"Sahara" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... need for them produced by the moral and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary human animal, are no more invariably beneficial and respectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, making the cheeks of the ploughman's child rosy in the morning and striking the ploughman brainsick or dead in the afternoon; no more inspired (and no less) than the religion of the Andaman islanders; as much in need of frequent throwing away and replacement as the community's boots. By writers ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... of introduction to some neighbouring grandee. There is an excellent caravanserai close by, at Ain Mokra. For gazelles one must go quite into the interior of the desert—to Boussada and Laghouat—in the great Sahara desert. Ghazella is, in the Arab language, the ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... when we saw the land birds we must have been passing some of the Canary Islands. If we continued on the same course, we are now to the north of Cape Blanco, near the unexplored country which skirts the great Sahara. All we can do is to rectify our instruments as far as possible and start afresh for ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... salvo shall fall and assort the old group of craters into a new one, to be reassorted again and again as the days go on. It is the nearest thing to sheer desert that I have seen since certain lonely rides into the old Sahara at the back of Mena Camp two years ago. Every minute or two there is a crash. Part of the desert bumps itself up into huge red or black clouds and subsides again. Those eruptions are the ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... the foci of huge concave mirrors, often a hundred feet in diameter, the required heat being supplied by the sun, without smoke, instead of by bulky and dirty coal. This discovery gave commercial value to Sahara and other tropical deserts, which are now desirable for mill-sites and for generating power, on account of the directness with which they receive the sun's rays and their freedom from clouds. Mile after mile Africa has been won for the uses of civilization, till great stretches ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... all along northern Africa as far as Tunis; and we come across it again amongst the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy. Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central Sahara belong to the same type. Everywhere the same tall, dark race, handsome, imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of eyes; a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... the air, but it wrenched out and hurled large masses of water, scattering them in rain and mist, the blood of the sea. Now and then it made all the air dense with spray, causing the Pacific to resemble the Sahara in a simoom. At other times it levelled the tops of scores of waves at once, crushing and kneading them by the immense force that lay in ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... abstraction Rita would not have moved; for, excepting the friendly palm, not another vestige of vegetation was visible right away to the horizon; nothing but an ocean of sand whereon no living thing moved. She and the parrakeets were alone in the heart of the Great Sahara. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... signs engraved upon the cave-entrance of La Piedra Escrita in the Sierra Morena of Andalusia; with those printed by General Faidherbe in his work on the Numidic or Lybian epigraphs; with the 'Thugga inscription,' Tunis; and with the rock-gravings of the Sahara, attributed to the ancient Tawarik or Tifinegs. Dr. Gran-Bassas (El Museo Canario), who finds a notable likeness between them and the 'Egyptian characters (cursive or demotic), Phenician and Hebrew,' notes that they are engraved in vertical series. Dr. Verneau, of the Academy, Paris, suggests ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Polymnia that they had no stately or simple charm in execution, and Terpsichore, who had joined with Melpomene in admiring the opera, found nothing in the novel which she could own and bless. Fleeting passages, remote and slight fragments, were pleasing to them all, like the oases of a Sahara, or the sites of high civilization on the earth; but the whole world of novels seemed to them a chaos undisciplined by art and unformed to beauty. The gates of the halls where the classics live in immortal youth were beginning to close against the voluminous prose ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... the villages which we have passed there were no traces of cultivation. The country extending between the several stations is as much a wilderness as the desert of Sahara, though it possesses a far more pleasing aspect. Indeed, had the first man at the time of the Creation gazed at his world and perceived it of the beauty which belongs to this part of Africa, he would have had no cause of complaint. In the deep thickets, set like islets amid ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... perhaps a sense of humor which was not wanting in him may have served as a buffer against the too importunate shock of disappointment. "He made Ritchie promise," says Haydon, "he would carry his 'Endymion' to the great desert of Sahara and fling it in the midst." On the 9th October, 1818, he writes to his publisher, Mr. Hessey, "I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get acquainted with my own strength and ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... part returning home by way of the Canaries, while Lancarot, with several other caravels, advanced along the coast of Africa southwards, till he got beyond what the Moors called the Cahara, or Sahara, of the Assenaji. This Moorish nation is mentioned by Abulfeda as the ruling tribe in Audagost, or Agadez, and as inhabiting the southern part of Morocco. They are therefore to be considered as the peculiar people of the great desert and its environs, at its western extremity ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... same geographical character has been going on in the Sahara, as the French since 1890 have been expanding southward from the foot of the Atlas Mountains in Algeria toward Timbuctoo at the cost of the nomad Tuaregs. Territory is first subdued and administered by the military till it is fully pacified. Then it is handed over to ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... strategic positions for exercising world power in future, are her real aims. Her ultimate objective in Africa is the establishment of a great Central African Empire, comprising not only her colonies before the war, but also all the English, French, Belgian, and Portuguese possessions south of the Sahara and Lake Chad and north of the Zambezi River in South Africa. Toward this objective she was steadily marching even before the war broke out, and she claims the return of her lost African colonies at the end of the war as a starting-point from which to resume the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... but seems immediately to change its mind and resolve not to blow, but let the rain come down. A drearier-looking spot for human abode it would be difficult to imagine, except it were as much of the sandy Sahara, or of the ashy, sage-covered waste of western America. A muddy road wound through huts of turf—among them one or two of clay, and one or two of stone, which were more like cottages. Hardly one had a window two feet square, and many of their windows had no glass. ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... such thing as knowing a man intimately. Every soul is, for the greater part of its mortal life, isolated from every other. Whether it dwell in the Garden of Eden or the Desert of Sahara, it dwells alone. Not only do we jostle against the street-crowd unknowing and unknown, but we go out and come in, we lie down and rise up, with strangers. Jupiter and Neptune sweep the heavens not more unfamiliar to us than the worlds that circle our own hearth-stone. Day ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... is Sahara," whispered the Sheep, plucking at Dorothy's frock to attract her attention, "but we call her Sarah to save time. She's kind of grumpy now because the other Camel stayed away, but she'll titter like a turtle when ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
... different tribes meet and mingle promiscuously among themselves. Negroes from the Soudan [Footnote: Soudan: the region south of the Sahara Desert.] and light-colored Arabs: Mussulmans [Footnote: Mussulmans: Mohammedans.] without conviction of the faith, whose women veil only their mouths; and the green-turbaned Derkaouas, merciless fanatics, who turn their heads and spit upon the ground at the sight of a Christian. ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... traveled by night, avoiding the highway. But in so doing I became so often involved in the maze of cross-roads, bylanes, cow-paths, and cart-tracks, that twice the dawn found me as completely lost as though I had been set down in the midst of the Sahara. I thus wasted much time, and wandered many miles out of my way; wherefore, to put an end to these futile ramblings, I set my face westward, hoping to strike the highroad somewhere between Tonbridge and Sevenoaks; determined ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... by a hope of heaven which nothing could shake, they swept from district to district, from tribe to tribe," everywhere proclaiming to roving multitudes the faith of their master. In this spirit they had faced the terrors of the Sahara Desert, and in the tenth century reached the land of the negroes, found the Niger, and established schools and ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... are many rich valleys yet much of the land is a desolate desert. One writer suggests regarding this awful silent region that the Desert of Sahara is a botanical garden in comparison with it. I traveled five hundred miles along this desert without seeing a tree or a blade of grass. This was in the northern part where it never rains. Much of the southern part ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... Temple of Seti I flowed the green wave like a lake in the desert, but beyond, to join the Sahara, rolled and billowed a waste of rose-pink sand, shot with topaz light, and walled with fantastic rocks, yellow and crimson, streaked with purple. In the heart of each shadow, fire burned like dying coals in a mass of rosy ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... heard of at Vienna, and we now learn that he has been very successful in the five years of his adventure in the northern and central parts of the continent. Letters received in Berlin from Drs. Barth and Overweg, contain information of their having accomplished the journey across the Great Desert, or Sahara, and of their arrival near the frontiers of the kingdom of Air or Asben, (Air is the modern Tuarick, and Asben the ancient Sudan name), the most powerful in that part of Africa after Bornou, and never explored by Europeans. On ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... could not quench it again with such a prairie of fuel around him. I am not speaking of Bombay people, with their clubs and gymkhanas and other devices for oiling the wheels of existence, but of the dreary up-country exile, whose life is a blank, a moral Sahara, a catechism of the Nihilist creed. What such a one needs is a hobby. Every hobby is good—a sign of good and an influence for good. Any hobby will draw out the mind, but the one I plead for touches the soul too, keeps the milk of ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... out-of-door scene is at best artificial and little and is generally at rest, or its movement is tainted with artificiality. The waves dash, but not dashingly, the water flows, but not flowingly. The motion picture out-of-door scene is as big as the universe. And only pictures of the Sahara are without magnificent motion. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... to a great extent isolated, although it approaches, by many promontories and by lines of shallower sea, to Europe and Asia: southern Africa, which is the most distinct in its mammiferous inhabitants, is separated from the northern portion by the Great Sahara Desert and the table-land of Abyssinia. That the distribution of organisms is related to barriers, stopping their progress, we clearly see by comparing the distribution of marine and terrestrial productions. The marine animals being different on the two sides of land tenanted by the ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... America?—they call them lightning-bugs, if you can believe me—remark the difference between southern euphuism and western bluntness—your fireflies are pretty enough, I grant. But they are tinsel pasted on the Desert of Sahara. They are condiments added to a dinner of dust and ashes. Life, trick it out as you will, is just an incubus—is just the Old Man of the Sea. Language fails me to convey to you any notion how heavily ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... South America plus North America as far as Mexico; and fourthly, the rest of the world, or Arctogoea, in which province America north of Mexico constitutes one sub-province, Africa south of the Sahara a second, Hindostan a third, and the remainder of the Old World ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... city on a hill on the skirts of the hot hop district of which Burwash is the Sussex centre. To walk about it even in April is no exhilaration; but in August one thinks of Sahara. I lived in Mayfield one August and could barely keep awake; and we used to look across at the rolling chalk Downs in the south, between Ditchling and Lewes, and long for their cool, wind-swept heights. They can be hot too, but chalk is never so hot as sand, and a steady climb ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... continually alter in the wind-storms. Sand wholly, and—except the strong paved Highway that now runs through it (to Reppen, Meseritz and the Polish Frontier, and is strongly paved till it get through Kunersdorf)—chaotic wholly; a scene of heaped barrenness and horror, not to be matched but in Sahara; the features of the Battle quite blown away, and indecipherable in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... answer the question. To have pleaded my ignorance, would have created a suspicion that I wished to conceal the real truth from him; I therefore told him, that my mother resided far beyond the sands of Sahara, and that whilst she was alive, the piece of iron would always point that way, and serve as a guide to conduct me to her, and that if she was dead, it would point to her grave. Ali now looked at the compass with redoubled amazement; turned it round ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... now," he admitted, sending a thoughtful glance over the arid waste; "it must seem like the Great Sahara to you, coming into it for the first time and directly from the Puget Sound country. I remember how I felt when I struck the Hesperides. Why, it looked like the front door of Hades to me; I said so, and I called myself all kinds of a fool. But I had ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... fact that, somehow, the news of our excavation seemed to have got down to the settlement. It is a curious fact, as the "King" observed, that if a man should start to dig for gold in the centre of Sahara, with no possible means of communicating with his fellows, on the third day, there would not fail to be some one to drop in and remark on the fineness of the weather. So it was with us. As a general ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... carcase, being mostly skin and bone, sometimes weighed only about twelve pounds. It is quite true that the scraggy Transvaal sheep would be looked down on and despised by their fat and far-famed English cousins, especially at that season of the year when the veldt is as bare and barren as the Sahara; but it surely is no fault of the British Government that not a green blade can anywhere be seen during these long rainless months, and that consequently all the flocks look famished. South African mutton is, at the best of times, a by no means ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... the Sahara move those soundless caravans of camels, swaying with their padded feet across the desert I imagine, till in the shadowy distance of my mind they fade ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... first, by spreading birches with their leaves on over the sand, and fastening them down with stakes, to break the wind. The fleas bit the sheep, and the sheep bit the ground, and the sore had spread to this extent. It is astonishing what a great sore a little scratch breedeth. Who knows but Sahara, where caravans and cities are buried, began with the bite of an African flea? This poor globe, how it must itch in many places! Will no god be kind enough to spread a salve of birches over its sores? Here too we noticed where the Indians ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... sea the parts that are lightly tinged with green, and to give the name of continent to the spots colored yellow. That is the hue of the Martian soil, due either to the soil itself, which would resemble that of the Sahara, or, to take a less arid region, that seen on the line between Marseilles and Nice, in the vicinity of the Esterels; or perhaps to some peculiar vegetation. During ascents in a balloon, the author has often remarked that the hue of the ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Note, ascribing a Celtic origin to this symbol, I have just met with somewhat of a curious coincidence, to say the least of it. In Richardson's Travels in the Sahara, &c., vol. i. p. 420., speaking ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... off uttering shrill cries. Mas'udi also speaks of the mysterious voices heard by lone wayfarers in the Desert, and he gives a rational explanation of them. Ibn Batuta relates a like legend of the Western Sahara: "If the messenger be solitary, the demons sport with him and fascinate him, so that he strays from his course and perishes." The Afghan and Persian wildernesses also have their Ghul-i-Beaban or Goblin of the Waste, a gigantic and fearful spectre which devours ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Caroline had spent entirely alone (her uncle being at Whinbury), and whose long, bright, noiseless, breezeless, cloudless hours (how many they seemed since sunrise!) had been to her as desolate as if they had gone over her head in the shadowless and trackless wastes of Sahara, instead of in the blooming garden of an English home, she was sitting in the alcove—her task of work on her knee, her fingers assiduously plying the needle, her eyes following and regulating their movements, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Great Britain, beans, almonds, goat-skins, and wool. The goat-skins are sumac-tanned and are still used in making the best book-binding leather. Only a small part of the so-called Morocco leather of commerce is genuine. There are no railways; caravan routes from the Sahara cross the country. Tangier and one or two other ports are open to foreign trade. Coal-oil is the only ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... which the feudal contingents, each commanded by its lord or his lieutenants, fought side by side with the king's soldiers furnished from the royal domains. The effective force of the army was made up by auxiliaries taken from the tribes of the Sahara and from the negroes of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to the city! An exclamation point deserves to be placed after this because it rightly belongs in a class with the statement that the mountain was coming to Mohammed. Scattergood had fully as much in common with cities as eels with the Desert of Sahara. ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... not of equal value. The Indian countries and the Ethiopian region (Africa south of the Sahara) are obviously nothing but the tropical, southern continuations or appendages of one greater complex. Further, the great eastern mass of land is so intimately connected with North America that this ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... stacks and drag them bodily to their villages on the snow, which sometimes falls, they told me, to the depth of fifteen or more feet. To the east stretched the rolling prairie without a house or a village to the Signavina (desolate land) Planina, solitary as the Sahara, for no man would build where a Turkish raid on this disputed land might sweep him and ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... The Loss of the "Viper," and the Adventures of her Crew in the Desert of Sahara. With Thirty-two Engravings. Crown 8vo, ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... back in fifty-six, before the water-ditch companies had fairly got started. It was as dry as Sahara on these mountains then, and it is no wonder somebody thought ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... the inspiration of my friend Sligo, who was never so brilliant in his life before. How generous in you to rise and shine on this wretched town! It is Sahara. Miss Plumer descends upon it like dew. ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... It was the prospectus, very skilfully drawn, of a company established to introduce gas into Algeria, almost as far as the Sahara. They promised the subscribers wonders and miracles: acres upon acres of land as a bonus. There was a fortune to be made. Meantime, they would issue six thousand shares of five hundred francs. It was three millions they were asking from the public. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... a glance that China and Chinese Tartary correspond almost exactly in latitude with the United States and Mexico. That the British Isles and Labrador correspond. That the southern part of Florida and Cuba are in the same latitude as the Desert of Sahara, and other points of the same kind are made clear ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 11, March 17, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the warmth provoked by the exertion of climbing, you begin to notice how cool it feels;—you could almost doubt the testimony of your latitude. Directly east is Senegambia: we are well south of Timbuctoo and the Sahara,—on a line with southern India. The ocean has cooled the winds; at this altitude the rarity of the air is northern; but in the valleys below the vegetation is African. The best alimentary plants, the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... very wonderful people, these Americans, thought Peninah, and most wonderful of all were the little girls of her own age, with their full skirts and dainty bonnets. True, they had never seen the Sahara Desert or crossed the mysterious ocean, yet she envied them their pretty clothes, feeling outlandishly queer in her pointed cap and baggy trousers. Mr. Noah had been very kind to her; he had brought her several pretty trinkets and a box ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... Sahara. I had reached the Pacific coast just when the departing rainy season had left all nature fair as a poet's dream of love, and, vainly dreaming that this was perpetual, it seemed as if I would sigh for no other heaven. But the scorching heat and Siroccoes ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... mouth! O let me take One draught from that delicious cup! The hot Sahara-thirst to slake That burns ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... region, whose character is determined by the numerous chains of the Atlas Mountains. This region, shut off from the rest of Africa not only by the Atlas but by the most impassable of all geographical barriers, the great Sahara desert, really belongs to Europe rather than to the continent of which it forms a part. Its fertile valleys were once the homes of brilliant civilisations: they were the seat of the Carthaginian Empire, ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... the Idiot. "Take North America. What do we find? We find in the sands of the Sahara a great statue, which we call the Sphinx, and about which we know nothing, except that it is there and that it keeps its mouth shut. We find marvellous creations in engineering that to-day surpass anything that we can do. The Sphinx, when discovered, was covered ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one hand, and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn 'Saying,' to which, after due pause, the honorable member for Blackberry Pastures responded by some keen and graphic observations, while the Olympian host, anxious that so much material should be spun into something, beamed smiling encouragement ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... hesitate, however. He has never shrunk from Danger's bright face, least of all would he shrink now when the passing of a brief ordeal may well mean reunion with his beloved and her rescue from the welter of Paris. The Pilgrim's soul hungers and thirsts for her. After the great Sahara of imprisoned loneliness, how near the Oasis of love and rapture! How beautiful the ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... matter, gives him free egress as a nullity. Such an unstable 'drift-mould of Accident' is the substance of this lower world, for them that dwell in houses of clay; so, especially in hot regions and times, do the proudest palaces we build of it take wings, and become Sahara sand-palaces, spinning many pillared in the whirlwind, and bury us under ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of heat and cold never visited Golden Valley. Spokane and the Bend country, just now sweltering in a torrid zone, might as well have been in the Sahara, for all the effect it had on this garden spot of all the Inland Empire. It was hot in the valley, but not unpleasant. In fact, the greatest charm in this secluded vale was its pleasant climate all the year round. No summer cyclones, no winter blizzards, no cloudbursts ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the desert of Sahara began to be felt, which told us we approached the tropic; indeed, the sun at noon seemed suspended perpendicularly above our heads, a phenomenon which few among us ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... black, ranged along the shore like naked negro boys, big-headed, with shaggy lumps of wool, hesitating before a plunge. The sandy roads were welcome after stones, and suddenly the landscape began to copy Africa, with shifting yellow sand deserts, brushed by purple shadows of the Sahara. Far away, the mountains, rolling along the wide horizon, glimmered blue, rose, ochre, and white, like coloured marble or a Moorish mosaic. Again we flashed past a troglodyte village in a hillside; crossed a magnificent bridge, which even Dick approved; wound through a labyrinth of ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the three great evangelical counsels of perfect chastity, poverty and obedience. The cloister is necessary for the observance of such engagements as these, and it were easier for a lily to flourish on the banks of the Dead Sea, or amid the fiery blasts of the Sahara, than for these delicate flowers of spirituality to thrive in the midst of the temptations, seductions and passions of the every day world of this life. Necessity makes a practice of these virtues ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... thing, or even better. For his father lived in a gloomy study with severe books, bound in divinity calf, all about him; and was no more conscious of the existence of the beautiful garden than if it had been the Desert of Sahara. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... confident, all of us observed,—the depression of our spirits would have been as profound as it was universal. This peculiarity was the stranger's appetite. This, fortunately, had remained unimpaired,—an oasis in the Sahara of his life. ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... earthquake regions of Europe, there have been many falls of red substance, usually, but not always, precipitated in rain. Upon many occasions, these substances have been "absolutely identified" as sand from the Sahara. When I first took this matter up, I came across assurance after assurance, so positive to this effect, that, had I not been an Intermediatist, I'd have looked no further. Samples collected from ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... drought he draws it up into his mouth and swallows it. This is what makes the camel so valuable to the wandering tribes in the great deserts of Africa and Asia. He is the only animal who can pass several days under the burning sun of Sahara without drinking—or rather without appearing to do so—for he carries his provision of water concealed from all eyes in the recesses of his body. I dare say you have often heard stories of Arabs dying of thirst ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... life of the globe; but his is a monotonous business, like the painting of miles and miles of palings: grass, grass, grass, trees, trees, trees, ad infinitum; whereas yellow leads a roving, versatile life, and is seldom called upon for such monotonous labour. The sands of Sahara are probably the only conspicuous instance of yellow thus working by the piece. It is in the quality, in the diversity of the things it colours, rather than in their mileage or tonnage, that yellow is distinguished; though, for that matter, we suppose, the sun is as big and heavy as most things, ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... was now curtailed to a few bucketsful, but even these few drops of the precious fluid were mostly wasted in the melee for their possession. The majority of the contestants retired disappointed to muse on the comforts of the Sahara Desert, and as the stories about tapping camels recurred to them, suggestive glances were cast at the more fortunate rivals. After a few days, conspicuous for the sparing enjoyment of salt cod, the water supply was ordered unlimited. An immediate ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... beneath us stretched gardens that must have been like those of many-columned Iram, which the ancient Addite King had built for his pleasure ages before the deluge, and which Allah, so the Arab legend tells, took and hid from man, within the Sahara, beyond all hope of finding—jealous because they were more beautiful than his in paradise. Within them flowers and groves of laced, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the Spanish protectorate of the Rio de Oro (q.v.). Adrar or Adrar el Jebli, otherwise Adghagh, is a plateau north-east of Timbuktu. It is the headquarters of the Awellimiden Tuareg (see TUAREG and SAHARA). Adrar n'Ahnet and Adrar Adhafar are smaller regions in the Ahnet country south of Insalah. Adrar Temur, the country usually referred to when Adrar is spoken of, is in the western Sahara, 300 m. north of the Senegal and separated on the north-west from Adrar Suttuf by wide valleys ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... numerous, and so shy of launching talk across the table, that you may talk to the person next to you not less secure from listeners than you would be in talking with the stranger whom you met at a well in the Sahara. It is not so, except on state occasions, at Paris. Difficult there to retire into solitude with your next neighbour. The guests collected by Duplessis completed with himself the number of the Sacred Nine—the host, Valerie, Rochebriant, Graham, Isaura, Signora ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... visionary. One of Selkirk's acquaintances met him strolling along Pall Mall, and brought him up short on the street with the query: 'If you are bent {34} on doing something futile, why do you not sow tares at home in order to reap wheat, or plough the desert of Sahara, which is nearer?' ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... with Fremont. The other side of our country seems so curious to me, I want to see what it is like. The other side of the Rocky Mountains! It's almost like saying the Desert of Sahara," ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... might she have bidden the sea rise from its bed and flood the dry and arid wastes of old Sahara. Her voice and that of the Socialists, their lawyers and their press, sounded in vain. A solid battery of capitalist papers, legal lights, private detectives and other means—particularly including the majority of the priests and clergy—swamped the man and damned him and doomed him ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... a wide-spread belief, mere age adds very little to the value of any book, and oft-times nothing at all. All librarians are pestered to buy "hundred year old" treatises on theology or philosophy, as dry as the desert of Sahara, on the ground that they are both old and rare, whereas such books, two hundred and even three hundred years old, swarm in unsalable masses on the shelves of London and provincial booksellers at a ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... last, when all the biscuits but one were gone, and the cake plate looked like the Desert of Sahara, the captain pushed back his chair, rose, and led the way into the next room. Miss Baker ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... a row of handsome books—"Seven Weeks in the Sahara, seven dollars; Six Months in a Waggon, six-fifty net; Afternoons in an Oxcart, two volumes, ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... people have just telephoned through about that article we sent them. I think you saw it, sir, and you may remember it begins——" and he read from a typewritten copy in his hand which was headed "Sahara Limited": ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... could not have been fascinated by her, if, at that time of his life, he had ever known a refined woman or mixed at all in the world; but she certainly had a gypsy charm, and seemed to carry oceans of Sahara and caravans of camels about with her. When she was in one of her furies, it was an echo of the whole Greek drama. This, you must recollect, was ten years ago, and even then she was spoiled by being coarse and melodramatic, but now she ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... forget the shock he had received in the old loft five or six weeks ago, and would have agreed if he had been bidden to take her for a sojourn in the Sahara. ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... of antimony, which is the principal ingredient in the pigments of this class. Egypt was famous for the fashion of painting the face from an early period: and in some remarkable curiosities illustrating the Egyptian toilette, which were discovered in the catacombs of Sahara in Middle Egypt, there was a single joint of a common reed containing an ounce or more of the coloring powder, and one of the needles for applying it. The entire process was as follows:—The mineral powder, finely ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... I'll do anything if you'll let me stop a bit, for it's as dull as the Desert of Sahara down there. Shall I sew, read, cone, draw, or do all at once? Bring on your bears. I'm ready." And Laurie sat down with a submissive ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... more nearly acquainted with the latter than Mr. Bancroft. A man, in the words of my Plymouth Brother, 'who knows the Lord,' must needs, from time to time, write less emphatically. It is a fetter dance to the music of minute guns - not at sea, but in a region not a thousand miles from the Sahara. Still, I am half-way through volume three, and shall count myself unworthy of the name of an Englishman if I do not see the back of volume six. The countryman of Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Drake, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... helmsman awfully,—I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back—a help—an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me—I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... the breakfast bell." He dropped into the chair, and lighted his cigar at a candle end. "Say, you never can tell, can you? Climbing up old Baldpate I thought to myself, that hotel certainly makes the Sahara Desert look like a cozy corner. And here you are, as snug and comfortable and at home as if you were in a Harlem flat. You never can tell. And what now? The ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... An excellent idea of the palm in full bearing may be obtained from our illustration, which represents the mode of gathering the dates, of which a single tree will often yield from one to four hundredweight in a season. The fruit varies much in size and quality; and in the oases of the Sahara forty-six ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... everything. He has explored the arid jungles of Africa, drawn forth the spotted cobra by his prehensile tail, snowballed the Russian bear on the snowy slopes of Alpine forests, and sold wooden nutmegs to the unsuspecting innocents of Patagonia. He has peddled patent medicines in the Desert of Sahara, and hung his hat and carved his name on the extreme top of the North Pole. The only difficulty I find in describing him is that I cannot tell what he cannot do. I will therefore set him in motion, as he hates to ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... sa'nters across to whar they're at. Leanin' over Sarah Ann's off-shoulder, bein' the one furthest from that onmitigated Jenks, I says, "Sweetheart, how can you waste time talkin' to this yere hooman Sahara, whose intellects is that ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the ice-hut of a benumbed Eskimo, or a history of the Washington Monument: something cold. Ice is as grateful in your dog-day literature as in your August julep. No one will hold that at such a time he prefers to contemplate a picture of Sahara or of a frying-pan. On the same principle, let us have, in art, our green leaves and warm colors amid the frosts of midwinter. Only the atmospheric extremes, summer and winter, can be seriously considered in "seasoning" periodical literature, the months our almanacs call spring ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... El Dorado he could not find; but now, in prison, he proposed to Secretary Winwood an expedition to secure what he had before sought in vain. The king wavered a while between his cupidity and fear; for, while he longed for gold, as the traveller does for water on the desert of Sahara, he was afraid of giving offence to the Spanish ambassador. But his cupidity was the stronger feeling, and Raleigh was sent with fourteen ships to the coasts of South America. The expedition was in every respect unfortunate to Raleigh and to the king. The gallant commander lost his private ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... an inscrutable stranger meet and love in an oasis of the Sahara. Staged this season with magnificent cast ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... and serves on the board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. From 1997 to 2004, Mr. Baker served as the Personal Envoy of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to seek a political solution to the conflict over Western Sahara. In 2003, Mr. Baker was appointed Special Presidential Envoy for President George W. Bush on the issue of Iraqi debt. In 2005, he was co-chair, with former President Jimmy Carter, of the Commission on Federal Election Reform. Since March 2006, Mr. ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... gloom of the Amazon forests, and had never returned. In the previous century two Cravens had succumbed to the fascination of the North West Passage, another had vanished in Central Asia. Barry's grandfather had perished in a dust storm in the Sahara. And it was to the North African desert that his own thoughts turned most longingly. Japan had satisfied him for a time—but only for a time. Western civilisation had there obtruded too glaringly, and he had admitted frankly to himself ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... entirely different feat from what it is at this day. Where, then, were the published guides? Where were the charts indicating the eligible camping grounds with their springs of pure water? These oases of the American Sahara were not yet acquainted with the white man's foot. The herds of buffaloes, the droves of wild horses, knew not the crack of the white man's rifle. They had fled only at the approach of the native Indian warrior and the yearly fires of the prairie. It was a difficult ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... Southport in Lancashire, where there is the second longest pier in England, a mile in length, from the end of which it is said that on a clear day with a powerful telescope you may perchance see the sea, that a distinguished traveller accustomed to the deserts of Sahara once found it, and that the name Southport is altogether a misnomer, as it is in the north and there is ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... a distance of twelve days to Heluan where there are about 300 Jews. Thence people travel in caravans a journey of fifty days through the great desert called Sahara, to the land of Zawilah, which is Havilah in the land of Gana[179]. In this desert there are mountains of sand, and when the wind rises, it covers the caravans with the sand, and many die from suffocation. Those that escape bring back with them copper, wheat, fruit, all manner of lentils, ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... covered with lovely white bloom, scenting the air with its delicious fragrance, and resembling huge tufts of feathers, eight or nine feet high. As we proceeded, however, we left all traces of vegetation behind us. It was like the Great Sahara. On every side a vast expanse of yellow pumice-stone sand spread around us, an occasional block of rock sticking up here and there, and looking as if it had indeed been fused in a mighty furnace. By half-past ten we had reached the 'Estancia de los Ingleses,' 9,639 feet ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... and amusing episodes in our many Mediterranean and North African wanderings was a visit to the Sahara. Although we penetrated but a short distance into the Great Desert, we were there introduced to aspects of Nature and to phases of life wholly new and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... is varied. In some places it is green, where the gramma-grass has formed a sward; but in most parts it is sterile as the Sahara. Here it appears brown, where the sun-parched earth is bare; there it is of a sandy, yellowish hue; and yonder the salt effervescence renders it as white as the snow upon which ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... the New Sahara desert," answered Tom. "I had the chart projector on just before we splashed in, but I can't tell you ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... parallelogram "props," as we used to call them (may their fathers' graves be defiled!), he stuck dead. For a whole evening did he pore patiently over one of them till A B, setting to C D, crossed hands, poussetted, and whirled round "in Sahara waltz" through his throbbing head. Bed-time, but no rest! Whether he slept or not he could not tell. Who could sleep with that long-bodied, ill-tempered-looking parallelogram A H standing on the bed-clothes, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the desert is real desert, it does not give, to me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color. Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more amiable. Yet these tombs ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... among the rocks and hills for fresh water. Great blackened stones parched and dry as the sands of Sahara met his view on every side, and no sight of water was found until he came to a dark shallow pool so warm that he ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... Macaulay, "The Greek Rhapsodists, according to Plato, could not recite Homer without almost falling into convulsions." The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping knife while he shouts his death song. The Dijazerti in the region of the Sahara believe that communication with Allah is only possible in a state of trance, and accordingly they work themselves into a religious frenzy, while the ignorant among them repeat the name of Allah many thousand times till they fall into ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... the floor. "What are you going to do? That's what brought me here today. I knowed I'd find you all here. When I sent some of you fellows into this blasted Sahara, I was honest. I thought Grass River was a real stream, not a weed patch and a stone outcrop. I'd seen water in it, as I can prove by Aydelot. Remember, when we met down by the ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... always suggests another." He drained his glass and rose. At the other side of the room was the bell-button. His finger was extended and about to touch it when he stopped to think. "No! Great heavens!" said he. "That makes my third, already, and I'm as dry as the desert of Sahara." He sat down again, an air of martyrdom upon his face. "Ah, well, Miss 'Lethe's worth it. I say, Frank, anything new ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... other curiosities that were taken out of the tombs at Sahara relating to Egyptian women, he saw a joint of the common reeds, which contained one of these bodkins and an ounce or more ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... shore of the Mediterranean, west of the Roman province, extended the two kingdoms of the Numidians and the Moors. To what race these people belonged is not precisely known. They were not negroes. The negro tribes have never extended north of the Sahara. Nor were they Carthaginians or allied to the Carthaginians. The Carthaginian colony found them in possession on its arrival. Sallust says that they were Persians left behind by Hercules after his invasion of Spain. ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... a journey across the Sahara in search of the most aggressive and most elusive of the ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... Here in sugar was a model of the achievement which will ever do honour to the name of Jean Dollfus, namely, the cites ouvrieres, and what was no less a triumph of the confectioner's skill, a group representing the romantic ride of M. and Mme. Dollfus on camels towards the Algerian Sahara when visiting the African ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Jarvis half-drew the curtain. "Ah, that's better. Never more than an inch at a time, Jarvis. How many times have I told you that? Never give me a shock like that again; never more than an inch of light at a time. Frantic fiends! From cimmerian, abysmal darkness to Sahara-desert glare!" ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... city as Boston amply justifies its inclusion in a "Historic Towns" series, along with London and Oxford; and it is by no means a singular instance. Even the lover of art will not find America an absolute Sahara. To say nothing of the many masterpieces of European painters that have found a resting-place in America, where there is at least one public picture gallery and several private ones of the first class, the best efforts of American painters, and perhaps still ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... such a city, where I hid a thousand dirhams in a monastery. After a while, I went thither and taking the money, bound it about my waist. Then I set out to return and when I came to the Sahara[FN395]-waste, the carrying of the money was heavy upon me. Presently, I espied a horseman pushing on after me; so I waited till he came up and said to him, "O rider, carry this money for me and earn reward and recompense in Heaven." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... way we've done it?" cried the two, triumphantly. "Why, those two Boys over yonder, uniting their flatulent forces, could not have done better—or worse. Ho! ho! ho! They made last winter a frozen Sahara. We've made the present summer a squashy Swamp! The winter was as dry as the dust of RAMESES. The summer has been as wet as old St. Swithin's gingham. We soaked June, we drenched July, and we drowned August. We squelched the strawberry season, reducing tons ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... Professor Thomas writes[421]: "Certainly the negroes of Virginia did not greatly desire freedom before the idea was developed by agitation from the outside, and many of them resented this outside interference. 'In general, in the whole western Sahara desert, slaves are as much astonished to be told that their relation to their owners is wrong and that they ought to break it, as boys amongst us would be to be told that their relation to their fathers was wrong and ought to be broken.' And it is reported ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... dangerous, and at the same time the most novel, part of the journey. Mr. Richardson had undertaken, on his way to Soudan Proper (his first destination), to pass by the hitherto unexplored kingdom of Aheer or Asben, situated towards the southern limits of the Sahara. The march of the Mission across the deserts that lie between Ghat and that territory was rendered exciting by continual reports of danger from pursuing freebooters of the Haghar and Azgher tribes; but the enemy ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... second, from century to century, from eon to eon, ever squandering two thousand million times as much heat as that which genially warms our temperate regions, as that which draws forth the exuberant vegetation of the tropics, or which rages in the Desert of Sahara? This is indeed a ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... themselves in the white dust, an inch deep, of midsummer, in the road between the wall and the corn—a pitiless Sahara road to traverse at noonday in July, when the air is still and you walk in a hollow way, the yellow wheat on one side and the wall on the other. There is shade in the park within, but a furnace of sunlight without—weariness to ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... this favored spot is as lifeless as the history of Sahara. Not a single event occurred of which even Spain can be proud; not a monument was raised which reflects any credit upon the mother country. Every thing was prescribed by law, and all law emanated from a tribunal five thousand miles distant. There was no relation of private life with which the government ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... causeway. Men's minds got confused in the immensity of the uproar, and deafness became epidemic. In winter, the surface of Macadam formed a series of little lakes, resembling on a small scale those of Canada; in summer, it formed a Sahara of dust, prodigiously like the great desert. Acres of the finest alluvial clay floated past the shops in autumn; in spring, clouds of the finest sand were wafted among the goods, and penetrated to every drawer and wareroom. And high over all, throughout all the main highways of commerce—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various |
