poor and arid, I will await the first pale showings ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... white teeth cut the string arid with a bang, down fell their prize. Then Tiny swung ...
— The Graymouse Family • Nellie M. Leonard
... constantly set these traps for them, but always without success, as some other kind of vermin is nearly certain to spring the trap before the chetah's arrival. Among the variety of small animals thus caught I have frequently taken the civet cat. This is a very pretty arid curious creature, about forty inches long from nose to tip of tail. The fur is ash-gray, mottled with black spots, and the tail is divided by numerous black rings. It is of the genius Viverra, and is exceedingly ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... carnivores would dwindle in the same proportion. Both types, again, would suffer from the enormous changes in their physical surroundings. Vast stretches of marsh, with teeming populations, were drained, and turned into firm, arid plains or bleak hill-sides. The area of the Amphibia, for instance, was no less reduced than their food. The cold, in turn, would exercise a most formidable selection. Before the Permian period there was not on the whole earth an ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... a painter of individuality in the human form and mind, I think him, even as it is, the prince of portrait painters. Titian paints nobler pictures, and Vandyke had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper; arid when you consider that, with a frightful conventionality of social habitude all around him, he yet conceived the simplest types of all feminine and childish loveliness;—that in a northern climate, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... imitated it; and all their other qualities were such as to enervate rather than inspire. The masculine rudeness of the old poets now gave way to pretty finish; verbal conceits took the place of condensed thoughts; the rich exuberance of the native style tried to cramp itself into the arid allusiveness which, instead of painting straight from nature, was content to awaken a long line of literary associations. Nevertheless there was much in their manipulation of language from which the Romans could learn a useful lesson. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... at an elevation of 190 miles. The probable range of temperature on the moon was discussed by Professor Very in 1898.[953] He concluded it to be very wide. Hotter than boiling water under the sun's vertical rays, the arid surface of our dependent globe must, he found, cool in the 14-day lunar night to about the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... music is the shout of camps. On seeing him the eagle speeds away in fright, Whilst hid 'mong rocks, the grisly wolf its victim champs. Mysore's as well as Agra's rajah is his kin; The great sheiks of the arid sands confess him lord; Omar, who vaunting cried: "Through me doth Allah win!" Was of his blood—a dreaded line of fire and sword. The waters of Nagain, sands of Sahara warm, The Atlas and the Caucasus, snow-capped and lone, Mecca, Marcatta, these were massed in part to form A portion ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... done. Masses of stone, with a few grey-looking plants growing amidst the arid cracks, a little scattered dry grass in patches, and a few bushy-looking shrubs of a dull sagey green; that was all. There were plenty of stones near, one of which looked like a safe shelter for serpent or lizard; and some horny-looking beetles were busily crawling ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... of Bethennabrio, a village within a dozen miles of Caesarea in which Paul would sleep that night. Thou canst not get to Caesarea to-night, Jesus affirmed to him, and they resumed their journey through a country that seemed to grow more arid and ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... both strange and headstrong, some sheep would never get near the food necessary to keep them alive. Confined to the provender even their shepherds would have them contented withal, many would die. Sometimes, to escape from the arid wastes of "society," haunted with the cries of its spiritual greengrocers, and find the pasture on which their souls can live, they have to die, and climb the grassy ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... plans for the care, preservation, and intelligent harvesting of our woodlands; studying soils that producers may cultivate with better knowledge of conditions, and helping to clothe desert places with grasses suitable to our arid regions. Our island possessions are being considered that their peoples may be helped to produce the tropical products now so extensively brought into the United States. Inquiry into methods of improving our roads has been active during the year; help has been given ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... wheat lands. Irrigation is already practised over other vast acreages. This land is level to rolling, and is of sandy loam nature. It is deeply under-laid by layers of lava rock—in places thousands of feet thick. As in most arid climates the soil is rich in minerals but low in nitrogen and organic matter. Under irrigation production is amazing. The growing season is sufficiently long for Carpathian walnuts anywhere in the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... many years ago, had been surrounded with art-tinted hangings and photographs from Rossetti, and the austerity of her eighteenth-century reaction was now almost defiant. Her drawing-room, in its arid chastity, challenged you, as it were, to dare remember the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... sphinx of granite in the arid sands of Egypt, you would have more chance of melting her. The winged words might fly uninterruptedly from your lips for a whole Olympiad; you could not move my resolution in the slightest. A heart of brass dwells in this marble breast of mine. Die ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... the official Army List, either as active or retired. The whole panorama of the mystic land of the Hindus was unrolled once more by the memories of fifteen clouded years, He saw again his far-away theater of varied action, with its huge grim mountains towering far over the snow line, its arid wastes, its fertile plains bathed in intense sunshine, its mystic rivers, and its silent, solemn shrines of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... long time against that grace of love which is more terrible than the thunderbolt that fell on the road to Damascus. A woman oftenest yields to the passion of love only when age or solitude does not frighten her. Passion is an arid and burning desert. Passion is profane asceticism, as harsh as religious asceticism. Great woman lovers are as rare as great penitent women. Those who know life well know that women do not easily bind themselves in the chains of real love. They know that nothing is less common than sacrifice ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... engineering and building construction are carried on at Pittsburg in four of the larger rooms of Building No. 21. In this laboratory, are conducted research investigations into the effect of alkaline waters and soils on the constituent materials of concrete available in arid regions, as related to the life and permanency of the concrete and reinforced concrete construction of the Reclamation Service. These investigations include a study of individual salts found in particular alkalis, and a study of the results of allowing ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... the mourning which is based, as our text bases it, on poverty of spirit, will certainly bring after it the consolation of forgiveness arid of cleansing. Christ's gentle hand laid upon us, to cause our guilt to pass away, and the inveterate habits of inclination towards evil to melt out of our nature, is His answer to His child's cry, 'Woe is me, for I am undone!' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... anew, the humble Grimaldi church, 13th cent., thrown down, and in its stead a majestic cathedral erected, the barns have been filled with plenty, costly roads have been cut through the cliffs, the formerly arid hills clothed with exuberant verdure, and beautiful villas have been built in the midst of enchanting gardens, in places where, only a few years ago, hardly enough of short wiry grass could grow to feed a goat. The gambling establishment of Monaco was opened in 1856 by a company with ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Celer, men of such ingenuity and daring enterprise as to attempt to conquer by art the obstacles of nature, and fool away the treasures of the prince: they had even undertaken to sink a navigable canal from the lake Avernus to the mouth of the Tiber, over an arid shore, or through opposing mountains: nor indeed does there occur anything of a humid nature for supplying water, except the Pomptine marshes; the rest is either craggy rock or a parched soil: and had it even been possible to break through these ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... this continent are superior, because it presents every variety of climate, soil, and production of the earth, with every variety of mineral production, with all kinds of water privileges, arid ocean coast on all sides, presenting every commercial advantage. Upon the American continent we are determined to stay, in spite of every odds against us. What part of the great continent shall our destination be—shall we emigrate ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... this category are those that are widely distributed in the western United States and that occur in Colorado in both the mountains and the lower more arid intermontane areas. Some of these species are differentiated into subspecies, one of which inhabits the mountains and another the lowlands. Wide-spread species that do not have subspecies in the lowlands different ...
— Mammals of the Grand Mesa, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... the globe, favours the communication by steam-power between both hemispheres, and almost from pole to pole; and while we hear of new discoveries that may make the air a motive power instead of steam, and thus render railway transit possible in arid deserts; and while the electric telegraph not only connects us with the continent of Europe, but is about to cross the Atlantic. With all these powers at command, men will not long be confined to the narrow boundaries in which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... distinctive smell, as of an arid dried-out swamp, with a faint taint of fish. But in the Flats the odor changes. Here is the smell of factories, warehouses, and trading marts; the smell of stale cooking drifting from the homes of the laborers and lower ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... same time that it must be at His own good time. Convinced of this, supported by this, encouraged by this, and venturing his life for this, he toils on, in full assurance that if he fails, another is to succeed,—that if he becomes a martyr, his blood will moisten the arid soil from which the future seed will spring. A missionary may be low in birth, low in education, as many are; but he must be a man of exalted mind,—what in any other pursuit we might term an enthusiast; and in this spreading of the Divine word, he merits respect for ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the middle of the series those pictures which I think least interesting, though the want of interest is owing more to the monotony of their character than to any real deficiency in their subjects. If, after contemplating paintings of arid deserts or glowing sunsets, we had come suddenly upon this breezy entrance to the crowded cove of Plymouth, it would have gladdened our hearts to purpose; but having already been at sea for some time, there is little in this drawing to produce renewal of ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... similar fact regarding the rudiments of the second and fifth digits in the instance of the elk and bison, which have them largely expanded where they inhabit swampy ground; whilst they are nearly obliterated in the camel and dromedary, that traverse arid deserts.—OWEN on Limbs, p. 34; see also BELL ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... those penciled memoranda were the fresh first impressions that would presently grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set down in the very midst of that historic little company that frolicked through Italy and climbed wearily the arid ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the way from the sandy loams to the deep soils and gravels, and it is possible to find thousands of acres of deep, rich loam soil. Some of it is five to twenty-five feet deep. Of course the rainfall in that semi-arid region is insufficient for nuts but that can be supplemented by irrigation water, so that is practically no disadvantage. Since I have been there I have tried to interest some of the fruit growers in the planting of a few different varieties of the hardier nuts, and I have distributed among them ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... the forest reserves will be not less helpful to the interests which depend on water than to those which depend on wood and grass. The water supply itself depends upon the forest. In the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production. The western half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country to-day if the waters that now run to waste were ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... letters, composed of the name of God and the Angels. Therefore in his coal-black eyes were gloomy lights which sometimes became ecstatic when they contemplated the incomparable delights of the supernatural world. His back was bent from the continual reading of books, arid his hand shook with excitement caused by the perpetual state of emotion in which his mind was kept; his body was thin from ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... awake in a desert—a real desert like the great African ones. Far as the eye can reach, for hours and hours as the train rolls on, sand and nothing else. Not a house, not an inhabitant, no water anywhere. You close your eyes that night on the arid waste, and lo! next morning you are in Swiss scenery. Great fir-clad mountains, capped with snow, border the rail, a precipice is below, and you shudder as you realize how near you are to the edge. A ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... the river Ucker, in pleasing contrast with the sandy plains of Brandenburg; it lies at no great distance from Berlin, so that it forms the favourite goal for a short excursion with the people of that arid city. ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... children should go to such a teacher for spiritual refreshment, they would return thirsty. He has nothing to give them, no bubbling water of life, no geniality, no such graces of the spirit as appeal to buoyant childhood. He lacks a sense of humor, and that lack makes arid the exuberant sources of life. He may solve problems in arithmetic, but he cannot compass the solution of the problem of life. The children pity him, and no greater calamity can befall a teacher than to deserve and ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Congregationalists—from liking the simplicity of that praying and speaking without books—and a little too from disliking the theory of state churches. There is a narrowness among the dissenters which is wonderful; an arid, grey Puritanism in the clefts of their souls: but it seems to me clear that they know what the 'liberty of Christ' means, far better than those do who call themselves 'churchmen'; and stand altogether, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... village and could see its extent, precisely how it was placed in the Sahara, in what relation exactly it stood to the mountain ranges, to the palm groves and the arid, sunburnt tracts, where its life centred and where it tailed away into suburban edges not unlike the ragged edges of worn garments, where it was idle and frivolous, where busy and sedulous. She realised for the first time that there were ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... that sympathy are cruelly asserted to be these arid woodland ruins—cruelly, because the common sight of the day blossoming over the agonies of animals and birds is made less tolerable by such fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benign beauty ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... where one strikes the Sefid River, we begin to rise and the country gets more hilly and arid. We gradually leave behind the oppressive dampness, which suggests miasma and fever, and begin to breathe air which, though very hot, is drier and purer. We have risen 262 feet at Kudum from 77 feet, the altitude of Resht, and as we travel now in a ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the wheat country into the arid zone, which was found to be not nearly so arid as we thought. The Black Angus and the White-Faced Herefords followed, and where once were only scattering droves of skinny pintos, now were to be seen shaggy-legged ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... rock, backed by the purple ridges of the greater heights. It was desert land, too. They had long since left the abundance of the valley behind them. Here was the stiff angularity of cactus, the twisted vegetation of an arid land. ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... middle of the public square was built of bricks, of that porous, fiery sort which seem so peculiarly designed to the monstrous vagaries of rural architecture. Here in Ascalon they fitted well with the arid appearance of things, as a fiery face goes best ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... confess, without a sensation of awe that I swept with my sight the vacant round of the horizon, and remembered that I was all alone, and unprovisioned in the midst of the arid waste; but this very awe gave tone and zest to the exultation with which I felt myself launched. Hitherto, in all my wandering, I had been under the care of other people—sailors, Tatars, guides, and dragomen had watched over my welfare, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... of the traveller, its excellently appointed and hospitable club. The residential quarter is happily situated on elevated ground, swept by refreshing breezes from the ocean. A large space is covered with good houses and well-kept lawns. The public gardens are a great feat of horticulture. The arid and sterile soil has been converted by liberal irrigation into a green oasis, containing groves of palms and a varied tropical vegetation. Needless to say the work is the achievement of a ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... that the regions of the antipodal races are antipodal in climate, the greatest contrast the world affords, perhaps, being that between the damp, hot, steaming, alluvial coast plains of the West Coast of Africa and the arid, elevated steppes and plateaux of Central Asia, bitterly cold in winter, and as far from the sea as any part of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the back door and made our way through the rather arid cleanliness of the houses' administrative departments, flavoured with a smell that combined more notably the odours of cooking and plate-polish. The transition as we emerged through the red baize door under the majestic panoply of the staircase, was quite startling. ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... scattered throughout the breadth of Southern Italy. The position of their Vesuvian settlement is certainly unique, for the rising ground on which it is perched appears like some verdant oasis amid the arid fields of sable lava. Secure in its commanding site, the monastery has many a time been completely surrounded by burning streams, which have invariably left the building and its woody demesne unscathed. More than once have ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... earth the giver attains to excellent prosperity. By giving a piece of earth containing mineral wealth, the giver aggrandises his family and race. One should never give away any earth that is barren or that is burnt (arid); nor should one give away any earth that is in close vicinity to a crematorium, or that has been owned and enjoyed by a sinful person before such gift. When a man performs a Sraddha in honour of the Pitris on earth belonging ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from being attractive. Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing to say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner. Then Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems arid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in Cowper, instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observations on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school- work of those days ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... sleep more sweetly and soundly than those who are labored for, and could fail to see by comparing the Persians' manner of living with their own, that it was the most abject and slavish condition to be voluptuous, but the most noble arid royal to undergo pain and labor. He argued with them further, how it was possible for anyone who pretended to be a soldier, either to look well after his horse, or to keep his armor bright and in good order, who thought it much ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... intellectual interest of the Count's 'Monks of the West' rests mainly on this, that it is the work of a brilliant and accomplished layman and man of the world, dealing with a class of characters who have generally been left to the arid professional handling of ecclesiastical writers. Montalembert sees their life as a whole, and a human whole; and, with all his zeal as an amateur hagiographer, he cannot but view them with some of the independence of a mind trained to letters and ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... by his bounty; to the peasants and farmers who were found incapable of cultivating their lands, he distributed cattle, seed, and the instruments of husbandry; and the rare and inestimable treasure of fresh water was parsimoniously managed, and skilfully dispersed over the arid territory of Persia. [44] The prosperity of that kingdom was the effect and evidence of his virtues; his vices are those of Oriental despotism; but in the long competition between Chosroes and Justinian, the advantage both of merit and fortune is almost always on the side ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon |
