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More "Brackish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... articulated coasts, showing the interpenetration of sea and land in a broad band of capes and islands separated by tidal channels and inlets, or on shores deeply incised by river estuaries, or on low shelving beaches which screen brackish lagoons and salt marshes behind sand reefs and dune ramparts, and which thus form an indeterminate boundary of alternate land and water, the zone character of the coast in a physical sense becomes conspicuous. In an anthropological ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... for realizing the exact picture of large collections of water; the waves danced along above, and the shadows of the trees were vividly reflected beneath the surface in such an admirable manner, that the loose cattle, whose thirst had not been slaked sufficiently by the very brackish water of Nchokotsa, with the horses, dogs, and even the Hottentots ran off toward the deceitful pools. A herd of zebras in the mirage looked so exactly like elephants that Oswell began to saddle a horse in order to hunt them; but a sort of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... could not stand. Twenty emaciated men were laid along the shore. Steller hurried off to hunt anti-scorbutic plants, while Waxel, who had taken command, and Khitroff ordered the water-casks filled. Unfortunately the only pool they could find was connected with an arm of the sea. The water was brackish, and this ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Babinet, Etudes et Lectures, ii, pp. 108,110.] The presence of the seal is hardly conclusive on this point, for it is sometimes seen in Lake Champlain at the distance of some hundreds of miles from even brackish water. One of these animals was killed on the ice in that lake in February, 1810, another in February, 1846, [Footnote: Thompson, Natural History of Vermont, p. 38, and Appendix, p. 18. There is no reason to believe ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... stay at Tinian, filling water took up the whole of their time, the well not affording more than three tons a day, sometimes only two tons: the water was rather brackish, but otherwise not ill tasted. They found the fowls and hogs very shy, and the cattle had quite deserted the south part of the island, owing, as was imagined, to the alarm the Charlotte's people had ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... at him now; there he stands, moping all the day long on that everlasting one leg of his. He turns with disgust from the mouldy corn before him, and the brackish water in his little trough. He mourns no doubt his lost companions, literally snatched from him one by one, and never seen again. But his days of mourning will be few for Mungo, our black cook, told me yesterday that the word ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... squat, its vaulted roof upheld by massive columns on whose capitals lozenges and bishop's croziers were carved, dated from the eleventh century. The altar stone survived intact. Brackish daylight, which seemed to have been filtered through layers of horn, came in at the openings, hardly lighting the shadowed, begrimed walls and the earth floor, which too was pierced by the entrance to an oubliette or ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... some part of its density; the same is observed in all those things which are strained through ashes. The schools of Plato, that the element of water being compacted by the rigor of the air became sweet, but that part which was expired from the earth, being enfired, became of a brackish taste. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... his lungs in diver fashion, Grief turned over and went down through the water. Salt it was to his lips, and warm to his flesh; but at last, deep down, it perceptibly chilled and tasted brackish. Then, suddenly, his body entered the cold, subterranean stream. He removed the small stopper from the calabash, and, as the sweet water gurgled into it, he saw the phosphorescent glimmer of a big fish, like a sea ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... jerk of his neck the Senior Surgeon rooted his mud-gagged mouth a half inch further towards free and spontaneous speech. Very laboriously, very painstakingly, he spat out one by one two stones and a wisp of ground pine and a brackish, prickly ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... although the large capitalisation aroused suspicion in the Senate, and Chief Justice Lansing called it "a novel experiment,"[157] the bill passed. Thus the Manhattan Bank came into existence, while wells, brackish and unwholesome, continued the only sufficient ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Kansas, before the war, I once had a walk of several miles under a burning sun, in a region where not a drop of water could be found. When I finally reached it, the only water to be found was in a small, stagnant pool, covered with a green scum nearly an inch in thickness. Warm, brackish, and fever-laden as that water was, I had never before tasted any thing half so sweet. Again, while crossing the Great Plains in 1860, I underwent a severe and prolonged thirst, only quenching it with the bitter alkali-water of the desert. On neither of these occasions were my sufferings ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... Turk was able to walk with the caravan; a fortnight later it could gallop by Frank's side. They were now entering the Alkali Plains, a wide and desolate region, where water is extremely scarce, and, when found, brackish and bitter to the taste, and where the very shrubs are impregnated with salt, and uneatable by most animals. In anticipation of the hardships to be endured in crossing this region, the bullocks had been allowed for some ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... north, shutting off the view, appeared quite near, he assumed that it was a small, brackish lake, like many others in Africa. A few years later it appeared how great an error he committed* [* It was the great lake which was discovered in 1888 by the celebrated traveler Teleki and which he named Lake Rudolf.]. For the time being, however, he was not concerned ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... blackish sediment. Hippocrates says, "Water which is easily warmed or easily chilled is alway lighter." But that water is bad which takes a long time to boil vegetables; and so too is water full of nitre, or brackish. And in his book 'On Waters,' Hippocrates calls good water drinkable; but stagnant water he calls bad, such as that from ponds or marshes. And most ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... pear-shaped harbours were produced.) Most authors have attributed this fact to the injurious effects of the fresh water, even where it enters the sea only in small quantity, and during a part of the year. No doubt brackish water would prevent or retard the growth of coral; but I believe that the mud and sand which is deposited, even by rivulets when flooded, is a much more efficient check. The reef on each side of the channel leading into Port Louis at Mauritius, ends ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... scattered trees pulled down by the wind caused by the thighs of that hero endued with the speed of the wind as he rushed after the deer. And proceeding, guided by those marks, to a spot filled with dry winds and abounding in leafless vegetables, brackish and devoid of water, covered with thorny plants and scattered over with gravel, stumps and shrubs and difficult of access and uneven and dangerous, he saw in a mountain cavern his younger brother motionless, caught in the folds of that foremost ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... seen, is said to convey the water out of the Valley of Siloam, and to supply the means of irrigating the little gardens still cultivated in that spot. Notwithstanding the dirty state of the water, and its harsh and brackish taste, it is still used by devout pilgrims for diseases of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... folded marine and brackish water strata younger than the Jurassic, but more especially those of ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... king cut up the land was this, namely because those of the Egyptians who had their cities not on the river but in the middle of the country, being in want of water when the river went down from them, found their drink brackish because they had it ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... dead stock, serving out two ounces to each, and half a pint of beer for the day. Nothing but brackish water could be obtained by digging in the sand. We collected all the provisions together near the tent, and formed a kind of storehouse, setting an officer to guard them from plunder, to which indeed some of the evil characters ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... course was often impeded by fallen trunks and half-burned stumps. Several times we had to turn aside to avoid the swampy ponds, fringed with tall saw-grass; from amid which rose snipes, plovers, and wild-ducks, and occasionally flocks of the beautiful white egret and snowy heron. The water was brackish, and covered with lilies of varied colours; from amid which, every now and then, alligators popped out their heads to look at us. Other birds, among them the great sand-hill crane, stalked about, until, uttering loud whoops, they took to flight, ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... on the floor of beaten earth. The old woman went out. Through the gaps in the walls Lewis saw her build a fire and put a pot of the brackish water on to boil. Then he saw her drag the setting hen from her nest and wring its neck. He ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... getting footsore and tired again before she found it, some distance away, in a gully coming from a fissure in a dislocated piece of outcrop. It was beautifully clear, cold, and sparkling, with a slightly sweetish taste, yet unlike the brackish "alkali" of the plains. It refreshed and soothed her greatly, so much that, reclining against a tree, but where she would be quite visible from the trail, her eyes closed dreamily, and ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of an animal diet, which, in all probability, would soon prove fatal alone. On the few cocoa-trees upon the island, the number of which did not exceed thirty, very little fruit was found; and, in general, what was found, was either not fully grown, or had the juice salt, or brackish. So that a ship touching here, must expect nothing but fish and turtles, and of these an abundant ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... Coal appears in the bed and banks of the Wollombi, near Mr. Blaxland's station, and at no great distance from his farm is a salt spring, also in the bed of this brook. The waters in the lesser tributaries, on the north bank of the river Hunter, become brackish when the current ceases. In that part of the bed of this river, which is nearest to the Wollombi (or to Wambo rather) I found an augitic rock, consisting of a ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Tell me of the creatures in it, And philosophize a little." Then the youthful Youkahainen Thus replied to Wainamoinen: "Know I well the titmouse-fountains, Pretty birdling is the titmouse; And the viper, green, a serpent; Whitings live in brackish waters; Perches swim in every river; Iron rusts, and rusting weakens; Bitter is the taste of umber; Boiling water is malicious; Fire is ever full of danger; First physician, the Creator; Remedy the oldest, water; Magic is the child of sea-foam; God the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... brought it from Alexandria. It was filthy water, full of dirt, and very brackish to taste. Also it was warm. During the two months at Suvla Bay I never tasted a drop of cold water—it ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... could I feel as I have felt—or be what I have been, Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene; {252} As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be, So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... was thirty days' voyage; that it springs out of a great rock, and makes a most violent stream; and that this rock stands so near unto the South Sea, that in storms the waves beat into the stream and make it brackish.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... doused his body into the water and let his pores drink, and threw buckets of it on his beseeching mules; but only after the well-hole had been scraped and bailed twice would he permit them to drink the brackish water. Then he tied them in the shade of the wilting mesquite trees and strode to ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... quickly started a fire. Tommy arrived some moments later with the coffee pot and other utensils. While all this was going on Harriet was spreading out their belongings so these might dry out in the sunlight. But the water for the coffee, secured some distance back, was brackish and poor. They made it do, however, and as quickly as possible had boiled their coffee and warmed over the beef and canned beans as well. As for drinking water, there was none at hand fit for this purpose. Dishes were somewhat limited, many ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... with the exception perhaps of some Pinnularioe, and Asterophyllites, there is a remarkable absence from the coal measures of any form of properly aquatic vegetation. (7) The occurrence of marine, or brackish-water animals, in the roofs of coal- beds, or even in the coal itself, affords no evidence of subaqueous accumulation, since the same thing occurs in the case of modern submarine forests. For these and other reasons, some ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... accumulation of social shells, like Oysters. Lastly, if we find the deposit to contain the remains of marine shells, but that these are dwarfed of their fair proportions and distorted in figure, we may conclude that it was laid down in a brackish sea, such as the Baltic, in which the proper saltness was wanting, owing to its receiving an excessive ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... piled in heaps among the ruins of their former habitations. For leagues beyond, the channel began to widen, and at length became so vast that one shore was no longer visible from the other. The water was now brackish, and beautiful sea-shells were seen strewn along the shore. They had reached the mouth of the Mississippi, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... alone—let me alone—your pearls can do nothing for me. When I am not working, I am bored, bored to death, so bored that I could kill myself; my ideas are of the color of that thick, brackish water flowing yonder. To be just at the beginning of life and to be disgusted with it! It's hard. I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in her chair, never opening her mouth, but smiling all ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... ardent gaze of a beast of prey watching for its spoil, and, suddenly, with a swift movement, he darted his forked weapon into the sea so vigorously that it secured a large fish swimming near the bottom. It was a conger eel, which managed to wriggle, half dead as it was, into a puddle of the brackish water. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... It needs all the violence of the fresh, strong, monsoon winds to even partially purge these villages of the rank odours which cling to them at the end of the fishing season; and when all has been done, the saltness of the sea air, the brackish water of the wells, and the faint stale smells emitted by the nets and fishing tackle still tell unmistakable tales of the one trade in which every member of these communities is ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Yankee phrase is designated as "Jack of all trades and master of none." If instead of being allowed to spread out so much, the educational stream is confined between narrow banks, it will show a deep and full current. If allowed to spread over the marshes and plains, it becomes sluggish and brackish. Our course of study for the common schools in recent years, has been largely added to and has been extended over the whole field of knowledge. History, geography, natural science lessons and drawing have been added to the old reading, writing, arithmetic, ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... illustrations of this doctrine. His villains (with a significant exception) are never monsters. They have some touch of human emotion. No desert, according to him, is so bare but that some sweet spring blends with its brackish waters. His grasping landladies have genuine movements of sympathy; and even the scoundrelly Black George, the game-keeper, is anxious to do Tom Jones a good turn, without risk, of course, to his own comfort, by way of compensation for previous injuries. It is this impartial insight into the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... heels, put them out of heart. Besides, having to fight for every step of the way increased their distress from thirst. Those that were in the van came up to a river, the water of which was extremely cool and clear, but brackish and medicinal, and, on being drunk, produced immediate pains in the bowels and a renewed thirst. Of this the Mardian had forewarned them, but they could not forbear, and, beating back those that opposed them, they drank of it. Antony ran from ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... people employed in burning large quantities of a coarse-looking rush and stalks of a plant which I had seen growing in a marsh near at hand. I had, the day before, by chance tasted the water in the march, and found it slightly brackish. On examining the proceedings of the people, I found that they were employed in manufacturing salt. Before them were a number of funnel-shaped baskets formed of grass rope. These were filled with the ashes, and water being ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... Terrestrial Nature of the Growth of Coal. Erect fossil Trees. Uniting of many Coal-seams into one thick Bed. Purity of the Coal explained. Conversion of Coal into Anthracite. Origin of Clay-ironstone. Marine and brackish-water Strata in Coal. Fossil Insects. Batrachian Reptiles. Labyrinthodont Foot-prints in Coal-measures. Nova Scotia Coal-measures with successive Growths of erect fossil Trees. Similarity of American and European ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... shore at the mouth of the creek which ran near his cave when he noticed a group of fishes, dark bluish above with silvery sides. The largest of them were about two feet long. They were feeding on the bottom in the brackish water at the mouth of the creek, which at its mouth opened out into quite a little bay or inlet. They would take up a mouthful of earth from the bottom and let it wash through their mouths, keeping all the bits of food that happened to be in it. ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... the water, and placed the firewood in her, with the stock of flour, frozen meat, and the bears' flesh; then with the kettle and frying-pan they baled eight or ten buckets of water into her, for Godfrey did not know how soon the river would become brackish. They spread the bear-skin over all, then having carefully repacked the canoe, they put her also into the water, stepped the mast, took their places in her, hoisted the sail, and with the boat in tow ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... soft-heartedness in the struggle. "Behold these Christians," he wrote to the Khalif of Bagdad, "how they come crowding in! How emulously they press on! They are continually receiving fresh re-enforcements more numerous than the waves of the sea, and to us more bitter than its brackish waters. Where one dies by land, a thousand come by sea. . . . The crop is more abundant than the harvest; the tree puts forth more branches than the axe can lop off. It is true that great numbers have already perished, insomuch that the edge of our swords is blunted; but our comrades ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... relation to marine and fresh-water animals might be observed in this chain of lagoons which skirt the coast of Brazil. M. Gay has stated that he found in the neighbourhood of Rio shells of the marine genera solen and mytilus, and fresh-water ampullariae, living together in brackish water. (2/2. "Annales des Sciences Naturelles" for 1833.) I also frequently observed in the lagoon near the Botanic Garden, where the water is only a little less salt than in the sea, a species of hydrophilus, very similar ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef, mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground off the north end of the larger bank in fifteen fathoms water; bottom sandy, with coral patches. Here he was detained seven days by a calm, the crew suffering severely from the water, which was gone quite bad; and it was only on the evening of the 12th ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and disposed of his portion in three mouthfuls. There was a small quantity of rain-water—about half a pint—which had been collected and carefully husbanded in the baling-dish. It was mingled with a little spray, and was altogether a brackish and dirty mixture, nevertheless they drank it with as much relish as if it ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... and a case of wine, which he had brought for emergencies. We had a tin cup and a small breaker; but the men, supposing that they would not be long absent from the schooner, had neglected to fill it with water, while that in the stream, as the tide was then rising, was brackish. They continued grumbling for some time, till Uncle Denis produced the biscuits and a bottle of wine, which he divided among them and ourselves. Our scanty supper being finished, the men threw themselves down by the side of the fire, hoping that the smoke would keep off the mosquitoes, which ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... frizzled cotes which do the mountains hide, Where never gale was longer known to stay Than from the smooth wave it had swept away The new divorced leaves, that from each side Left the thick boughs to dance out with the tide. At further end the creek, a stately wood Gave a kind shadow (to the brackish flood) Made up of trees, not less kenn'd by each skiff Than that sky-scaling peak of Teneriffe, Upon whose tops the hernshew bred her young, And hoary moss upon their branches hung; Whose rugged rinds sufficient were to show, Without their height, what time they 'gan ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the road made by the Jayhawkers and found it quite level, but sandy. Following this I came to a campfire soon after dark at which E. Doty and mess were camped. As I was better acquainted I camped with them. They said the water there was brackish and I soon found out the same thing for myself. It was a poor camp; no grass, poor water and scattering, bitter sage brush for food for the cattle. It would not do to wait long here, and so ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... Singapore jail in Brass Basa Road was originally a piece of low ground saturated with brackish water; and the convicts themselves were, as we have elsewhere stated, employed in conveying red earth from the side of Government Hill to reclaim most of this marsh, in order to erect thereon the necessary buildings for their occupation. The site ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... for the huts of the natives. Some animals were seen resembling wolves, lean as skeletons,—probably dingoes. At last some brackish water was found, and the Roebuck proceeded to Timor. Here the ship, being refitted and the crew refreshed, Dampier sailed on the 20th of December for the coast of New Guinea. It was made on the 1st of January, 1700, and appeared to be high, level land, covered ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... moment, but only for a moment. Her thirst was too great to allow niceties to interfere with it. She picked up one of the clean coffee-cups that had rolled to her feet, rinsed it several times, and then drank. The water was warm and slightly brackish, but she needed it too much to mind. In spite of being tepid it relieved the dry, suffocating feeling in her throat and refreshed her. The Nubian went away again, leaving the woman still ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... leave, and on their journey went, Their will could brook no stay, their zeal, no let; To Ascalon their voyage straight they bent, Whose broken shores with brackish waves are wet, And there they heard how gainst the cliffs, besprent With bitter foam, the roaring surges bet, A tumbling brook their passage stopped and stayed, Which late-fall'n rain had proud and ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... abnormal an education can have been entirely without drawbacks, it is no part of my purpose to affirm. Tossed, as one may say, to sink or swim amid the waves of life, where those waves ran turbid and brackish, Dickens had emerged strengthened, triumphant. But that some little signs should not remain of the straining and effort with which he had won the land, was scarcely to be expected. He himself, in his more confidential communications with Forster, seems to avow a consciousness that this was so; ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... where we were then they give less trouble than anywhere. For though they soon go sick on good corn, which a horse must have, they thrive and grow fat on desert gleanings; and whereas sweet water will make their bellies ache oftener than not, the brackish, dirty stuff from wells by the Dead Sea shore ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... deliciousness of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued to be called, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and any old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of intestinal mischief to those who quench their ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Indian troops and of how "they made my mouth water, especially the 6th Gurkhas." I ask him if I could not anyway have them "as a sort of escort to the Mountain Battery," and go on to say, "The desert is drying up, Cox tells me; such water as there is is becoming more and more brackish and undrinkable; and no other serious raid, in his opinion, will be possible this summer." I might have added that once we open the ball at the Dardanelles the old Turks must dance to our tune, and draw in their troops for the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... with a group of men, slipped off my load, and then lay quite still for a long time. After a while I had my first drink of water for that day. We stayed there some time, and one or two of the men had found a well. But it was brackish and the men should not have touched it, for it made them worse. Several were knocked out ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... to detest us, Herrick!" said Mr Brooke, after we had been waiting patiently for about a quarter of an hour, impatiently another, but not quite in idleness, for, after tasting the river water to find that it was very slightly brackish now, the tub and the jar were both ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... land for fresh water. One man died as he was lifted from the decks to the shore. Bering could not stand unaided. Twenty emaciated sailors were taken out of their berths and propped up on the sand. And the water they took from this rocky island was brackish, and only increased the ravages of ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... chief town of a sanjak of the Konia vilayet in Asia Minor. It is called by the Christians Polydorion. Its altitude is 3150 ft. and it is situated in the midst of gardens, about 2 m. from the brackish lake, Buldur Geul (anc. Ascania Limne). Linen-weaving and leather-tanning are the principal industries. There is a good carriage road to Dineir, by which much grain is sent from the Buldur plain, and a railway connects it with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in all the papers, and brackish bathing-places on the St. Lawrence were already crowded. The Saguenay and Marguerite rivers had carried off their fishing votaries, the black fly worked its wicked will at Tadousac, where the "property" whale of the —— hotel had already been seen spouting, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... those we caught were mostly sharks, dog-fish, and a fish called by the seamen nurses, like the dog-fish, only full of small white spots; and some small fish not unlike sprats. The lagoons (which are brackish) abound with trout, and several other sorts of fish, of which we caught a few with lines, but being much encumbered with stumps of trees, we could not haul ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... fanned his long hair and caused him to look in the direction of the fleecy white clouds which were creeping upward from the horizon. Soon there would be fog. Then he could continue on his way to the brackish spring on the bluff-side overlooking the south shore. From there it was only a stone's throw to the beach where the mussels and abalones clung ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... morning, a caravan was formed to penetrate into the interior, for the purpose of finding some fresh water. We did accordingly find some at a little distance from the sea, by digging among the sand. Every one instantly flocked round the little wells, which furnished enough to quench our thirst. This brackish water was found to be delicious, although it had a sulphurous taste: its colour was that of whey. As all our clothes were wet and in tatters, and as we had nothing to change them, some generous officers offered theirs. My step-mother, my ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... for it nourish'd her Leander's life; Which with her robe she rescu'd from their strife: But silk too soft was such hard hearts to break; And, she, dear soul, even as her silk, faint, weak, Could not preserve it; out, O, out it went! Leander still call'd Neptune, that now rent His brackish curls, and tore his wrinkled face, Where tears in billows did each other chase; And, burst with ruth, he hurl'd his marble mace At the stern Fates; it wounded Lachesis That drew Leander's thread, and could not ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... faith in his fellow being. Life made music in tuneful chords upon the strings of his heart. The twin wells of love and faith were always brimming for his friends; overflowing for the one man whose act was to turn their waters brackish and bitter. That man was his father, John Harper Drennen, a man prominent enough in the financial world to make much copy for the newspapers up and down the country and to occupy no little place in transoceanic cable ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... River, (after my friend who is now surveying the coast of this continent), and found, at one third ebb, four fathoms. King's River appeared equally deep, and was about one hundred yards broad; the water at this time of the tide brackish: the country covered with brush, the soil very rich; and a few ceder trees were scattered among the other timber. The vines were of enormous size, and in many instances had entirely enveloped the trees to which they had ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... shore in their turn, while the others were anchored out at sea. But their greatest discouragement arose from the unexpectedly long time which it took to reduce a body of men shut up in a desert island, with only brackish water to drink, a matter which they had imagined would take them only a few days. The fact was that the Lacedaemonians had made advertisement for volunteers to carry into the island ground corn, wine, cheese, and any other food useful in a siege; high prices being offered, and freedom promised ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... the Sabbatia tribe keep close to the Atlantic Coast in salt meadows and marshes, along the borders of brackish rivers, and very rarely in the sand at the edges of fresh-water ponds a little way inland. From Maine to Florida they range, and less frequently are met along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico so far as Louisiana. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... established, the proprietor of which kept a register of passing herds for the convenience of owners. None of ours were due, yet we looked over the "arrivals" with interest, and continued on down the trail to Red Fork. The latter was a branch of the Arkansas River, and at low water was inclined to be brackish, and hence was sometimes called the Salt Fork, with nothing to differentiate it from one of the same name sixty miles farther north. There was an old Indian trading post at Red Fork, and I lay over there while Edwards went on south to meet the cows. ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... doubtless they enjoyed the same reputation in the more remote time of the Pharaohs. A few fishing villages, however, are mentioned as scattered along the littoral; watering-places, at some distance apart, frequented on account of their wells of brackish water by the desert tribes: such were Nahasit, Tap-Nekhabit, Sau, and Tau: these the Egyptian merchant-vessels used as victualling stations, and took away as cargo the products of the country—mother-of-pearl, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... was slow to respond. He was lying face down, he knew that. And he ought to get up. If he didn't get up he would drown. Something hot and heavy, like a huge hand, was pressing him deeper into the brackish mire. He pondered. Perhaps it were better to drown. For a moment he allowed himself the luxury of the thought, then decided against it. Plenty of time later for drowning. First there was something he ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... first, some of the cruisers completed their water by dipping it carefully from the surface. But on the fleet anchoring in the bay, the launches, with the armed boats to protect them, were sent up the river, where the water was not at all brackish. An arrangement was eventually made with the French General, who agreed not to molest the boats, the Admiral on his part promising that none of his people should be suffered to land on the marshes, or in any way to disturb the cattle grazing there, of which there were many thousands. ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... amuses itself mainly with questionable jests that range all the way from the slightly brackish to the hopelessly obscene. Now, in using this type of anecdote, the Hooker's- Benders must not be thought to design an attack upon the decencies of life; on the contrary, they are relying on the fact that their hearers have, in the depths of their beings, a profound reverence for the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... travelling on this occasion was decidedly eccentric. On reaching a village he would tell his coachman where to go next but he never told him more than one stage in advance. Every morning he would consume one of his rolls and wash it down with the lukewarm brackish water of the Maros—and bitter enough he found the taste of it too. He never quitted the carriage for more than two or three minutes at a time, and he presented his pistols point blank at everyone who approached him ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... besieged was gloomy enough. True their provisions still held out, but they suffered greatly from want of water, that within the enclosure being quite brackish, until a fresh spring was suddenly discovered in the courtyard. Even then the fact that scarcely a man had escaped unwounded, and that they had no prospect before them but a lingering death by famine, or one more dreadful still upon the altar of sacrifice, made their situation a very trying one. ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... of the Humboldt is a lake of strong, brackish water, where the river empties into the natural basin, formed by the slant of the surrounding district of mountains, plain and desert, and where some of the water sinks into the ground and much of it evaporates, there being no surface outlet. In the latter part of the summer ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... has wandered hither from the sea, and can't find her way out again. And so, you see, she lies there dying in the brackish water. ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it caused that undefinable shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially comes over one by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would follow a slight gasping and contest against chocking, that seemed to me a perfect convulsion; for I suppose ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... and enclosed it anew. Now the city at that time was of no use, there being no water in it by which could be raised gardens and orchards, except the water of the Nagumdym which was far from it, for what water there was in the country was all brackish and allowed nothing to grow; and the King, desiring to increase that city and make it the best in the kingdom, determined to bring to it a very large river which was at a distance of five leagues ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... his experiences had taught him to expect only injury and wrong. The Ragnor home and its love and truth had been the miracle that had for nine months turned his brackish water of life into wine. Was it going to fail him, as everything else had done? He laughed inwardly at the cruel thought and whispered to himself: "This, too, can be borne, but oh, Thora, Thora!" and the two words shattered his pride and ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... corner you meet water-carriers, and little wagons loaded with tubs of water. Attempts have frequently been made to procure this indispensable element by digging; water has, indeed, in some instances gushed forth, but it always had a brackish taste. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... the fear of death was bitter and sick and accursed, As brackish water to drink of which is to ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... do not, they think and believe that they shall never prosper, which image they call in the Spanish tongue Nostra Signora de Guadaloupe. At this place there are certain cold baths, which arise, springing up as though the water did seethe, the water whereof is somewhat brackish in taste, but very good for any that have any sore or wound to wash themselves therewith, for as they say, it healeth many; and every year once upon Our Lady Day, the people used to repair thither to offer and to pray in that church before the image, ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt
... and further, that this huge rock standeth so neere vnto a Sea, that many times in stormes (the winde comming outwardly from the sea) the waues thereof are beaten into the said fresh streame, so that the fresh water for a certaine space, groweth salt and brackish: I tooke a resolution with my selfe, hauing dismissed Menatonon vpon a ransome agreed for, and sent his sonne into the Pinnesse to Roanoak, to enter presently so farre into that Riuer with two double whirries, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... with the hope of getting my fingers to tingle by handling the snow; but it was frozen so hard I could not scrape up with my nails as much as a half-dozen of flakes would make. What I got I dissolved in my mouth and found it brackish; however, I suspected it would be sweeter and perhaps not so stonily frozen higher up, where there was less chance of the salt spray mingling with it, and I resolved when the light came to fill my empty beer-bottles as with salt or pounded sugar for use hereafter—that is, ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... life is that of the freshwaters, including river and lake, pond and pool, swamp and marsh. It may have been colonised by gradual migration up estuaries and rivers, or by more direct passage from the seashore into the brackish swamp. Or it may have been in some cases that partially landlocked corners of ancient seas became gradually turned into freshwater basins. The animal population of the freshwaters is very representative, and is diversely adapted to meet ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the water washed over her, but there were the falls at nearly the same distance as when she embarked, and there they stayed as well. The water, too, was no more fresh and sweet, but had a salt and brackish taste. The sun was nearly overhead, and she was in an agony of apprehension before she saw the falls slide slowly back, and in one of a fresh succession of wonders, understanding nothing of it, she found herself, with a strange sucking heave under her, falling on the ebb-tide as before she had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... a hill country one expects to find springs, but not to depend upon them; for when found they are often brackish and unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you find the hot sink of Death Valley, or high rolling districts where the air has always a tang of frost. Here are the long heavy winds and breathless calms on the tilted ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... is this affair?' 'You must go and kill a man named Hatim-Thai, who lives on the confines of Syria.' To this I replied: 'O my lord, king of the world, I am only a Bedouin, a poor robber, wandering in the forests and the plains. For drink I have but the brackish water of the marshes. For food I have only rats and locusts.' On account of my wretchedness, I obeyed the wishes of the King, and promised to execute this affair. But here I am, in a very embarrassing situation, for I do not know this Hatim-Thai, and I don't even know ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... eyes; and yet their very help might weaken us. When we have beaten our way across with the roar of the distant waves still in our ears, the shadows of the black, fierce, jagged cliff hardly faded, the taste of the brackish spray still lingering on our lips, an exultant thrill speeds through every nerve as we clasp a hand that has had to buffet through ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... would you do in those damnable sickly gutters—floundering about in the brackish ditchwater? Dishwater I should rather ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... and especially those of England, but it had lately been forsaken, on account of the supposed badness of its water. This supposition, however, arose from a want of duly examining the brook by which the water is supplied. It is, indeed, brackish at the lower part of the brook, but higher up it will be found excellent. The lieutenant, therefore, was clearly of opinion, that Prince's Island is a more eligible place for ships to touch at, than ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... hills billowing to a brick red sky, where the sun hung a dull blaze. There were tracks of the fleeing drovers having paused for a rest in the same place. It was a pebble bottom hot and dry. Wayland scooped under with his Service axe and an ooze of clay water seeped slowly up forming a brackish pool. He had to hold the little mule back from fighting the horses for that water. When the animals had drunk, he filled the water bag with the settlings. Towards three in the morning, the soft velvet pansy blue Desert dark broke ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... think that oysters are not best when quite fresh from their beds, and that their flavour is too brackish and harsh, and is much ameliorated by giving them ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... No permanent streams water this region; occasional "wadys" or torrent-courses, only full after heavy rains, are found; but the scattered inhabitants depend for water chiefly on their wells, which are deep and numerous, but yield only a scanty supply of a brackish and unpalatable fluid. No settled population can at any time have found subsistence in this region, which produces only a few dates, and in places a poor and unsucculent herbage. Sandstorms are frequent, and at times the baleful simoon sweeps across the entire tract, destroying with its pestilential ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... I have felt,—or be what I have been, Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene; As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be, So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... vessels riding at anchor in Hobson's Bay. Here, too, the briny scent of the sea, carrying up over grassy flats, met their nostrils, and set Mahony hungrily sniffing. The brief twilight came and went, and it was already night when they urged their weary beasts over the Moonee ponds, a winding chain of brackish waterholes. The horses shambled along the broad, hilly tracks of North Melbourne; warily picked their steps through the city itself. Dingy oil-lamps, set here and there at the corners of roads so broad that you could hardly see across ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... that it contains no running water, but I draw my supply from wells or rather fountains, for they are situated at a high level. Indeed, it is one of the curious characteristics of the shore here that wherever you dig you find moisture ready to hand, and the water is quite fresh and not even brackish in the slightest degree, though the sea is so close by. The neighbouring woods furnish us with abundance of fuel, and other supplies we get from a colony of Ostia. The village, which is separated only by one residence from my own, supplies my modest wants; it boasts of three ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... the first squatter coming this way. The runs about it are very extensive; the natives few and inoffensive, and the stock-yard etc., left there, renders it very complete. I must not omit, however, to mention, that the water had become slightly brackish, but not so as to be unpalatable, or even, indeed, perceptible, except to persons unused to it. The large reach had fallen two feet since the party first occupied that station. In other reaches lower down, that we passed during this day's journey, the water was perfectly ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... salt, formed in a saturated solution, fall to the bottom; and by the attraction between crystals of a similar nature and form, the crystallized masses daily augment. It is generally observed that the water is brackish wherever lagoons are formed in clayey ground. It is true, that for the new salt-work near the battery of Araya, the seawater is received into pits, as in the salt marshes of the south of France; but in the island of Margareta, near Pampatar, salt is manufactured ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... mild, and gentle, and friendly to the constitution, than the said damps: but I know that the place where I was bred stands upon a zonic of coal; that the water which the inhabitants generally use is hard and brackish; and that the people are remarkably subject to the king's evil and consumption. These I would impute to the bad water, impregnated with the vitriol and brine of coal, as there is nothing in the constitution of the air that should render such distempers endemial. That the air of Boulogne ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the relief of Carolina. Early in the year 1761 he landed at Charlestown, where he took up his winter quarters, until the proper season should approach for taking the field. Unfortunately during this time many of the soldiers, by drinking brackish water, were taken sick, which afforded the inhabitants an opportunity of showing their kindness and humanity. They considered themselves, and with reason, under the strongest obligations to treat men with tenderness, who came to protect them against ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... button-tipped stigmatic branches above. Stem: 4 to 7 ft. tall, stout, from perennial root. Leaves: 3 to 7 in. long, tapering, pointed, egg-shaped, densely white, downy beneath lower leaves, or sometimes all, lobed at middle. Preferred Habitat - Brackish marshes, riversides, lake shores, saline situations. Flowering Season - August-September. Distribution - Massachusetts to the Gulf of Mexico, westward to Louisiana; found locally in the interior, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... ice sometimes means bread or no bread to scores of families, and it means added or diminished comforts to many more. It is a crop that takes two or three weeks of rugged winter weather to grow, and, if the water is very roily or brackish, even longer. It is seldom worked till it presents seven or eight inches of clear water ice. Men go out from time to time and examine it, as the farmer goes out and examines his grain or grass, to ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... at its inner extremity for about one mile with thick solid ice. At the inner end of every fjord there is a river, flowing through a valley, which is the continuation of the fjord; consequently the water is only brackish and freezes more easily than salt water. Further on the fjord is free of ice, for in this part of the world, though so far north, the sea is made warm by the Gulf Stream, the very same Gulf Stream that starts from West Africa and flows westward to the coast of Brazil, ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... Pedagogue, with sudden drub, Smites his scald-head, that is already sore,— Superfluous wound,—such is Misfortune's rub! Who straight makes answer with redoubled roar, And sheds salt tears twice faster than before, That still, with backward fist, he strives to dry; Washing, with brackish moisture, o'er and o'er, His muddy cheek, that grows more foul thereby, Till all his rainy face looks grim ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... whose banks the fertile mountains stood In ages passed bravely crowned with wood, Which lending cold-sweet shadows gave it grace To be accounted Cynthia's bathing-place; And from her father Neptune's brackish court, Fair Thetis thither often would resort, Attended by the fishes of the sea, Which in those sweeter waters came to plea. There would the daughter of the Sea God dive, And thither came the Land Nymphs every ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... There are a certain number of reservoirs and cisterns which hold up water during the rains. In the winter time these would be full. The Turk is less particular about the water which he drinks than the white man, and doubtless he could, to some extent, be supplied from some of the brackish pools in the desert, with water that no one would think of ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... the worst of it, as the bed was so fearfully ploughed up by the pack-horses ahead of them. The whole bed of this peculiar creek appears to be a quicksand, and when I say it was nearly a quarter of a mile wide, its formidable nature will be understood. Here a stream of slightly brackish water was trickling down the bed in a much narrower channel, however, than its whole width; and where the water appears upon the surface, there the bog is most to be apprehended. Sometimes it runs under one bank, sometimes under the opposite, and again, at other places the water occupies the mid-channel. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... prized. In Melbourne we have no water, but such as is carted by the water barrel carters from the river Yarra-Yarra. Every house has its barrel or hogshead for holding water. The Yarra-Yarra water is brackish, and causes dysentery. The complaint is now prevailing. In many parts of the interior puddle holes are made, and water is thus secured from the heavy rain that falls in the early part of summer. Water saved in this manner never becomes putrid. The leaves of the gum-tree fall into the pool abundantly, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... stunted; it scants them both in food and drink. Its miserliness is deep-set: artesian wells sunk a thousand feet through its dull grey sands bring up only a brackish yellow water; a precarious ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... the Chasseurs had pitched their camp where a few barren, withered trees gave a semblance of shelter, and a little thread of brackish water ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... with eight doti, or thirty-two yards of cloth, as a farewell tribute to the Sultan, we struck off through the jungle, and in five hours we were on the borders of the wilderness of "Marenga Mkali"—the "hard," bitter or brackish, water. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... rest, confirming what not only Opechancanoyes, and an Indian which had been prisoner to Pewhatan had before tolde mee, but some called it five days, some sixe, some eight, where the sayde water dashed amongst many stones and rocks, each storme which caused oft tymes the heade of the River to bee brackish: Anchanachuck he described to bee the people that had slaine my brother, whose death hee would revenge. Hee described also upon the same Sea, a mighty nation called Pocoughtronack, a fierce nation that did eate men and warred with the people of Moyaoncer, and Pataromerke, Nations upon ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... cold clay mask (brackish and wet With what strange tears!) it was not his, not his, The kiss that through his quivering lips ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... their ears, now loud and threatening as it beat against the iron cliffs and thundered up the coombs, now striking a shriller note as the huge waves, ever beaten off, retreated, dragging beach and shingle with them. It had been an ocean gale, and the very air was salt and brackish with flavours of the sea. Here and there great piles of seaweed had been carried in a heterogeneous mass to their feet, and the ground beneath them was soft and sandy. But the storm had died away as suddenly as it had come. The tall, stark pine trees, which a few ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and some small; some round and some of a long shape. They are found both in salt water and brackish, and those that we had out of salt water are far better than the other ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... partly impregnated with salts." He passed by a Moqui village and thence on to the overland mail route. The Little Colorado was described as "not quite the size of the Virgin River, water a little brackish, but better than that of the Virgin." In May of the same year, Hamblin piloted, as far as Moen Copie, the first ten wagons of the Haight expedition that failed in an attempt to found a settlement on ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... the valley which lay to the west of us." ... "At the end of a mile in a south by east direction, we found ourselves on the banks of a river, the Hutt, from forty to fifty yards wide, which was running strong, and was brackish at its mouth," etc. Such was the appearance of the estuary and of the Hutt River in the eyes ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... soda; the washing of napkins with soda is apt to produce excoriations and breakings-out. "As washerwomen often deny that they use soda, it can be easily detected by simply soaking a clean white napkin in fresh water and then tasting the water; if it be brackish and salt, soda has been employed." [Footnote: Communicated by Sir Charles Locock ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... carried on without a smart boat. The gondola is a source of continual expense for repairs. Its oars have to be replaced. It has to be washed with sponges, blacked, and varnished. Its bottom needs frequent cleaning. Weeds adhere to it in the warm brackish water, growing rapidly through the summer months, and demanding to be scrubbed off once in every four weeks. The gondolier has no place where he can do this for himself. He therefore takes his boat to a wharf, or squero, as the place is called. At these squeri ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Estremadura, infecting the low plains with miasma. The Guadalquivir eats out its deep 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 ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... out, and reached Salt River at three, but did not cross there. It is a magnificent stream, 200 feet wide, with hard banks and fine timber on each side; but its waters are brackish. ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... inhabitants is said to amount to thirty thousand; and marks of opulence and independency appear in every quarter of this commercial city, which, however, is not without its inconveniences and defects. The water of their public pumps is generally hard and brackish, an imperfection the loss excusable, as the river Clyde runs by their doors, in the lower part of the town; and there are rivulets and springs above the cathedral, sufficient to fill a large reservoir ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... LANCELET, the name of small, fish-like, marine creatures, forming the class Cephalochorda, of the phylum Vertebrata. Lancelets are found in brackish or salt water, generally near the coast, and have been referred to several genera and many species. They were first discovered by P. S. Pallas in 1778, who took them to be slugs and described them under the name Limax lanceolatus. The true position in the animal kingdom was first recognized ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... no exception to the general rule. Abdur Kad'r, it is true, may have raged a little more extensively than usual when it was discovered that the well had caved in from sheer disuse, and several hours' labor would be necessary before some brackish water could be obtained. He did not trouble the Effendi with this detail, however. There was another more pressing matter to be dealt with, but, Allah be praised, that might wait till a less occupied ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... difficult to get the horses up and down. On the top it is very stony, with salt bush and scanty grass. Crossed the Margaret and a salt creek, in which there is water, some of which is salt and some brackish, but not unfit for the use of cattle. There is abundance of feed all round. We arrived at Hamilton Springs a little before sundown. ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... Mediterranean; and, on the east, from the Aral, 138 feet above that level. The waters of the Black Sea, now in communication with the Mediterranean by the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, are salt, but become brackish northwards, where the rivers of the steppes pour in a great volume of fresh water. Those of the shallower northern half of the Caspian are similarly affected by the Volga and the Ural, while, in the shallow bays of the southern division, they become extremely ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and drew himself up, with the stabbed amour propre prompting him to make some stinging retort contrasting the wells of truth with the brackish waters of sheer worldliness. Then he saw how inadequate it would be; how utterly impossible it was to meet this charmingly vindictive young person upon any grounds save ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... sweethearts' heads, How can I say? They are well done to, when Love of a man their beings like a loom Seizes, and the loose ends of purposes Into one beautiful desire weaves. But love has not so done to me: I was A nature clean as water from the hills, One that had pleased the lips of God; and now Brackish I am, as if some vagrom malice Had trampled up the springs and made them run Channelling ancient secrecies of salt. O me, what, has my tongue these bitter words In front of my love's death? Look down, sweetheart, From the height ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... magnesium chloride, or of calcium chloride, in water, diminishes its power of dissolving sulphate of lime, while the presence of sodium chloride increases that power. As an instance of the latter fact, we find a boiler works much cleaner which is fed alternately with fresh water and with brackish water pumped from the Tyne when the tide is high than one which is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... would give us barely enough water for drinking purposes. The authorities did all they could, and pumped up water from the Scheldt for a few hours each day, enabling us, with considerable difficulty, to keep the drainage system clear. But this water was tidal and brackish, whilst as to the number of bacteria it contained it was better not to inquire. We boiled and drank it when we could get nothing else, but of all the nauseous draughts I have ever consumed, not excluding ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... of a long flat. One of the officers, who happened to be very thirsty, placed such confidence in their friendly manner, that he allowed them to conduct him alone to a small well near the beach, but the water was too salt to be drunk. The force of habit is astonishing: natives drink this brackish fluid and find it very refreshing. The small quantity that suffices them is also surprising, though they will drink enormously ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... settled that all the inland rivers as yet discovered found the same common embouchure. Mitchell's experience too proved that the pastoral country through which the Darling ran was by no means unfit for habitation, nor was the river a salt one; true some of his men had noticed that the water was brackish in places, but this brackishness, it was seen, had ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... has come in contact with a mug filled with a liquid that exhales an inviting odor. I raise it to my lips, which, are burning, for I am suffering such an agony of thirst that I would even drink brackish water. ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... no overtures to the enemy. For five years, we are told,[14145] they were content to drink such water only as could be obtained in their own island from wells sunk in the soil, which must have been brackish, unwholesome, and disagreeable. At the end of that time a revolution occurred at Nineveh. Shalmaneser lost his throne (B.C. 722), and a new dynasty succeeding, amid troubles of various kinds, attention was drawn away from Tyre to other ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... the north-east, which is properly the Swan River; the other from the south-east, called Canning's River. Captain Stirling examined them both: the former to its source, the latter beyond the point where the water ceased to be brackish. They are both sufficiently convenient for boat navigation, even at the end of the dry season; and any obstruction might easily be removed to make them more so, by which the productions of an immense extent of country might be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... equator in the eastern rift-valley. It is one of a chain of lakes which stud the floor of the valley and has an elevation of 3325 ft. above the sea. It is about 16 m. long by 9 broad and has an irregular outline, the northern shore being deeply indented. Its waters are brackish. Fed by several small streams it has no outlet. The largest of the rivers which enter it, the Tigrish and the Nyuki, run north through a flat marshy country which extends south of the lake. This district, inhabited by the negro tribe of Njamusi, was by the first explorers called ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... placid was bustling with a silent, grim activity. From secret places men produced Winchesters, revolvers, and knives, if they carried them. In half an hour all the food had been brought in, and the casks of water laboriously filled at a brackish pool five miles away. ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... there been less wind; for in addition to the danger of being ingulfed by the heavy sea, their clothing, which they spread to collect the rain, was so deluged with salt spray as to make the water exceedingly brackish. Bad as it was, however, it served to maintain life until they reached a little rocky, uninhabited island in the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... only, as its name indicates, the port of the ancient Tiber. The road which leads from Transtevere runs along the river, which rolls through a plain strewn with ruins and indented with barren hills, its brackish water discolored from the sand and mud ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... from the sea," the professor began, "there is a great deal of hesitation among them sometimes before they go up the river to spawn, and we want to find out whether they go back to the sea again, whether they swim directly up the stream, or whether they remain in the brackish water at ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the name aloud, tasting its flavour. It has always had to me something brackish, something that fills my mind with grey pain and makes me yearn for my old toys. It is curious how the places and streets of London assume a character from one's own moods. All the big roads have a very sharp character of their own. If all other indications were lacking, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... ripen the bright green apples, Full of disappointment and of rain, Brackish they will taste, of tears, when the yellow dapples Of autumn tell the withered ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... rapid in its growth, and seed spread so quickly, wind swept, that the traces of the earthquake wave were pretty well obliterated by bright young growth. Many of the pools had dried up, but four of the largest kept fairly well filled with brackish water, evidently supplied by some underground communication with the sea, possibly merely by slow filtration through the porous coral rock, sufficient, however, to keep them fit habitations for fish ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... above the town, it ebbs and flows every six hours with a strong current. The tide comes up about thirty miles so full that there is nothing but salt water in the river, the fresh water being driven back with its force; and above that, for some miles, the water is brackish; but a little higher, as it runs by the town, it is quite fresh; and when the tide ebbs, it continues fresh all along to the sea. There is a bridge cast over the river, not of timber, but of fair stone, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... vapor, but others spouted from the base of the rock. Dick knelt down to drink from one of the latter, but as his face approached the water he jumped away. He dipped up a little of it in his soft hat and tasted it. It was brackish and almost boiling hot. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... time were successful: in a few minutes we found a pool of brackish water which appeared, under the present circumstances, to afford the most delicious draughts, and, having drunk, we lay down by the pool to rest ourselves. Being however doubtful as to which was the best route to lead us out of the ravine we were now in, I walked up its course, accompanied ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... still in his heart, but at times the remorse and contrition Which in all noble natures succeed the passionate outbreak, Came like a rising tide, that encounters the rush of a river, Staying its current awhile, but making it bitter and brackish.[49] ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... wandered hither from the sea, and can't find her way out again. And so, you see, she lies there dying in the brackish water. ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... he speared a gherkin with his knife. "It was coming on evening when I met him; and, says he, 'I 'm making for the Old-man Gilgie— haven't you come past it?' So I told him if he wanted to camp on water, he'd have to turn back five mile, and come with me to where I knew of a brackish dam. I'd just been disappointed of water, myself, at the Old-man Gilgie. It had been half-full a few days before, but a dozen of Elder's camels had called there, carrying tucker to Mount Brown; and each of ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... derived from the character of their embedded shells. These consist entirely of living species; but, in the first place, the common eatable oyster is among them, attaining its full size, whereas the same Ostrea edulis cannot live at present in the brackish waters of the Baltic except near its entrance, where, whenever a north-westerly gale prevails, a current setting in from the ocean pours in a great body of salt water. Yet it seems that during the whole time of the accumulation ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... the mouth of the river or the sea. The water in the river at Newcastle at ordinary flood tide is fresh, but when it is high spring tide, or the wind blows hard from the south or southeast, it is brackish, and if the wind continues long or it is hard weather it becomes a little saltish. With a new or full moon it makes high water at Newcastle at five o'clock. The principal persons whom we have seen are Mr. Moll and ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... wished to imitate that holy solitary. Roman matrons were then seen to create for themselves a solitude in the heart of their luxurious capital; offices of the palace, bedizened in purple and gold, deserted the court, amid the rejoicings of a festival, for the date-tree and the brackish rivulets ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... when well dressed, produces a kind of viscous juice; it has a brackish taste, and savors strongly of salt water. We were told in the country that the only use of it is to increase, when mixed with potatoes, the mass of aliment given to the stomach. The longer and more difficult the work of the stomach, the less frequent are its calls. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... sand underfeet, and scorching rays of the sun from above, blood dried up in the body, the brain became inflamed, followed by delirium, coma, death. It was impossible for the white soldiers to perspire unless they were near marshes where they might quench their intolerable thirst in the brackish waters. Owing to the lack of fresh vegetables and improper food, the rations of bully beef and hard-tack, and the assaults of blood-sucking insects, many deaths occurred. Even the Northwest Indian troops, accustomed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... ourselves from every experience through which we pass. No ingratitude, injustice, or unworthiness in those to whom we try to do good, should ever be allowed to turn love's sweetness into bitterness in us. Like fresh-water springs beside the sea, over which the brackish tide flows, but which when the bitter waters have receded are found sweet as ever, so should our hearts remain amid all experiences of love's unrequiting, ever sweet, thoughtful, unselfish, ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... the mouths of the river these bhulls are very numerous and form by far the most fertile portion of the surrounding district. They bear a most dreary, desolate, and swampy appearance—are intersected in all directions by streams of salt and brackish water, and are generally surrounded by low dykes or embankments, in order to regulate the influx and reflux of the river and sea. Yet from these dreary swamps a very considerable portion of the rice consumed in Sind is produced; and the Zemindars, who hold them, are esteemed amongst the ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... which was increasing rapidly, drove the boat on to the rocks, where one of the casks was slightly stove in. This accident proved later to be a serious one, since some sea-water had entered the cask and the contents were now brackish. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... whaleboat was got ready, and manned by a stout crew of such recent Christians that the demons of the strait had first to be appeased by two tins of salmon and six biscuit, paid secretly in advance to Nebenua, the devil-priest. Then, when all was ready, even to the breaker of brackish water, a forty-pound tin of biscuit, two hundred fresh nuts, medicine chest, compass, and five pounds of niggerhead tobacco by way of petty cash, the whole expedition was tantalized and held back by ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... any worth, was a few handfuls of dry dates in one of the hovels and a water-jar with about two quarts of brackish water. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... round the desert lake and steered clear of another lesser lake, formed entirely of petroleum from the great gusher. By day its greasy blackness glared in hideous contrast to the blue though brackish water; but now night lent its ugliness a strange disguise. All the faint twilight that remained glimmered on the gloss of its surface like phosphorus in the palm of a negro's hand; and as Nick passed on toward the town, stars shone out in its dark mirror. He could hear the thick splash of ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... could not have grown in water. Again, with the exception perhaps of some Pinnulariae and Asterophyllites, there is a remarkable absence from the coal measures of any form of properly aquatic vegetation. (7) The occurrence of marine, or brackish-water animals, in the roofs of coal-beds, or even in the coal itself, affords no evidence of subaqueous accumulation, since the same thing occurs in the case of modern submarine forests. For these and other reasons, some of which are more fully stated in the papers already referred to, while I admit ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... creek on the south, below which the hills approach the river, and continue near it during the day. Three miles further is a large creek on the north; and again, six and three-quarters miles beyond this, is another large creek, to the south; both containing a small quantity of running water, of a brackish taste. The last we called Rattlesnake Creek, from our seeing that animal near it. Although no timber can be observed on it from the Missouri, it throws out large quantities of driftwood, among which were some pieces ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... with the fear of death was bitter and sick and accursed, As brackish water to drink of which is ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it caused that undefinable shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially comes over one by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would follow a slight gasping and contest against chocking, that seemed to me a perfect convulsion; for I suppose the tendency to choke and sneeze is always enhanced ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... professional or non-professional, persons, who by consulting it may obtain an instant answer to a given question. Now although many of the explanations may be superfluous to some seamen, still they may lead others to a right understanding of various brackish expressions and phrases, without having to put crude queries, many of which those inquired of might be unable to solve. Nor is it only those afloat who are to be thus considered; all the empire is more or less connected with its navy and its commerce, and nautical phraseology is thereby ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... perceptible change had taken place in the ice of the harbour on its upper surface, it being covered with innumerable pools of water, chiefly brackish, except close in-shore, where the tides had lifted the ice considerably above ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... always clung round the spot; in this funereal Close, where the trees were green only in proportion as they were distant from the church, lay two microscopic ponds like the mouths of two wells; one covered to the brim with yellow-green duck-weed, the other full of brackish water of inky blackness, in which three goldfish lay as ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... threw itself upwards into broken spray, which flew to leeward at a sharp angle, blown from the summit of the wave like froth from an over-filled tankard. After a night of squally restlessness, accompanied by a driving rain that tasted brackish, things had settled down with the dawn into a steady, roaring gale of wind. In the growing light sea-gulls rose triumphantly with smooth breasts bravely ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... Ebumesu, or 'Winding Water.' The people declare that it had a single mouth till the earthquakes of July 1862, which shook down Accra, raised a divide, and made a double embouchure. The eastern fork, known as the Pana, is the drain of a large and branchy lagoon, brackish water, bitumen-coloured or brassy-yellow, with poisonous vegetation, and bounded by mangroves abounding in tannin. These water-forests grow differently from the red and white rhizophores of Eastern Africa. We shall again be ferried over the upper part of the western mouth. Both have ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... Sabbatia tribe keep close to the Atlantic Coast in salt meadows and marshes, along the borders of brackish rivers, and very rarely in the sand at the edges of fresh-water ponds a little way inland. From Maine to Florida they range, and less frequently are met along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico so far as Louisiana. How bright and dainty they are! Whole meadows are radiant with their blushing loveliness. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... water for drinking purposes. The authorities did all they could, and pumped up water from the Scheldt for a few hours each day, enabling us, with considerable difficulty, to keep the drainage system clear. But this water was tidal and brackish, whilst as to the number of bacteria it contained it was better not to inquire. We boiled and drank it when we could get nothing else, but of all the nauseous draughts I have ever consumed, not excluding ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... crow breast the violent air by stooping ragged pinions, so furious was the rush of wind when any power awoke the clouds; or sometimes, when the air was jaded with continual conflict, a heavy settlement of brackish cloud lay upon a waste ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... hope of getting my fingers to tingle by handling the snow; but it was frozen so hard I could not scrape up with my nails as much as a half-dozen of flakes would make. What I got I dissolved in my mouth and found it brackish; however, I suspected it would be sweeter and perhaps not so stonily frozen higher up, where there was less chance of the salt spray mingling with it, and I resolved when the light came to fill my empty beer-bottles as with salt ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... rescued from their strife; But silk too soft was such hard hearts to break; And she, dear soul, even as her silk, faint, weak, 220 Could not preserve it; out, O, out it went! Leander still call'd Neptune, that now rent His brackish curls, and tore his wrinkled face, Where tears in billows did each other chase; And, burst with ruth, he hurl'd his marble mace At the stern Fates: it wounded Lachesis That drew Leander's thread, and could not miss The thread itself, as it her hand did hit, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Philips of Montague has in his pastures of Socke, about three miles off, a large Pool, to which Pigeons resort; but the Cattle will not drink of it, no not in the extream want of water in this drought. To the taste it is not only brackish, but hath other loathsome tasts. In a Venice-glass it looked greenish and clear, just like the most greenish Cider as soon as it is perfectly clarified. I boyl'd a Pint of it in a Posnet of Bell-Mettall (commonly used to preserve Sweatmeats:) suddenly it yeilded a thick ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... offensive-looking skin disease, which causes the skin to peel off in scales. In their conversation with one another I recognized several Polynesian words. The water is obtained by digging in the sand, and is very brackish. ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... several genera, which bear to them a great external similarity (Lates, Therapon). They have the same habits as their European allies, and their flesh is considered equally wholesome, but they appear to enter salt-water, or at least brackish water, more freely. It is, however, in their internal organisation that they differ most from the perches of Europe; their skeletons are composed of fewer vertebrae, and the air bladder of the Therapon is divided into two portions, as in the carps. Four species at least of this ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... constant dread of being precipitated on the rocks. The boats have no sails, and are pushed along by poles with great labour. There is no water in the city: it is brought from pits east and west, a quarter of a mile distant,—that from the east being brackish, and that from the west sweet. Water is sold in the streets of Timbuctoo, as in many African cities. The Maroquine merchants live in style and luxury at Timbuctoo, and tea, coffee, and sugar may be obtained ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Stokes described a form from brackish water near New York, which should unquestionably be referred to the genus Loxophyllum, and I believe to Quennerstedt's species setigerum. While the latter possesses only a few setae, the former has a number of them, and Stokes described his species as having a variable ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... discover, and she was getting footsore and tired again before she found it, some distance away, in a gully coming from a fissure in a dislocated piece of outcrop. It was beautifully clear, cold, and sparkling, with a slightly sweetish taste, yet unlike the brackish "alkali" of the plains. It refreshed and soothed her greatly, so much that, reclining against a tree, but where she would be quite visible from the trail, her eyes closed ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... "tower," or kasbah, "castle," or fonduk, "caravanserai," (all which names people called it,) with a large wall round the principal wells, the materials of which were red earth and lumps of salt, some of which appeared as hard as the soft Malta stone. The water is, of course, brackish, but nevertheless the camels drank it with eagerness. I was staring at the eagerness with which the camels were drinking, when the Commandant said, "Enhār săkoun, Yâkob," (a hot day, James,) "do the camels in your country drink water in that way?" Hereat ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... or coldness, and which, when poured into a brazen or silver vessel, does not produce a blackish sediment. Hippocrates says, "Water which is easily warmed or easily chilled is alway lighter." But that water is bad which takes a long time to boil vegetables; and so too is water full of nitre, or brackish. And in his book 'On Waters,' Hippocrates calls good water drinkable; but stagnant water he calls bad, such as that from ponds or marshes. And most spring-water is ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a small opening where the soil was moist; here they dug wells, but the water proved brackish. Their trouble was a little recompensed by the ease with which they procured an ample provision of cocoa and other nuts. With these they allayed their hunger and their thirst at pleasure; and every man loaded himself with ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... obviously have been an ancient coral-reef, or an accumulation of social shells, like Oysters. Lastly, if we find the deposit to contain the remains of marine shells, but that these are dwarfed of their fair proportions and distorted in figure, we may conclude that it was laid down in a brackish sea, such as the Baltic, in which the proper saltness was wanting, owing to its receiving an excessive supply ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... made for the huts of the natives. Some animals were seen resembling wolves, lean as skeletons,—probably dingoes. At last some brackish water was found, and the Roebuck proceeded to Timor. Here the ship, being refitted and the crew refreshed, Dampier sailed on the 20th of December for the coast of New Guinea. It was made on the 1st of January, 1700, and appeared to be high, level land, ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... But an exception must be made in favor of the waters of the Bay of Fonseca. Here they are found in vast beds, in all the subordinate bays where the streams deposit their sediment, and where, with the rise and fall of the tide, they obtain that alternation of salt and brackish water which seems to be necessary to their perfection. They are the same rough-coated, delicious mollusks as those of our own coasts, and by no means to be degraded by a comparison with the muddy, long-bearded, and, to Christian palates, coppery abominations of the British Islands, which in their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... things which are strained through ashes. The schools of Plato, that the element of water being compacted by the rigor of the air became sweet, but that part which was expired from the earth, being enfired, became of a brackish taste. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... sending Bombay and my friendly Mgogo with eight doti, or thirty-two yards of cloth, as a farewell tribute to the Sultan, we struck off through the jungle, and in five hours we were on the borders of the wilderness of "Marenga Mkali"—the "hard," bitter or brackish, water. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... embouchure. Mitchell's experience too proved that the pastoral country through which the Darling ran was by no means unfit for habitation, nor was the river a salt one; true some of his men had noticed that the water was brackish in places, but this brackishness, it was seen, ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... those myriad ears Away from the fiendish clamour of Indian gods, One man preaching the truth against the huge Bray of the gongs and horns of the Indian priests! A cup of wine poured in the sea were not More surely lost in the green and brackish depths, Than the fire and fragrance of my doctrine poured Into that multitudinous pond of men, India.—Shipman! Master of the ship!— I have thought better of this journey; now I find I am not meant ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... separable from the Portage beds, it is a sandstone and conglomerate formation which reaches its maximum thickness (8000 ft.) in Pennsylvania, but thins rapidly towards the west. In the Catskill region the Upper Devonian has an Old Red facies—red shales and sandstones with a freshwater and brackish fauna. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the main admirably well supplied, but there was a deficiency of drink. The water as they advanced became brackish and intolerably bad, and there was great difficulty in procuring any substitute. At Male three cows were given for a pot of beer, and more of that refreshment might have been sold at the same price, had there been ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... about this lower part of the creek is, that stretches of fresh and salt water alternate. The stream, as we saw it, was only just running in the lower reaches; in places it ran under the sandy bed, and in this part the salt pools occurred. First we passed a stretch of clear, brackish water, then a nearly dry reach of sand, then a trickle of fresh water lasting for a hundred yards or so; this would again disappear, and be seen lower down as another ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... nitrous swarms are risen towards the Surface of the Sea in a dark Night, they cause such a shining light upon the Waves, as if the Sea was on fire. And being delivered from the brackish Water, and received into the open Air, those fiery and shining Meteors which fix upon the Masts and Sides of the Ships, and are only nitrous particles condensed by the circumambient Cold, and like that which the Chymists call Phosphorus, or artificial Glow-worm, shine and ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... sand. He doused his body into the water and let his pores drink, and threw buckets of it on his beseeching mules; but only after the well-hole had been scraped and bailed twice would he permit them to drink the brackish water. Then he tied them in the shade of the wilting mesquite trees and strode to the top of ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... Potoor[1], on the west side of the road leading from Jaffna to Point Pedro, where the surface of the surrounding country is only about fifteen feet above the sea-level. The well, however, is upwards of 140 feet in depth; the water fresh at the surface, brackish lower down, and intensely salt below. According to the universal belief of the inhabitants, it is an underground pool, which communicates with the sea by a subterranean channel bubbling out on the shore near Kangesentorre, about seven miles to ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the voyage commenced; and the duty of taking ashore, tethering, and guarding the other sheep at each landing place was taken in turn by Pearson and Loughnan. At the lower end of the lakes the water was found to be brackish, so they went ashore at several places to look for fresh water. They landed on a flat at Reeve's River, and Davy found an old well of the natives, but it required cleaning out, so he went back to the boat for a spade. It ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... two miles from the town to the southward, it runs between two high mountains, apparently as high as the mountains which Adams saw in Barbary; here the river is about half a mile wide. The water of La Mar Zarah is rather brackish, but is commonly drunk by the natives, there not being, according to the report of Adams, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... lagoon behind this bar. At every flood its waters overflow, and are unable to escape to the sea when left behind the bar. Sometimes, in like manner, in a gale of wind on shore, the waves are carried over the bar, and there are left as a brackish pool, unable ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... vaulted roof upheld by massive columns on whose capitals lozenges and bishop's croziers were carved, dated from the eleventh century. The altar stone survived intact. Brackish daylight, which seemed to have been filtered through layers of horn, came in at the openings, hardly lighting the shadowed, begrimed walls and the earth floor, which too was pierced by the entrance to an oubliette or ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... collections of water; the waves danced along above, and the shadows of the trees were vividly reflected beneath the surface in such an admirable manner, that the loose cattle, whose thirst had not been slaked sufficiently by the very brackish water of Nchokotsa, with the horses, dogs, and even the Hottentots ran off toward the deceitful pools. A herd of zebras in the mirage looked so exactly like elephants that Oswell began to saddle a horse in order to hunt them; but a sort of break in the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... is in every one of us, and strikes upon motives, sympathies, faculties, that run through the common humanity. Surely, you will not calculate any essential difference from mere appearances; for the light laughter that bubbles on the lip often mantles over brackish depths of sadness, and the serious look may be the sober veil that covers a divine peace. You know that the bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches, and how many blithe hearts dance under coarse wool. ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... leagues, through deep sand, chiefly along the sea-coast, and is bounded on the east by the Lomas de Lachay. Here flocks of strand snipes and flamingoes fly constantly before the traveller, as if to direct his course. In the pescadores (fishermen's huts), five leagues from the Salinas, brackish water and broiled fish may be obtained, and sometimes even clover, which is brought hither, from the distance of several miles, to feed the hungry horses. From the pescadores the road crosses steep sand-hills, which rise from three to four hundred feet high, and fall with a declivity of more ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the hills, land limited, partly impregnated with salts." He passed by a Moqui village and thence on to the overland mail route. The Little Colorado was described as "not quite the size of the Virgin River, water a little brackish, but better than that of the Virgin." In May of the same year, Hamblin piloted, as far as Moen Copie, the first ten wagons of the Haight expedition that failed in an attempt to found a ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... ranging from large and irregular lumps at Portland to small polished stones at the western extremity. It is said that a local seafarer landing on the beach in a fog can tell his whereabouts to a nicety by handling the shingle. For about half the distance, that is to Abbotsbury, the Fleet makes a brackish ditch on the landward side. Behind this barrier is a country of low hills and quite out-of-the-world hamlets seldom visited or visiting. Chickerell, the nearest of them to Weymouth, has a manufactory of stoneware ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... correcting this evil quality, by other medications, to let it perish. Other causes of their sickness (not always taken notice of) proceed from too liberal refreshments and over-watering in dry and scorching seasons; especially in nurseries: The water should therefore be fitly qualify'd, neither brackish, bitter, stagnat, or putrid, sower, acrimonious, vitriolic, arenous and gravelly, churlish, harsh and lean; (I mention them promiscuously) and whatever vicious quality they are perceptibly tinctur'd and impregnate with, being by no means ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... their last camp together at a brackish water-hole near the edge of the plain which Manley had described. Beyond it they could see the snow-clad peak. They repeated to one another the legends on the Williams map, its promise of a pass close by that summit and of a fertile valley leading ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... brackish water that we drink Creeps with a loathsome slime, And the bitter bread they weigh in scales Is full of chalk and lime, And Sleep will not lie down, but walks ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... Territory on the E., is a third larger than Scotland, and presents a prairie surface crossed by the Arkansas, Cimarron, and Canadian Rivers, and rising to the Wichita Mountains in the S. There are many brackish streams; the rainfall is light, hence the soil can be cultivated only in parts. Ceded to the United States under restrictions by the tribes of the Indian Territory in 1866, there were various attempts by immigrants from neighbouring States to effect settlements ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... assumed, a maritime bay-into fresh. [Footnote: Babinet, Etudes et Lectures, ii, pp. 108,110.] The presence of the seal is hardly conclusive on this point, for it is sometimes seen in Lake Champlain at the distance of some hundreds of miles from even brackish water. One of these animals was killed on the ice in that lake in February, 1810, another in February, 1846, [Footnote: Thompson, Natural History of Vermont, p. 38, and Appendix, p. 18. There is no reason to believe that the seal breeds in Lake Champlain, but the individual last ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in Hobson's Bay. Here, too, the briny scent of the sea, carrying up over grassy flats, met their nostrils, and set Mahony hungrily sniffing. The brief twilight came and went, and it was already night when they urged their weary beasts over the Moonee ponds, a winding chain of brackish waterholes. The horses shambled along the broad, hilly tracks of North Melbourne; warily picked their steps through the city itself. Dingy oil-lamps, set here and there at the corners of roads so broad that you could hardly see across them, shed but ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... boats brought it from Alexandria. It was filthy water, full of dirt, and very brackish to taste. Also it was warm. During the two months at Suvla Bay I never tasted a drop of cold water—it was always ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... meagre and stunted; it scants them both in food and drink. Its miserliness is deep-set: artesian wells sunk a thousand feet through its dull grey sands bring up only a brackish yellow water; a precarious rye ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... was his experiences had taught him to expect only injury and wrong. The Ragnor home and its love and truth had been the miracle that had for nine months turned his brackish water of life into wine. Was it going to fail him, as everything else had done? He laughed inwardly at the cruel thought and whispered to himself: "This, too, can be borne, but oh, Thora, Thora!" and the two words shattered his pride and made him ready to weep when he sat ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... of owners. None of ours were due, yet we looked over the "arrivals" with interest, and continued on down the trail to Red Fork. The latter was a branch of the Arkansas River, and at low water was inclined to be brackish, and hence was sometimes called the Salt Fork, with nothing to differentiate it from one of the same name sixty miles farther north. There was an old Indian trading post at Red Fork, and I lay over there while Edwards went on south to meet the cows. His work for the summer was to oversee the deliveries ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... gentle compassion in Elisha, is the symbolical one. The new cruse and the salt are emblems of the divine gift which cleanses the human heart. Salt is an emblem of purification, and its emblematic meaning prevails here over its natural properties; for the last thing to cure a brackish spring was to put salt into it. The very inadequacy, as well as inappropriateness, of the remedy, points the miraculous and symbolical character of the whole. A jar full of salt could do little to a gushing fountain. But ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... heights, from the storms of the Polar Sea; but of these species, perhaps a couple seldom develop any flowers. The mosses, too, were in great part without fruit, with the exception of those which grew on the margin, formed of hard clay covered with mud, of a pool, filled with brackish water and lying close to the sea-margin. A large number of pieces of driftwood scattered round this pool showed that the place was occasionally overflowed with sea-water, which thus appears to have been favourable to the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... daring little ferns and plants have a foothold on it; the lake is inaccessible from this direction. A narrow pathway winding in and out edged with water-reeds leads by it on the other side. This lake is said to be so deep that it is unfathomable; it is dark brown in colour, bitter and brackish to the taste. No fish can live in it. Learned men, called geologists, who study the crust of the earth, have decided that this region is not volcanic in origin as it would appear at first sight, but that the lake is fed by water ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... supplied with food, and had much trouble in obtaining water. The only spring to which they had access, and even that by no means abundant, was in the citadel of Pylos, and most of them were reduced to scraping the shingle, and thus obtaining a meagre supply of brackish water. On land their quarters were straitened and uncomfortable, and they had no proper anchorage for their ships, so that the crews had to go ashore in turns to get their meals. They were greatly disappointed to find their task thus prolonged, for they had supposed that a ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... miles. It is, however, shallow, and contains numerous shoals and islands. It is properly an estuary, immense volumes of fresh water flowing into it from the south. The tides are felt through its entire length of one hundred and sixty miles, but the water is only slightly brackish. It has a dingy orange-brown color. A narrow blue line on our left, miles away, was all that was visible, at times, of the island of Marajo; and as we passed the broad mouth of the Tocantins, we were struck with the magnificent sea-like expanse, for there was scarcely ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... years after, and largely incorporated in Bledsoe's "History of the Indian Wars of Northern California," is the source of most of the incidents relating to Gregg's party embraced in this chapter.] and Buck went in different directions to find water. Wood returned first with a bucketful, brackish and poor. Buck soon after arrived with a supply that looked much better, but when Gregg sampled it he made a wry face and asked Buck where he found it. He replied that he dipped it out of a smooth lake about a half mile distant. It was good plain salt water; they had discovered the mythical bay—or ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... settled permanently in their new home, as far as their own lives went at least; though they found the tender young could not stand the brine that did no harm to the tougher constitutions of the elders. No doubt the change was made gradually, a bit at a time, through the brackish water, the species getting further and further seaward down bays and estuaries with successive generations, but always returning to spawn in its native river, as all well-behaved salmon do to the present moment. At last, the habit hardened into an organic ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... there was no anchorage for the ships, some took their meals on shore in their turn, while the others were anchored out at sea. But their greatest discouragement arose from the unexpectedly long time which it took to reduce a body of men shut up in a desert island, with only brackish water to drink, a matter which they had imagined would take them only a few days. The fact was that the Lacedaemonians had made advertisement for volunteers to carry into the island ground corn, wine, cheese, and any other food useful ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... of the colonists . . , really a fresh-water fish, but . . . often brought to the Sydney market from Broken Bay and other salt-water estuaries. . . . The perch of the Ganges and other East Indian rivers (L. calcarifer) enters freely into brackish water, and extends to the rivers ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... unhuman stomach, for he ate everything, at any time, and in any condition; raw or cooked, digestible or not, he swallowed it silently and greedily, and thought it quite unnecessary when I wanted the boys to cook some rice for me, or to wash a plate. The tea was generally made with brackish water which was perfectly sickening. George had always just eaten when I announced that dinner was ready, and for answer he generally wrapped himself in his blankets and fell asleep. The consequence was that each of us lived his own life, and the companionship ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... and the coral being thus prevented growing, the pear-shaped harbours were produced.) Most authors have attributed this fact to the injurious effects of the fresh water, even where it enters the sea only in small quantity, and during a part of the year. No doubt brackish water would prevent or retard the growth of coral; but I believe that the mud and sand which is deposited, even by rivulets when flooded, is a much more efficient check. The reef on each side of the channel leading into Port Louis at Mauritius, ends abruptly in a wall, at the foot of which ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... up, and, at first leading their horses, passed down the coulee into the more precipitous depths of the narrow canyon. This proved hardly more than a gash cut through the rolling prairie, rock strewn, holding an insignificant stream of brackish water, yet was an ideal hiding-place, having ample room for easy passage between the rock walls. The men mounted, and Hampton, with a wave of his hand, bade the old ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... a large silver lake: About whose banks the fertile mountains stood In ages passed bravely crowned with wood, Which lending cold-sweet shadows gave it grace To be accounted Cynthia's bathing-place; And from her father Neptune's brackish court, Fair Thetis thither often would resort, Attended by the fishes of the sea, Which in those sweeter waters came to plea. There would the daughter of the Sea God dive, And thither came the Land Nymphs every eve To wait upon her: bringing for her brows Rich garlands ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... water the Cimarron was a brackish stream. But numerous tributaries put in from either side, and by keeping above the river's ebb, an abundance of fresh water was daily secured from the river's affluents. The fifth day out from Red Rock was an excessively sultry one, and suffering would have resulted ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... wax-work, climbing Red berries Thickets; N. E., Middle States. Seneca snakeroot White Rocky soil; N. E., West, South. Sheep-laurel Crimson Hill-sides, pastures. Common. Shrubby cinque-foil Yellow Wet grounds; N. E. Common. Silver-weed Yellow Brackish marshes and meadows; New England, West. Small cranberry Rose-color Peat bogs; N. E., Middle States. Spotted wintergreen Pink and white Open woods; Middle States. Staghorn sumac Greenish Hill-sides, dry banks. Common. Strawberry-bush ...
— Harper's Young People, June 8, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... anti-scorbutic plants, while Waxel, who had taken command, and Khitroff ordered the water-casks filled. Unfortunately the only pool they could find was connected with an arm of the sea. The water was brackish, ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... in Northern Siberia. They are not as good as in Kamchatka, and I believe it is the rule that the salmon deteriorates as one goes toward the south. Possibly the quality of the Amoor salmon is owing to the time the fish remain in the brackish waters of the Straits of Tartary. The fishing season is the only busy portion of ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... eyes the spectacle of refined and luxurious manners, and always in his ears the babble of the Dorian women, while he had only to pass the gates, and wander through the fens of Lysimeleia, by the brackish mere, or ride into the hills, to find himself in the golden world of pastoral. Thinking of his early years, and of the education that nature gives the poet, we can imagine him, like Callicles in Mr. ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... fellows. For almost all the other little rivers of the South Shore, lazy as they may be by nature, yet manage to do some kind of work before they finish the journey from their crystal-clear springs into the brackish waters of the bay. They turn the wheels of sleepy gristmills, while the miller sits with his hands in his pockets underneath the willow-trees. They fill reservoirs out of which great steam-engines pump the water to quench ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... his afternoon's experience. He had gone a long way into the woods without seeing any such game as he wished, and had about decided to content himself with some squirrels, and return to the road, when he came upon a deer-lick—a pool of salt or brackish water, in a flat, level place, to which deer and other animals came to drink, or to lick the earth at the water's edge to satisfy the craving which all animals have for salt. As it was then nearly ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... autumn of that year, at the season when the days and nights are of one length, that the great inroad of the sea befell. The day had been stormy, with a brackish wind clamouring out of the sea, and as the darkness closed in it was with us as it is with blind men who hear and feel the more keenly because of their blindness and all that we heard was the boom of billows breaking on the long shore and the crying and groaning of the old oaks and high ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... says, the Holy Family rested in their flight to Egypt. The present tree was planted in 1672, but the credulous still believe it to be a direct descendant of the original one. A fine spring which flows in the vicinity is also supposed to have lost its natural brackish taste on account of the infant Jesus having been bathed in it. A half-mile farther on is Heliopolis, the old City of the Sun. It is now marked by the solitary obelisk, which alone remains to remind ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... peculiarity of the lake of Tezcuco is that it is a salt lake, containing much salt and carbonate of soda. The water is quite brackish and undrinkable. How it has come to be so is plain enough. The streams from the surrounding mountains bring down salt and soda in solution, derived from the decomposed porphyry; and as the water of the lake is not drained off into the sea, but evaporates, the solid constituents ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... The frizzled cotes which do the mountains hide, Where never gale was longer known to stay Than from the smooth wave it had swept away The new divorced leaves, that from each side Left the thick boughs to dance out with the tide. At further end the creek, a stately wood Gave a kind shadow (to the brackish flood) Made up of trees, not less kenn'd by each skiff Than that sky-scaling peak of Teneriffe, Upon whose tops the hernshew bred her young, And hoary moss upon their branches hung; Whose rugged rinds sufficient were to show, Without their height, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... before passed through the Loudon Branch, we now followed the main stream, and on our way landed on the south bank, upon a piece of open forest land, abundantly clothed with luxuriant grass and moderate-sized timber. The water here began to taste brackish, but it was quite fresh about a quarter of a mile higher up, above a spit of rocks which nearly crosses the channel, leaving a passage of ten feet water, over which there is a trifling fall. About three-quarters of a mile lower down we landed on the north ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... much disputed. On a soil, in other respects excellent, they found only one river of a moderate size, which, gliding gently almost on a level with the sea through a flat country, furnished only a brackish water. Two or three springs, which they found in the innermost parts of the island, made but feeble amends for this defect. The wells were for the most part dry. The construction of reservoirs required time. Nor was the climate ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... rewarded by the appearance of moisture, and after we had thrown out more of the sand a whitish fluid flowed into the hole. On tasting it we found that it was drinkable, though somewhat bitter and brackish. ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... as he was lifted from the decks to the shore. Bering could not stand unaided. Twenty emaciated sailors were taken out of their berths and propped up on the sand. And the water they took from this rocky island was brackish, and only increased the ravages of ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... breaker lay on its bilge, in the middle of the boat, where more or less sea-water always collected. And ever and anon, dipping his finger therein, my Viking was troubled with the thought, that this sea-water tasted less brackish than that alongside. Of course the breaker must be leaking. So, he would turn it over, till its wet side came uppermost; when it would quickly become dry as a bone. But now, with his knife, he would gently probe the joints of the staves; shake his head; look up; look down; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... city of Bisnaga many walls and towers and enclosed it anew. Now the city at that time was of no use, there being no water in it by which could be raised gardens and orchards, except the water of the Nagumdym which was far from it, for what water there was in the country was all brackish and allowed nothing to grow; and the King, desiring to increase that city and make it the best in the kingdom, determined to bring to it a very large river which was at a distance of five leagues away, believing ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... night you find fresh water, enough mayhap for some 50 or 100 persons with their beasts, but not for more. And all across the Desert you will find water in like manner, that is to say, in some 28 places altogether you will find good water, but in no great quantity; and in four places also you find brackish water.[NOTE 1] ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... river divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that of the west, and D'Autray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle passage. As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew fresh with the salt breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the great Gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely, as when ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... wood and quickly started a fire. Tommy arrived some moments later with the coffee pot and other utensils. While all this was going on Harriet was spreading out their belongings so these might dry out in the sunlight. But the water for the coffee, secured some distance back, was brackish and poor. They made it do, however, and as quickly as possible had boiled their coffee and warmed over the beef and canned beans as well. As for drinking water, there was none at hand fit for this purpose. Dishes were somewhat limited, many of theirs having been ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef, mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground off the north end of the larger bank in fifteen fathoms water; bottom sandy, with coral patches. Here he was detained seven days by a calm, the crew suffering severely from the water, which was gone quite bad; and it was only on the evening of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ships of many nations, and especially those of England, but it had lately been forsaken, on account of the supposed badness of its water. This supposition, however, arose from a want of duly examining the brook by which the water is supplied. It is, indeed, brackish at the lower part of the brook, but higher up it will be found excellent. The lieutenant, therefore, was clearly of opinion, that Prince's Island is a more eligible place for ships to touch at, than ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... are a few orchards of pomegranate and fig trees, and some vine plantations. The place is supplied with vegetables from Rieha, and from Aere, a village two hours distant, lying between Darkoush and Djissr Shogher. There is a single spring in the town of brackish water, which is never used but in seasons of great drought; a man who had cleansed the bottom of the deep well in which the spring issues, told me that he found two openings in the rock, near each ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... the water-casks on shore, and clearing the well at which they were to be filled. This well I imagined to be the same that the Centurion watered at; but it was the worst that we had met with during the voyage, for the water was not only brackish, but full of worms. The road also where the ships lay was a dangerous situation at this season, for the bottom is hard sand and large coral rocks, and the anchor having no hold in the sand, the cable is in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... the water is perfectly fresh, but brackish when low; and that coming down the Tamunak'le we found to be so clear, cold, and soft, the higher we ascended, that the idea of melting snow was suggested to our minds. We found this region, with regard ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... theories launched by biological speculators who have never set foot in Mexico, especially Weismann's picture of the dismal condition of the salt-incrusted surroundings which were supposed to have hemmed in the axolotl—the brackish Lago de Texcoco, the largest of the lakes near Mexico, being evidently in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... has been so ludicrously misnamed the Malayan Caviare. It needs all the violence of the fresh, strong, monsoon winds to even partially purge these villages of the rank odours which cling to them at the end of the fishing season; and when all has been done, the saltness of the sea air, the brackish water of the wells, and the faint stale smells emitted by the nets and fishing tackle still tell unmistakable tales of the one trade in which every member of these communities is ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... cucumbers and pomegranates, both of which we carried with us on the long desert stretches. Melons, too, the finest we have ever seen in any land, frequently obviated the necessity of drinking the strongly brackish water. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... infant wholly to my charge, for the haemorrhage of the day before had returned, and she was fast drifting into unconsciousness. "Water, water!" was the only intelligible cry that left her lips, and that we had to give was warm and brackish, from the occasional lapping of the sea against the barrels, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... article of commerce. Turtles appear to reach a very old age, specimens having been known to have lived several hundred years. The box tortoise of our woods, the musk turtles, the snapping turtles are familiar examples of this order, while the terrapin, which lives in brackish ponds and swamps along our sea-coasts, is famous as ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... he went to the hay-yard where his pony was stabled. He met a water man, halting on his rounds at the front of a neat canvas dwelling. The man had three large barrels on a wagon, each full of muddy, brackish water. A long piece of hose was thrust into one, its ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... education can have been entirely without drawbacks, it is no part of my purpose to affirm. Tossed, as one may say, to sink or swim amid the waves of life, where those waves ran turbid and brackish, Dickens had emerged strengthened, triumphant. But that some little signs should not remain of the straining and effort with which he had won the land, was scarcely to be expected. He himself, in his more confidential communications with Forster, seems ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... we set out, and reached Salt River at three, but did not cross there. It is a magnificent stream, 200 feet wide, with hard banks and fine timber on each side; but its waters are brackish. ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... in chanels cleare 25 To romble gently downe with murmur soft, And were by them right tunefull taught to beare A bases part amongst their consorts oft; Now forst to overflowe with brackish teares, With troublous noyse did ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... surface of the earth continued to change, the ocean retreated from the Rocky Mountain region, and extensive marshy lowlands with lakes of fresh or brackish water came into existence. There were such marshes in the areas that are now covered by New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana. Westward for some distance the land was higher, but in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California there were other marshy lowlands ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... stern-sheets which was locked, and on David prising it open with his clasp knife, it was found to contain some fishing-line and hooks. A small cask, or breaker, was also locked in the bow of the boat, and this was found to contain water, a trifle impregnated by the sea, and slightly brackish, but still quite drinkable. It need hardly be mentioned what a great boon this was to them, as they had begun to be afflicted with thirst as the sun's heat grew more powerful ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... drinking we tore off our clothes and sat down in the pool, absorbing the moisture through our parched skins. You, Harry, my boy, who have only to turn on a couple of taps to summon "hot" and "cold" from an unseen, vasty cistern, can have little idea of the luxury of that muddy wallow in brackish tepid water. ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... for there she stayed: the planks tilted up and down, the water washed over her, but there were the falls at nearly the same distance as when she embarked, and there they stayed as well. The water, too, was no more fresh and sweet, but had a salt and brackish taste. The sun was nearly overhead, and she was in an agony of apprehension before she saw the falls slide slowly back, and in one of a fresh succession of wonders, understanding nothing of it, she found herself, with a strange sucking heave under her, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... less and less, until finally they were living on three dry biscuits a day each. The water, too, was getting lower and lower in the one cask that remained, and it had a warm, brackish taste. Still it was the ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... waterhole several miles off that we fenced round and used for drinking—so long as it lasted. When we were mustering the other side of the run, it came to our camping at a sandy creek where we could dig in the sand and get just enough for horses and men. The water of the Bore I'd made, was a bit brackish, but it kept the grass alive round about and was all the cattle had to depend on. You can think of the job it was shifting the beasts over there from other parts of the run which was what we tried to do, so long as they were ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... succulent and thick-skinned but they differ from them in their curious ability to live upon very salt and soda-laden water. All through the great African desert region, in fact, most of the water is more or less brackish; 'bitter lakes' are common, and gypsum often covers the ground over immense areas. These districts occupy the beds of vast ancient lakes, now almost dry, of which the existing chotts, or very salt pools, are the last shrunken ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... of beaten earth. The old woman went out. Through the gaps in the walls Lewis saw her build a fire and put a pot of the brackish water on to boil. Then he saw her drag the setting hen from her nest and wring its neck. He ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... what Will predicted it would be, a foot of sand and an inch of water, but it was only slightly brackish, and both horses and horsemen drank freely from it, took a rest and then drank as freely again. Another half ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... was perfectly willing to embark upon a voyage in which I was well aware the chances of death were at least as five to one. I caught and contrived to smoke a quantity of fish sufficient to last me for a fortnight, and filled a small cask with brackish but still drinkable water. In this vessel, thus stored, I embarked about a fortnight after the day of the mysterious shock. On the second evening of my voyage I was caught by a gale which compelled me to lower the sail, and before which I was ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... miles in uncovered wagons. Many nights we shared a one-room cabin with all the members of the family. But the greatest hardship we suffered was the lack of water. There was very little good water in the state, and the purest water was so brackish that we could hardly drink it. The more we drank the thirstier we became, and when the water was made into tea it tasted worse than when it was clear. A bath was the rarest of luxuries. The only available fuel was buffalo manure, of which the odor permeated all our food. But despite ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... valleys but in the braes, suffering anew the rigour of the frost and the snow. By midday we reached the shore of Loch Leven, and it seemed as if now our flight was hopelessly barred, for the ferry that could be compelled to take the army of Mac-Cailein over the brackish water at Lettermore was scarce likely to undertake the conveying back of seven fugitives of the clan that had come so high-handedly through their neighbourhood four days ago. On this side there was not a boat in sight; indeed there was not a vestige on any side of human tenancy. ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... our anchorage—over there," and he pointed to the mouth of a narrow channel between South Point and the Ile des Fregates, the latter a tiny islet that almost blocks the entrance to a shallow bay into which runs a rivulet of good but slightly brackish water. ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... The continental water supply was thus effectually cut off; but the Tyrians were resolute, and made no overtures to the enemy. For five years, we are told,[14145] they were content to drink such water only as could be obtained in their own island from wells sunk in the soil, which must have been brackish, unwholesome, and disagreeable. At the end of that time a revolution occurred at Nineveh. Shalmaneser lost his throne (B.C. 722), and a new dynasty succeeding, amid troubles of various kinds, attention ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... and emptying his lungs in diver fashion, Grief turned over and went down through the water. Salt it was to his lips, and warm to his flesh; but at last, deep down, it perceptibly chilled and tasted brackish. Then, suddenly, his body entered the cold, subterranean stream. He removed the small stopper from the calabash, and, as the sweet water gurgled into it, he saw the phosphorescent glimmer of a big fish, like a sea ghost, drift ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... discovery, and dearly prized. In Melbourne we have no water, but such as is carted by the water barrel carters from the river Yarra-Yarra. Every house has its barrel or hogshead for holding water. The Yarra-Yarra water is brackish, and causes dysentery. The complaint is now prevailing. In many parts of the interior puddle holes are made, and water is thus secured from the heavy rain that falls in the early part of summer. Water saved ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... name of small, fish-like, marine creatures, forming the class Cephalochorda, of the phylum Vertebrata. Lancelets are found in brackish or salt water, generally near the coast, and have been referred to several genera and many species. They were first discovered by P. S. Pallas in 1778, who took them to be slugs and described them under the name Limax ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the main effects of the metropolitan complexities, the widening brackish and salt portions of the Potomac estuary form a generally healthy body of water, though changes loom as the metropolis moves inexorably outward from its center and as hitherto remote Tidewater areas are brought ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... crooked passage, of which only the beginning is seen, is said to convey the water out of the Valley of Siloam, and to supply the means of irrigating the little gardens still cultivated in that spot. Notwithstanding the dirty state of the water, and its harsh and brackish taste, it is still used by devout pilgrims for diseases of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... turn. It was the riders' skill and fortitude that made the operation of the line possible. Both riders and hostlers shared the same privations, often being reduced to the necessity of eating wolf meat and drinking foul or brackish water. ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... lord, king of the world, what is this affair?' 'You must go and kill a man named Hatim-Thai, who lives on the confines of Syria.' To this I replied: 'O my lord, king of the world, I am only a Bedouin, a poor robber, wandering in the forests and the plains. For drink I have but the brackish water of the marshes. For food I have only rats and locusts.' On account of my wretchedness, I obeyed the wishes of the King, and promised to execute this affair. But here I am, in a very embarrassing situation, for I do not know this Hatim-Thai, and I don't even know where his tribe ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... the southward and eastward, we could work only slowly to the southward, against wind and current. At times we suffered greatly for want of water; our usual resource was to dig for it, but often it was so brackish and warm that when extreme thirst forced its use the consequences were violent pains and retchings. One morning we saw a few wigwams ashore, and pulled in at once and landed. It was a party of Seminoles who had come out of the everglades like the bears to gather eggs. They ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... the chief causes of illness among the colonists, impure water, we did not have to contend with. In the early days of James Towne, the river was the only water supply; later, shallow wells were dug; both the river and the wells furnished impure, brackish water. To-day, two artesian wells are flowing on the island. As we got our supply from them, we often thought of how those first settlers suffered and died for want of pure water, when all the while this inexhaustible supply lay imprisoned beneath their cornfields. ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... mile from the sea on the right or west bank of the Fleet stream. This rivulet, which is so narrow as it passes the houses that I have known a good jumper clear it without a pole, broadens out into salt marshes below the village, and loses itself at last in a lake of brackish water. The lake is good for nothing except sea-fowl, herons, and oysters, and forms such a place as they call in the Indies a lagoon; being shut off from the open Channel by a monstrous great beach or dike of pebbles, of which I shall ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... the bo'sun calculated, to last us for the better part of two months, and this without any great stint; but we had yet to prove if the brig held water in her casks, for that in the creek was brackish, even so far as we had penetrated from the sea; else we had not been in need. To the charge of this, the bo'sun set Josh, along with two of the men. Another, he told to take charge of the galley, so long as we were in the hulk. But for that night, he said we had no need to ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... more, gives a sort of reality and substance to such traditions. The custode dipped an iron ladle into the miraculous water, and we each of us drank a sip; and, what is very, remarkable, to me it seemed hard water and almost brackish, while many persons think it the sweetest in Rome. I suspect that St. Peter still dabbles in this water, and tempers its qualities according to the faith of those ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... this occasion was decidedly eccentric. On reaching a village he would tell his coachman where to go next but he never told him more than one stage in advance. Every morning he would consume one of his rolls and wash it down with the lukewarm brackish water of the Maros—and bitter enough he found the taste of it too. He never quitted the carriage for more than two or three minutes at a time, and he presented his pistols point blank at everyone who ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... him and kissed her salt-sweet mouth. Her kiss was brackish on his lips as life was. She felt a kind of assault in the fervor of his kiss, but she did not resist. He was a stranger who sprang at her from the dark, but he was also very like a poet she had loved ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... he reached the summit of the hill and looked about. The damp sea air fanned his long hair and caused him to look in the direction of the fleecy white clouds which were creeping upward from the horizon. Soon there would be fog. Then he could continue on his way to the brackish spring on the bluff-side overlooking the south shore. From there it was only a stone's throw to the beach where the mussels and abalones clung so thickly to ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... exaltation was soon to be transformed into the deepest discouragement; for when night closed in and Alush was reached after a short march it appeared that the desert tribe which dwelt there, ere striking their tents the day before, had filled the brackish spring with pebbles ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... most of them died within two or three days. So long that we had thirty at a time sick of this calenture, which attacked our men, either by reason of the sudden change from cold to heat, or by reason of brackish water which had been taken in by our pinnace, through the sloth of their men in the mouth of the river, not rowing further in ...
— Sir Francis Drake Revived • Philip Nichols
... of Java, also acts in this manner. He generally lives in estuaries. It is therefore a brackish water which he takes up and projects by closing his gills and contracting his mouth; he can thus strike a fly at a distance of several feet. Usually he aims sufficiently well to strike it at the first blow, but sometimes he fails. Then he begins again until he has succeeded, which ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... make shift for themselves, and to learn from the hardship of their lot repentance for the act of piracy they had committed in stealing our ship. On searching the island they found it to contain no water except a brackish liquid, to be had by digging, The only food obtainable was shell-fish, and occasionally the rank flesh of sea birds. They had neither the tools nor materials to build habitations, and were forced to shelter themselves from the scorching sun in summer and from the bitter ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... Mr. Rhea upon it, and for two men to hold him on; which was done by the faithful Nestorians, Daniel and Guwergis. The motion of the horse extorted frequent, though gentle, groans of pain. He was very thirsty, and both the children were crying for water. There was none. At a brackish brook he had tried to drink, but spit out the ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... was blinking at him, for his eyes had taken in more or less of the brackish water of the river; but he shook his head in the negative. This relieved Jack more than a little. Like Josh, he had been hoping that in the very beginning of their new cruise a wet blanket might not be cast over the spirits of the party by their witnessing the drowning ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... stuff tasted a little brackish, but Bart got it down all right. He didn't much like the idea of drinking a solution of "germs," but he knew that was silly. There was a big difference between disease germs and ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... as this last existed; in sad reality we coasted along 240 miles of sand hillocks; I never knew before, what a horrid ugly object a sand hillock is. The famed country of the Rio Plata in my opinion is not much better: an enormous brackish river, bounded by an interminable green plain is enough to make any naturalist groan. So Hurrah for Cape Horn and the Land of Storms. Now that I have had my growl out, which is a privilege sailors take on all occasions, I will turn the tables and give an account of my doing ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... found the ground softer, and the water not so deep; yet the wind continued to blow so hard that we could not venture to change our station. We had found a small spring of water about half a mile inland, upon the north side of the bay, but it had a brackish taste; I had also made another excursion of several miles into the country, which I found barren and desolate, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach. We had seen many guanicoes at a distance, but we could not get near enough to have a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... marine and brackish water strata younger than the Jurassic, but more especially those of ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... some, which we judged to be of the deer kind. The fish in the bay are scarce; those we caught were mostly sharks, dog-fish, and a fish called by the seamen nurses, like the dog-fish, only full of small white spots; and some small fish not unlike sprats. The lagoons (which are brackish) abound with trout, and several other sorts of fish, of which we caught a few with lines, but being much encumbered with stumps of trees, we could not haul ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
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