"Oasis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beautiful Establishment, or Oasis of Purity, intended for the Devil's regiments of the line, lay continents of dingy poor and dirty dwellings, where the unfortunate not yet enlisted into that Force were struggling manifoldly,—in their workshops, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... miles of our ride lay across an undulating plain of dolorite, to a farm situated at the head of an inlet of the sea. At a distance, the farm-steading looked like a little oasis of green, amid the grey stony slopes that surrounded it, and on a nearer approach not unlike the vestiges of a Celtic earthwork, with the tumulus of a hero or two in the centre, but the mounds turned ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Here do I sit now, The desert nigh, and yet I am So far still from the desert, Even in naught yet deserted: That is, I'm swallowed down By this the smallest oasis—: —It opened up just yawning, Its loveliest mouth agape, Most sweet-odoured of all mouthlets: Then fell I right in, Right down, right through—in 'mong you, Ye friendly damsels dearly ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... stones had been gathered to form fences like ramparts. Again I saw fields crusted with stone like the fields of Cong, with the same waterworn appearance, but not so extensive. The little, pretty station of Cusheen seemed an oasis ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in 1858, and here, too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields and trees that still maintain a green though besmutted oasis in the busy heart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soon engulf them, there were kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians. She died a few years ago, mourned and missed ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... one subsided into an indignant silence. The oasis was an ideal place for two situated as they were, and having the wisdom of the woods they remained still and quiet in its cover. But after three or four hours the shiftless one became restless. He was a man of great strength, ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... from Adrar Suttuf by wide valleys and sand dunes. Adrar is within the French sphere of influence. In general barren, the country contains several oases, with a total population of about 10,000. In 1900 the oasis of Atar, on the western borders of the territory, was reached by Paul Blanchet, previously known for his researches on ancient Berber remains in Algeria. (Blanchet died in Senegal on the 6th of October 1900, a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... executed on account of the dampness of the church and the hardness of men's hearts. But it was impossible to disturb a religious service. So she coaxed the boy, dragging behind her, down the ambulatory beside the oasis of chapel, where the singers, sitting side-wise, in rows facing each other, chanted the Venite. A few worshipers from the close, all of them women, pattered in to take part in this daily office. The smithy hammers ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Surrounded by big bluffs at the intersection of the Laramie and Platte rivers, forming a valley unsurpassed in the fertility of its soil, together with the richness of its natural vegetation, it was an oasis in the desert. The glory of the once charming place has departed forever. It was abandoned by the government a few years ago, as it was no longer a military necessity, the savage tribes which it watched having either become tame or removed ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... perhaps, among the most unsettled of men. He had settled with his family on the banks of the Red River. The colony on that river is now one of the frontier towns of Canada. At the time we write of, it was a mere oasis in the desert, not even an offshoot of civilisation, for it owed its existence chiefly to the fact that retiring servants of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company congregated there to spend the evening of life, far beyond the Canadian boundary, in the heart of that great wilderness ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... hot sunshine with its myriad shining sword-points, the old hedge sent out to Philip on the May breeze its ancient welcome of aromatic fragrance, and the tall roses crowded gayly to look over its edge at the new master. Slowly, a little dazed at this oasis of shining order in the neglected garden, he walked to the opening and stepped inside the hedge. The rose garden! The famous rose garden of Fairfield, and as his mother had described it, in full splendor of cared-for, orderly bloom. Across the paths he ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... When Father Hecker and Mrs. George V. Hecker and their associates began The Young Catholic, this vast mirage of the desert of life had but glimmered upon the distant horizon; they saw it coming and they did their best to point Catholic youth away from it and lead it to the real oasis of God, with its grateful shade, its delicious fruits, and its ever-flowing springs of the ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... watered, but here it lies out almost like a desert. It is sparsely inhabited along the little streams by a straggling off-shoot of the Mexican race; yet once in a while a fine place is to be seen, like an oasis in the Sahara, the home of some old Spanish Don, with thousands of cattle or sheep ranging on the plains, or perhaps the headquarters of some enterprising cattle company. But these places were few and far between at the time ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... is truly an oasis in the midst of the desert of Africa. It produces in abundance wheat, beans, lentils, and all leguminous foods; palms rear themselves in forests. On the pastures irrigated by the Nile graze herds of cattle and goats, and flocks of geese. With a territory hardly ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... Sanehat's flight southward, reaching the Nile at Cairo after two days' haste, indicates that the army was somewhere west of the Delta. This would point to its being on the road to the oasis of the Natron Lakes, which would be the natural course for a body of men needing water supply. His throwing himself between two bushes to hide from the army shows that the message came early in the day, otherwise he would have fled in the dark. He then fled a day's journey to the south, ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... garden of roses." He could not long confine himself to ordinary language. "And yet the hot sand of the desert, and the cool of the night, and the occasional patch of miserable, languishing green, with the little kindly spring in the camel-trodden oasis, seemed all so delightful in the past life that one was quite content, never suspecting the existence of better things. But now—I could almost laugh to think of it. I stand in the midst of the garden that is filled with all things fair, and the tree of ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... before their rights to free life had been recognized, and another hundred years to found their liberty on a firm basis—the twelfth century charters thus being but one of the stepping-stones to freedom.(15) In reality, the mediaeval city was a fortified oasis amidst a country plunged into feudal submission, and it had to make room for itself by the force of its arms. In consequence of the causes briefly alluded to in the preceding chapter, each village community had gradually fallen under ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... sort of talk passed over Clara as a desert wind passes over an oasis, bringing no pleasant songs of birds, and sowing no fruitful seed. She had her born ideas as to men and women, and she was seemingly incapable of receiving any others. In her mind men were strong and brave, and women weak and timorous; ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Just see how this would sound, for instance:—'And now our little band of toil-worn castaways,' (that's us), 'weary and faint with their wanderings through the desert, (that's Cape Desolation, or Sea-bird's Point, or whatever Johnny in his wisdom shall conclude to call it), arrived at a little oasis, (this is it), a green spot in the wilderness, blooming like the bowers of Paradise, where stretched at ease, upon beds of bright and odoriferous flowers, they reposed from the fatigues of their journey.' There, that sentence, I flatter myself is equal in harmony and effect, to the opening ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... a military outpost in an oasis under the Atlas, about forty miles south of Fez. To most people the word "oasis" evokes palms and sand; but though Morocco possesses many oases it has no pure sand and few palms. I remember it as a considerable event when I discovered one from ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... separated herself almost entirely from her blood-stained husband, and spent her life in the recesses of the harem, praying as a Christian both for the murderer and his victims. It is a relief, in the midst of this atrocious saturnalia to encounter this noble and gentle character, which like a desert oasis, affords a rest to eyes wearied with the contemplation of so ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... glance at Egypt's north-western frontier. Behind the deserts which spread to the west of the Delta lies the oasis of Siwa; and from here there is a continuous line of communication with Tripoli and Tunis. Thus, during the present winter (1910-11), the outbreak of cholera at Tripoli has necessitated the despatch of quarantine officials ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... about an hour, he grew restless. The sand in that part lay in high ridges or dunes, some of them at least a hundred feet high, and he hoped that on surmounting the next beyond him he would come in sight of the town, or at least of some oasis, with water and human habitations, and with each recurring disappointment he became only the more eager to reach the sand-hill beyond. But he was becoming very faint, and the wound in his head throbbed to agony. He was at last so "beat" that he was ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... of his sailors,—songs so clear and sonorous, that they would have made a divine harmony had their notes been taken down,—he saw the Island of Monte Cristo, no longer as a threatening rock in the midst of the waves, but as an oasis in the desert; then, as his boat drew nearer, the songs became louder, for an enchanting and mysterious harmony rose to heaven, as if some Loreley had decreed to attract a soul thither, or Amphion, the enchanter, intended there to ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... blue and white the coverlet on the bed, blue the quaintly shaped china on the wash-stand. She remembered with a thrill of satisfaction that her own bags and cases were of the same hue, and took off her hat feeling that she had found an oasis in the ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... way hence to Mount Lebanon, on the other side of the Tigris and Euphrates, the traveller comes, after a journey of some days, to a vast desert. There, in the middle of a large barren and sandy plain, lies a fruitful oasis, watered by a little stream, on whose brink grow tall palms, refreshing the wanderer with their shade and fruit. But the neighbourhood of the palms is frequented by a monstrous lion of a dark colour,—the only one that has wandered ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... wife, cultivates a little piece of ground, and supplied passing travellers with general rations for both man and beast. The place was clean in comparison with what we had been accustomed to, and we seemed to sigh a mutual sigh of content at our good luck in reaching this "oasis." We rested all afternoon, and got to bed early, and, although there were rats about, I slept "like a log," ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... camped at Andrews Creek an incident occurred which revealed Roosevelt's influence over the cowpunchers, not alone of his own "outfit." Andrews Creek was not more than a mile from Medora, and after the day's work was done, the cowboys naturally adjourned with much enthusiasm to that oasis for the thirsty. As the evening wore on, the men, as "Dutch Wannigan" remarked long afterward, "were getting kinda noisy." Roosevelt, who had also ridden to town, possibly to keep an eye on "the boys," heard ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... streams of welcome rain, Such as the two preceding ones had brought. Rain, that in tropic climes means life and joy To man and beast as to the thirsty soil And though the sky hung like a sable pall Over the fair oasis, nestling calm Beneath the trusted shelter of the hills, And o'er the broad lake-outlet of the floods, What cause had they to fear? 'Twas often thus, And the long wished-for rains would bring forth joy So reasoned they who, peaceful, viewed unmoved Th' outpouring of that ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... weeps; his 'alley tors' and his 'commoneys' are alike neglected; he forgets the long familiar cry of 'knuckle down,' and at tip-cheese, or odd or even, his hand is out. But Pickwick, gentlemen, Pickwick, the ruthless destroyer of this domestic oasis in the desert of Goswell Street—Pickwick, who has choked up the well and thrown ashes on the sward—Pickwick, who comes before you to-day with his heartless tomato sauce and warming-pans—Pickwick still rears his head with unblushing effrontery, and gazes without a sigh on the ruin he has made. ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... other and ceased talking. Though it was past seven, daybreak was still three hours distant. The aurora borealis had passed out of the sky, and the camp was an oasis of light in the midst of deep darkness. And in this light the forms of the three men were sharply defined. Emboldened by the silence, Sigmund raised his voice and opened the last stanza of the ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... arms of the Nile, and delighted in giving them the names of their respective countries;** Greeks of diverse origin settled themselves at Neapolis, not far from Panopolis; and the Samians belonging to the AEschrionian tribe penetrated as far as the Great Oasis; in fact, there was scarcely a village where Hellenic traders were not found, like the bakals of to-day, selling wine, perfumes, oil, and salted provisions to the natives, practising usury in all its forms, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... instant that one frail sheet of glass, by holding in the extra oxygen which counteracted the poisoned ether, shut us off from the fate of all our kind. For a few short hours the knowledge and foresight of one man could preserve our little oasis of life in the vast desert of death and save us from participation in the common catastrophe. Then the gas would run low, we too should lie gasping upon that cherry-coloured boudoir carpet, and the fate of the human race and of all earthly life would be complete. For a long time, in a mood which ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... then another hill piled on the summit of the first. An additional mile of plateau followed, from which could be discerned two light-houses on the coast they were nearing, reposing on the horizon with a calm lustre of benignity. Another oasis was reached; a little dell lay like a nest at their feet, towards which the driver pulled the horse at a sharp angle, and descended a steep slope which dived under the trees like a rabbit's burrow. They sank lower ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the liberty, here, of citing an instance of this. In 1861, when I found myself on the West Coast of Mexico, a dozen backwoods families determined upon settling in Sonora (forming an oasis in the desert); a plan which was frustrated by the invasion at that time of the European powers. Many native farmers awaited the arrival of these immigrants in order to take them under their protection. The ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... ought to go to my work, Brick. I won't try to explain what this hour has meant to me for I believe you understand. I'm like a man crossing the desert who finds a spring and gets enough water to last him till the next oasis." ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... junto, the name of Jefferson will be hailed with gratitude, his memory honored and cherished as the second founder of the liberties of the people, and the period of his administration will be looked back to as one of the happiest and brightest epochs of American history; an oasis in the midst of a sandy desert. But I beg the gentleman's pardon; he has already secured to himself a more imperishable fame than I had supposed; I think it was about four years that he submitted to the House of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... their surroundings. At distances varying from a mile to a mile and a half a few dilapidated dwellings peeped out of a fringe of woods. Everything else was pine-swamp, with the exception of the one small field of potatoes in which they were encamped, and which stood out as an oasis in the wilderness. Through the midst of the landscape straggled a muddy road, hopelessly impassable for foot-travellers. Certainly ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... them and seemed to cut them off from the observation of passers-by. It was as if their tenderness for each other had found an oasis in ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... not isolated from the world upon this Great Plateau so much as might appear at first glance. There is a puff of smoke upon the horizon, and the whistle of a locomotive strikes upon the ear. The railway which links this great oasis of cultivated fields with others similar, and with the world beyond, runs near at hand, and will bear us, do we wish it, away to the confines of the Republic in the north, to the United States, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... into this train of thought by an article in the North China Daily News of 10th July 1874, in which the writer speaks of China as "a luxuriant mental oasis amidst the sterility of Eastern Asia," and "possessing a literature in vastness and antiquarian value surpassed by no other." He goes on to say that the translations hitherto made "have conveyed to us a faint notion of the compass, variety, solidity, and linguistic beauties of that literature." ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... at the Hotel Astor is the oasis in the desert days of rehearsal for all early fall plays, and beside its tinkling fountain and under its tinkling music can be found at luncheon all of the theatrical profession who are not around the corners at the equally cool, white-tiled Childs restaurants. Beside ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Great forest-clad hills reared their torn and barren crests to enormous heights out of the dead level of the prairie. A tumbled sea of Nature's wreckage lay strewn about unaccountably, for a distance of something like two miles, east and west, and double that distance from north to south. It was an oasis of natural splendor in the heart of a calm sea ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... Add to this threatening collection trees and snow-slides and slippery pavements and you have quite a list of horrors. Danger! Why, the land is nothing but maelstrom of catastrophes compared with which the serenity of the open sea, with nothing but its moon and stars overhead, is an oasis of safety. Of course there are certain things you must be on your guard against while on the water—fogs, icebergs and gales. But where can you find a spot under God's heaven entirely free from the possibilities of mishap of some sort? I'd a hundred times rather take the risks ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... the scenes of our indulgence long walks through the solitary and romantic environs of Arthur's Seat, Salisbury Crags, Braid Hills, and similar places in the vicinity of Edinburgh; and the recollection of those holidays still forms an oasis in the pilgrimage which I have to look back upon. I have only to add, that my friend still lives, a prosperous gentleman, but too much occupied with graver business to thank me for indicating him more plainly as a ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... stress of life is sternest in the cities, and most of the experiments have been made there. They are oases in the desert of the buildings and pavements of brick, with their grime and monotony, and if the people of the desert will camp for an hour and drink of the spring, those who have planted the oasis will be well pleased. To attract them the settlement workers have organized clubs and classes for united study and activity in matters that naturally interest the people of the neighborhood; they have music and dancing and amateur theatricals, and often ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... twenty miles from the mouth of the Thompson they came to a field of potatoes planted by some rancher of Kamloops. The starving Overlanders could scarcely credit their eyes. No one occupied the windowless log cabin; but there was the potato patch—an oasis of food in a desert of starvation. They paused long enough at the cabin to boil a great kettleful and to feast ravenously. This gave them strength to tramp on to Kamloops. We saw that the Irish mother, Mrs Shubert, with her two children, accompanied this party. The day after ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... for the prevailing aridness and to apologize to the thirsty wayfarer for the inhospitableness of its surroundings. Miles away to the northward, perched high up among the ravines of a sun-baked mountain-spur, one can see a circumscribed area of luxuriant foliage. This conspicuous oasis in the desert marks the source of the beautiful road-side fountain, which traverses a natural subterranean passage-way between these two distant points. These little isolated clumps of waving trees, rearing their green heads conspicuously above the surrounding ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... where the dazzling elixir had wasted its virtues—there the herbage already had a freshness of verdure which, amid the duller sward round it, was like an oasis of green in a desert. And, there, wild flowers, whose chill hues the eye would have scarcely distinguished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar beauty. Toward that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects, whose hum of intense joy was ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... not go to his rooms, however. He could delay no longer reaching Mrs. Preston. From the quiet decorous boulevard, with its clean asphalt pavement and pleasant trees, he turned at once into the dirty cross street. The oasis of the prosperous in the expanse of cheap houses and tawdry flat-buildings was so small! It was easy, indeed, to step at least physically from the one ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... had no carpet. There was a little gas cooking-stove, with cooking things ranged on it; a small bare table; and one large cupboard. No draperies, no pictures, no ornaments of any kind; but by the window an ancient golden leather chair. Cecilia could never bear to sit in that oasis; its colour in this wilderness was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a nuisance and a pandemonium, now an oasis of verdure—has not as yet reported its owl, but the public eye is upon it, and the nocturnal marauder may yet be detected in the forks of the great willow-trees, which still retain their verdure. The sparrows are almost disproportionately ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... each in a green niche of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... obsequious dexterity of his colleague, who pronounced a sentence of condemnation against the unfortunate Timasius. His immense riches were confiscated in the name of the emperor, and for the benefit of the favorite; and he was doomed to perpetual exile a Oasis, a solitary spot in the midst of the sandy deserts of Libya. [14] Secluded from all human converse, the master-general of the Roman armies was lost forever to the world; but the circumstances of his fate have been related in a various and contradictory ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... odor from the heavenly bowers, Which stirs our senses tenderly, and brings Dreams which are shadows of diviner things Beyond this grosser atmosphere of ours. An oasis of verdure and of flowers, Love smiteth on the Pilgrim's weary way; There fresher air, there sweeter waters play, There purer solace charms the quiet hours. This glorious passion, unalloyed, endowers With moral beauty all who feel its fire; Maid, wife, and offspring, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... were driven over two or three miles of dusty, hard road to a distant hotel, which stands in the midst of greenness,—in an oasis. Immediately above the green sward that surrounds it the brown hills rise, the grass scorched ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... from the country I found, to my delight, in place of the abomination of desolation I have described, a beautiful green oasis in the world of stone and brick. From fence to fence flourished and waved in the breeze an unbroken forest. The unsightly heaps had become a range of hills, sloping gently down to the level on one side, and ending on the other ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... established. Then, with trembling and eager footsteps, the girls hastened to what appeared to be an oasis in a desert ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... astonished the good sisters with her feats of embroidery and fine sewing and they could not understand how such an one could learn so quickly. The manual skill of playing and the quick eye in reading music had probably much to do with it. The weeks at the convent were like a charming oasis in the dry and dusty plain of her public life and she came out of the school blooming with ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... woman and an inscrutable stranger meet and love in an oasis of the Sahara. Staged this season with magnificent cast and ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... palm tree, in an oasis of the Arabian desert, sat the Phoenix, glowering moodily upon the world below. He was alone, quite alone, in his old age, as he had been alone in his youth, and in his middle years; for the Phoenix has neither mate nor children, and there ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... in like an oasis in these terrible narratives of Canaanite extermination. There is much about it that is beautiful and striking, but the main thing is that it teaches the universality of God's mercy, and the great truth that trust in Him unites to Him and brings deliverance, how black soever may have ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Herr Max,' Ernest was saying at that exact moment, 'to have you down here with us even for a single night. You can't imagine what an oasis your coming has been to us both. I'm sure Edie has enjoyed it just as much as I have, and is just as anxious you should stop a little time here with us as I ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... umbrella-tree, samples of every fruit and berry of attractive appearance, however hot and acrid, all go to form a mulching of vegetable matter such as no other tree of forest or jungle gets. Prodigal and profuse as she may be, Nature is the rarest of economists. Out here in the forest is springing up an oasis of jungle, every plant of which owes its origin to ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... in some the ground is covered with salt; in others, like the Sahara, there are no rivers. In some places in the Sahara there is water coming up through a crack in the rocks. This water is called a "spring," and wherever one is found, trees and grass and food will grow. Such a place is called an "oasis." In the big oases there are villages and towns. But the sun is so hot that before the water from the spring has flowed very far it is dried up, and beyond that nothing will grow. So when we think of the ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How
... is the development of an attitude which is detached from practical effects and from the practical life of outer success. The dance is an action by which nothing is produced and nothing in the surroundings changed. It is an oasis in the desert of our materialistic behaviour. From morning till night we are striving to do things, to manufacture something in the mill of the nation: but he who dances is satisfied in expressing himself. He becomes detached ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... immaterial something, and turn up again some time afterwards in another part of the brain as a material process. The traveller in the desert might as well hope, before he again goes forth into the wilderness of reality, to take rest and refreshment in the oasis with which the Fata Morgana illudes him; or as well might a prisoner hope to escape from his prison through a door reflected in ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... welcomed by Colonel F. F. Flint, of the 4th Infantry, commandant of the post. Delicacy dictates that we forbear to speak of the charming family which surrounds him; but the rarity of Christian households in the army made our visit there like to an oasis ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... real, as if, by some magic, we were actually going to mix in the life of the past. But it is in reality but a mere delusion, a deceit like those dioramas which we have all been into as children, and where, by paying your shilling, you were suddenly introduced into an oasis of the desert, or into a recent battle-field: things which surprised us, real palm trunks and Arabian water jars, or real fascines and cannon balls, lying about for us to touch; roads opening on all sides into ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... straight horizon; thus the whole is magnificent. Nothing of the sort could be produced in the interior of a country but in a situation like the present. Who but a man of extraordinary genius would have thought of rearing in the desert such a structure as this, or creating such an oasis? The colouring of the building reminded me of Malta or Sicily, a rich mellow hue prevails; the ornaments of the Tower are so clean, so distinct, such terseness. The windows, small and few compared ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... journeying the loneliness of the Desert will become frightfully oppressive. Upon my poor fellows the access of melancholy came heavy, and all at once, as a blow from above; they bent their necks, and bore it as best they could, but their joy was great on the fifth day when we came to an oasis called Gatieh, for here we found encamped a caravan (that is, an assemblage of travellers) from Cairo. The Orientals living in cities never pass the Desert except in this way; many will wait for weeks, and even for months, until ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... enough, then he felt his heart thump against his ribs. A tragedy had come into the room! The woman at his side sat as though turned to stone. There was a look in her face as of one who sees Death. The small patch of rouge, invisible before, was now a staring daub of color in an oasis of ashen white. Her eyes were as hard as stones; her lips were twitching as though, indeed, she had been stricken with some disease. No longer was he sitting with this most beautiful lady at whose coming all heads were turned ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was a sweet oasis in the severe monotony of a life which had been filled always with hard work, criticism and misrepresentation, although it was only a public expression of the numerous and strong friendships which had been many times manifested in private. The birthday celebration ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... lay dry before its sliding, for it was on its way in. It had nearly reached the cliff's foot in most places; but Mick presently came to a point where he looked down on a small field of very green grass, set as an oasis between the waves and the walling rock, with a miniature chaos of heaped-up boulders to left and right. A few of them were scattered over it, and even the highest of these wore a scarf of leathery flat sea-ribbon, in token of occasional submergence; but amongst them grew hawthorn and sloe bushes, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... sunset; the sonorous sound of the cattle bells is heard, as they slowly emerge from the steep hill path that leads to Maxwell and Louis Perron's little clearing; the dark shadows are lengthening that those wood-crowned hills cast over that sunny spot, an oasis in the vast forest desert that man, adventurous, courageous man, has hewed for himself in the wilderness. The little flock are feeding among the blackened stumps of the uncleared chopping; those timbers have lain thus untouched ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... on the western edge of the Common, and straggles over a dozen short, crooked roads—an oasis among parallelograms. Once it had a reputation for growing bog-myrtle, as you may learn ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the sycamores and looked up through tender feathery foliage at the white arch of marble through which the noble avenue flows away between its splendid arid chasms of marble, bronze, and masonry to that blessed leafy oasis in the north—the Park. ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... give of her store of strength and cheer to others, but the store seemed inexhaustible. The more she gave, the more one felt that there was enough and to spare. I looked forward to my little weekly visit as to an oasis in the desert; not that all else was bleak, but that spot seemed to me so ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... triumphing over varying conditions. The cloth upon the plain deal table was of fine linen, the decanter and glasses were beautifully cut; there were walnuts and, in a far Corner, cigars of a well-known brand and cigarettes from a famous tobacconist. Beyond that little oasis, however, were all the evidences of a hired abode. A hole in the closely drawn curtains was fastened together by a safety pin. The horsehair easy-chairs bore disfiguring antimacassars, the photographs which adorned the walls were grotesque but typical of village ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... alders, oaks, and the largest beech trees to be found in Europe. It is more than a French league in circumference, and is situated to the east of the city, only a few steps from the last houses. It is a really delightful oasis in the midst of the depressing Dutch plains. When one has entered the wood and passed beyond the fringe of pavilions, little Swiss cottages, and summer houses dotted about among the first trees, one seems to have lost one's self in a lonely interminable forest. The trees are as thick ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... him. The result of all these tendencies was that the Platonic Academy at Florence deliberately chose for its object the reconciliation of the spirit of antiquity with that of Christianity. It was a remarkable oasis in the humanism ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... a page of newspaper "want ads" for "trained" men, in all walks of life. "Trained" men? Hateful word! How often had he encountered it! Ah, here was one advertisement without the "trained"; he devoured it eagerly. The item, like an oasis in the desert of his general incapacity and uselessness, exercised an odd fascination for him in spite of the absolute impossibility of his professing to possess a fractional part of those moral attributes demanded by the fair advertiser. She—a Miss Van Rolsen—was seeking a paragon, not ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... of the woes of the American nation, by the fear of seeing injustice and cupidity triumphing over the cause of the people, we were seeking relief in a measure of gaiety. When I had an hour's leisure I used to escape from my stern toils to the oasis of my own thoughts in the family at Sainte-Severe. At such a time I was wont to tell my kind friend Arthur some of the comic incidents of my entry into life after leaving Roche-Mauprat. At one time I would give him a description ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... exclaimed, with as near an approach to anger as I had ever seen in him. "I forbid you to write them!" But I believe this command only added a new attraction to authorship, agreeably haunting me as I beckoned imaginary scenes and souls out of chaos. An oasis bloomed at remote seasons, when we went to visit Mr. and Mrs. Fields in Boston. My mother writes of my reviving, and even becoming radiant, as soon as a visit of this fragrant nature breathed upon me. I joyously begin a letter of my mother's with the following greeting: "As soon as we got to Boston. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of his wellknown prowess when he was "shurf." The Happy Family were sprawled in unwonted luxury on the shady side of an outcropping of rock from under which a little spring seeped and made a small oasis in the general barrenness. They had shade, they Had water and food, and through the thin aromatic smoke of their cigarettes they could watch their horses cropping avidly the green grass that meant ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... the book-reviewer there is sometimes found the oasis of opportunity to recommend to a (comparatively) less suffering community a book worth reading. My Baronite has by chance come upon such an one in Timothy's Quest, by KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. The little volume ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... in experience; and when one has patiently, even happily, given up much of the joy of living to serve, has learned to keep self under and love even the unlovable, has put to the test the promises of the Bible and found them hold true in time of need, and has found the Sabbath day an oasis in the desert of an otherwise dreary life, even an old theologian wouldn't have much more to go on in beginning ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... tree in an oasis," Grizzel said huffily. "I am going to bathe my feet in the creek. Go and look for your old gold. You won't ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... The valley had closed up, so that the lofty walls cast shadows that met. A clump of cottonwoods surrounding a spring, abundance of rich grass, willows and flowers lining the banks, formed an oasis in the bare valley. Slone was tired out from the day of ceaseless toil down and up, and he could scarcely keep his eyes open. But he tried to stay awake. The dead silence of the valley, the dry fragrance, the dreaming walls, the advent of night low down, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... stretched the arm of stony-eyed duty, striking into the dust the crystal drops, withering the palms; and following her stern beckon, the thirsty pilgrim re-trod the sands of surrender, more intolerable than before, because the oasis was still in sight. Duty! Rugged incorruptible Spartan dame, whose inflexible mandate is ever: "With your shield, or ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... one passenger, whom either curiosity or business had brought thither, stood on the platform of the little station looking about him. To the right of him, beyond the village, blooming like an oasis from the irrigation afforded by the artesian wells, rose the mountains, the foothills green and dimpled, the slopes with their massed shadows of pines and oaks climbing upward and gashed with deep purple canons, and above them the great white, solemn peaks, austere and stately guardians of ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... was an oasis of cleanliness and good food, as when they stopped at the railroad hotel in Salina and found it run by Mother Bickerdyke, who, marching through Georgia with General Sherman, had nursed and fed his soldiers. At such times Kansas would take on a rosy ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... not prescribed by custom and example. But, independently of the Robinson Crusoes of the class, many such slaves of conventionalism achieve their freedom while intending only to better their condition. They emigrate to a new country, and find themselves actually in a desert island—an oasis in the wilderness—where it is necessary to work at whatever employment offers the means of subsistence—to resort to all sorts of shifts and expedients, and to submit cheerfully to the deprivation of things ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... opportunity to dissuade him from the campaigns he has been planning against the long lived Ethiopians, the Ammonians and the Carthaginians. Of the first of these three nations we know scarcely anything but through fabulous tales; by attacking them we should lose much and gain little. The oasis of Ammon is scarcely accessible to a large army, on account of the desert by which it is surrounded; besides which, it seems to me sacrilegious to make war upon a god in the hope of obtaining possession of his treasures, whether we be ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 'purpose' displayed in these 'canals.' Their being all so straight, all describing great circles of the 'sphere,' all being so evidently arranged (as he thinks) either to carry water to some 'oasis' 2000 miles away, or to reach some arid region far over the equator in the opposite hemisphere! But he never considers the difficulties this implies. Everywhere these canals run for thousands of miles across waterless deserts, forming a system and indicating ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... unattractiveness has its oasis. Near the outer end of the Hackney Road is a park of 217 acres, fenced in, not by railings, but by a wooden paling, and containing plenty of greensward, trees, a lake for bathers, flower beds with the flowers arranged carefully in patterns by the admired cockney ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... Transcript, which declared that the fertile spots in the territory were small and separated by immense distances, and described the Red River region as an oasis in the midst of a desert, "a vast treeless prairie on which scarcely a shrub is to be seen." The climate was unfavourable to the growth of grain. The summer, though warm enough, was too short in duration, so that even the few fertile spots could "with difficulty mature ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... gold-seekers to the placers and valleys, there seemed no occasion for it. His fortune had been already found in the belt of arable slope behind the wooded defile, and in the miraculously located coign of vantage on what was now the great highway of travel and the only oasis and first relief of the weary journey; the breaking down of his own team at that spot had not only been the salvation of those who found at "Hays" the means of prosecuting the last part of their pilgrimage, but later provided ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the building of which I have read but have never seen. I have not had time to come so far down before this. Can you imagine a more delightful oasis in this desert ...
— Three People • Pansy
... hundred feet more, which you don't see, just like it. Another artist would have put in an oasis, or a stray hyena, or the bleached bones of an unfortunate traveller. I did not. Why? Another would have worked up a sunset, or a moonrise, or a thunder storm, to give variety to the sky. I did not. Why? The sky over my desert is an uninterrupted blue. There is not even ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... him with an admiration I could not repress. There was, indeed, something of the hero about this simple-minded Saharaman. We were at the edge of the oasis, in a remote place looking towards the quivering mirage which guards dead Okba's tomb. A tiny earthen house, with a flat terrace ending in the jagged bank of the Oued Biskra, was crouched here in the shade. From it emerged a pleasant scent of coffee. Suddenly Safti's ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... abyss, and in its centre an oasis of light, and in this oasis two creatures shut out of life, dazzling each other. No purity could be compared to their loves. Dea was ignorant what a kiss might be, though perhaps she desired it; because blindness, especially in a woman, has its dreams, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... out. A few moments later I heard the wheels of his carriage pass the long front of the house and turn down the avenue. I lingered for a moment where I was. The small oak table at which we had dined seemed like an oasis of colour in the midst of an atmosphere of gloom. The room was large and lofty, and the lighting was altogether inadequate. From the walls there frowned through the shadows the warlike faces of generations of Rowchesters. At the farther end of the apartment four armed ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... south, though he invaded Syria again in force at least once during the interval. In 842, however, having taken a new road along the coast, he turned inland from Beirut, crossed Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, and succeeded in reaching the oasis of Damascus and even in raiding some distance towards the Hauran; but he did not take (perhaps, like the Bedawi Emir he was, he did not try to take) the fenced city itself. He seems to have repeated his visit three years ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... enough to meet you, no doubt, from the valuable hints which you would have afforded me, the work now presented to you would have been in every way more worthy of your acceptance. But you were far better engaged; you were seeking another oasis in the wilds of the desert (that emblem of yourself in hieroglyphic lore), to which, so I was informed, you expected to have been guided information gained in the inside wrappers of one of your ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... changes: the glorious valley Father Thames has scooped out for himself is left behind; we are crossing the chalk uplands. On all sides are vast stretches of unfenced arable land, though here and there a tiny village with its square-towered Norman church peeps out from an oasis of green fields and stately elm trees. On the right the Chiltern Hills are seen in the background, and Wittenham Clump stands forth—a conspicuous object for miles. The country round Didcot reminds ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... presently went about his business, leaving Shelby in some quandary how he should employ the interval before the hour appointed by the great leader for their meeting. For a time he loitered in a window overlooking the restful oasis of the square, a place of fountains and pleasant leafage, dominated by a graceful tower which served as footstool for a shining goddess on tiptoe to greet the morning. His eyes were not long bent upon the goddess,—he did ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... meant to be an oasis of liberty and abundance in a worldwide desert of disappointed dreams. Our Nation was created to help strike away the chains of ignorance and misery and tyranny wherever they keep man less than God means ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson
... arrangement in which they have an equal interest with man himself. If Connecticut, with its blue laws, disloyal Hartford convention, and Democracy, has, nevertheless, been a Canada for fugitive wives from the yoke of matrimony, pray keep that little State, like an oasis in the desert, sacred to sad wives, at least until the sixteenth amendment of the federal constitution shall give the women of the republic the right to say whether they are ready to make marriage, under all circumstances, for better or worse, an indissoluble ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... old personality was dying within him. He could no longer recover his former way of life; all his disquietudes had vanished. He felt that he was balanced, lacking those alternations of courage and cowardice which had previously formed the characteristic thing in him. It was the oasis after the desert; the calm that ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... was not altogether alone in the world; there was a hope of my being rescued from the "slough of despond," where I had been so long floundering. I felt that the fountain of human kindness was not utterly sealed up, and again a green spot, an oasis, small, indeed, but cheering, appeared in the desert of my life. I had something to live for; a new desire for life seemed suddenly to spring up; the universal boundary of human sympathy included even my wretched self in its cheering circle. All these sensations ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... and deeply coloured spurs of naked rock, most picturesquely crowded with chod-tens, rise above the greenery, breaking the purple gloom of the gorge which cuts deeply into the mountains, and supplies from its rushing glacier torrent the living waters which create this delightful oasis. ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... to trade. Their language was strange to Jethro and Amuba; but it was closely related to that spoken by Ruth, and she generally acted as interpreter between Jethro and the natives. After traveling through Moab, they took the caravan road across the desert to the northeast, passed through the oasis of Palmyra, a large and flourishing city, and then journeyed on the Euphrates. They were now in the country of the Assyrians, and not wishing to attract attention or questions, they avoided Nineveh and the other great cities, and kept on their way north until they reached the mountainous country ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Like every aspect of life, and like most persons, it is a hint and suggestion of something high and poetic. It is an oasis of repose in the desert of our American hurry. It is a ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... we had come upon an oasis in this desert of stone," muttered Tonnison, as he gazed interestedly. Then he was silent, his eyes fixed; and I looked also; for up from somewhere about the center of the wooded lowland there rose high into the quiet air a great column of hazelike spray, upon which the sun shone, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... following her guidance, here we are in the dear round room time enough to catch the last rays of the sun, as they light the noble landscape which lies like a panorama around us, lingering longest on that long island of old thorns and stunted oaks, the oasis of B. Heath, and then vanishing in a ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... grass, and some clumps of harebells, azure as the clear sky overhead, softened the bareness of this tiny, high-flung terrace. In one spot, at the back, a spread of intense green and a handbreadth of moisture on the rock showed where a tiny spring oozed from a crevice to keep this lonely oasis in ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... this visit is but a little green oasis in the desert. In a day or two we shall separate, probably forever; but both, I doubt not, will be happier through life for this brief reunion. His plan is to make his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... oasis of palms and ti-trees I would make for it, knowing that if no water existed there, it could easily be got by digging. The physical conditions of the country would change suddenly, and my indefatigable wife was frequently at fault in her root-hunting ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... scenery, bathed in eternal sunshine by day and kissed by cool ocean breezes by night—the isle of Paul and Virginia, the isle which to Alexandre Dumas was the Paradise of the World, an enchanted oasis of the ocean, "all carpeted with greenery and refreshed with cooling streams, where, no matter what the season, you may gently sink asleep beneath the shade of palms and jamrosades, soothed by the ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... that her mother had foolishly boasted that she was fairer than the Nereids, the fifty nymphs who are the spirits of the waves. Neptune was so much displeased that he sent a flood to overflow the land, and a sea-monster to devour the people and cattle. In an oasis or isle of fertility in the middle of the Lybian desert was a temple of Jupiter, there called Ammon, and the Ethiopians had sent there to ask what to do. The oracle replied that the evil should cease if Andromeda were given up to the monster. Cepheus ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he was aware, too, in some subtle way, of the relief his guest experienced when they plunged into the darkening forest and left the forlorn place behind them. The clearing in which it was situated seemed an oasis of light in the desert of night in which the rest of the world lay. From the obscurity of the forest Dundas saw, through the vistas of the giant trees, the clustering cottages, the great hotel, gables and chimneys ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the Nile. Above the cataracts they pushed their arms into Ethiopia, and left there the monuments of their dominion. To the west they were at once defended and confined by a desert impassable to armies, but which the oasis rendered passable to the caravan. On the north was an almost harborless sea. On the east was another desert, through which roads led to the ports of the Red Sea and the mines of Sinai. On the north-east the Arabian desert ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... plaque, sculptured on both faces, which Peretie acquired at Hama in Northern Syria. The dealer from whom he bought it declared that it came into his hands from a peasant of Palmyra. As to where the latter found it we know nothing. In any case the oasis of Tadmor was a dependency of Mesopotamia as long as the power of the Chaldaean and Assyrian monarchies lasted, and the characteristic features of the work in question are entirely Assyrian. In that respect neither Peretie nor ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... and again I thought of the poor devils on the yard. Well, they belonged there by right, just as we belonged here by right in this oasis of the cabin. I looked at Mr. Pike and wagered to myself that half-a- dozen like him could master that stubborn foresail. As for the Samurai, I was convinced that alone, not moving from his seat, by a tranquil ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... describes with considerable detail the destruction of the mountains.] The next morning I found Biskra crowded with Arabs, who reported that the ocean had poured through the passage made by the eruption and was flooding the entire desert as far south as the oasis of Wargla, and that it had come within twelve miles of the walls of our own city. I at once hired a donkey and made a personal investigation, with the result that I can report as a fact that the entire desert east and south ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... entered the Barren Lands. The Barren Lands were bare but for an occasional oasis of trees like an island of refuge in a shelterless sea. In the clumps of dwarf shrubs, the Indians found signs that meant relief from famine—tufts of hair rubbed off on tree trunks, fallen antlers, ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... introduce myself; I knew your dear mother so well when we were both girls. I am so delighted to find such a church—quite an oasis; and I want to ascertain the best hour for calling on her. Quite an invalid—I was so shocked to hear it. Will the afternoon suit her? I am only here for three days to deposit these two girls, while I take the other on a round of visits. ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Grand Central Station shut off the street completely. Third Avenue, behind it, swarmed and rattled alarmingly close, and Broadway flared its impudent signs only five minutes' walk in the other direction, but here, in a little oasis of quiet street, two score of old families serenely held their place against the rising tide, and among them the Melroses confidently ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... later the proprietor of this roadside ranch, this artificial oasis in a land of desolation, strolled into the big bare room where half a dozen troopers were dozing or gambling, it was with an air of confidential joviality that he whispered to ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... as from a great distance; but as one dying in the desert turns his face toward the distant oasis, Deacon turned weakly to the speaker. She placed one fair arm behind his head, pillowing him, and with a peacock fan which had lain amid the cushions fanned his face. The strange scene became wholly unreal to him; he thought ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... Patmos of the devout and brave of another age looming dark and high through the diluted mist, and enveloped for a moment, as the cloud parted, in an amber-tinted glory. There had been a little Presbyterian oasis of old in the neighbourhood of Cromarty, which, in the midst of the Highland and Moderate indifferency that characterized the greater part of the north of Scotland during the seventeenth century, had furnished the Bass with not a few of its most devoted victims. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... flowers. Every natural object seemed to bring them a special message from the great Author of the beautiful. To these rare souls every natural object was touched with power and beauty; and their thirsty souls drank it in as a traveler on a desert drinks in the god-sent water of the oasis. To extract power and real wealth from men and things seemed to be their mission, and to pour it out again in refreshing showers upon a thirsty humanity. They believed that man's most important food does not enter by the mouth. They knew that man could not live by estates, dollars, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... town was Vodena, which seemed, after the heat and dust of the journey, like an oasis in the desert. Scores of streams, issuing from the steep slopes of the encircling hills, race through the town in a network of little canals and fling themselves from a cliff, in a series of superb cascades, into the wooded valley below. Philip of Macedon was born near ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... you. I pine for news of you, of Uncle John, of all at dear, dear Fernley. Alas! how young I was there! a simple child, sporting among the Northern daisies. Now, in the whirlwind of my passionate existence, I look back to that peaceful summer. For you, Marguerite, the green oasis, the palm-trees, the crystal spring; for me, the sand storm and the fiery death. No matter! I live and die a daughter of Cuba, the gold star on my brow, the three colours painted on my heart. Good night, beloved! I kiss the happy paper ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... wonderful greenness, which the recent rain had intensified. There is too much green, to my thinking, with too much uniformity in its soft, bright tone, in South Devon. After gazing on such a landscape the brown, harsh, scanty vegetation of the hilltop seemed all the more grateful. The heath was an oasis and a refuge; I rambled about in it until my feet and legs were wet; then I sat down to let them dry and altogether spent several agreeable hours at that spot, pleased at the thought that no human fellow-creature would intrude upon me. Feathered companions were, however, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... bubbled up at the division of a road. One branch led along the northern bank of the Rameside canal, eastward to Pa-Ramesu. The other crossed the northwestern limits of Goshen and went toward Tanis, in the northeast. Round about the little oasis were the dark circles where the turf fires of many travelers had been. The merchants from the Orient entering Egypt through the great wall of Rameses II, across the eastern isthmus, passed this way going to Memphis. Here Philistine, Damascene, Ninevite and Babylonian had halted; here Egyptian, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... are going farther and farther away to a bit of an oasis where the Sheikh's people are gathered with their flocks. They find pasture there at this time of year, and a little employment with the travellers who come to Cairo. In the summer time, when the city is pretty well empty, they go right away to some high ground where ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... south and seaward corner of the great bight on the Lancastrian coast—mournfully alone some say, gloriously alone to my thinking—rises in singular unexpected fashion the islet of Scarthey; a green oasis secure on its white rocky seat amidst the breezy wilderness of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... waiting for the ferryman on our return journey after the summer's absence, the plantation could be seen stretching away into the distance, hemmed in by the flat-topped cypresses. From there we had a view of our distant dwelling, gleaming white in the sunlight and standing in a green oasis of trees and grass, all looking wonderfully small amid the expanse of flat fields around it. Apart as I now am from the restless, never-ending push of life, when neither men nor women have time for leisure, when even pleasure ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... "Sebah, Oasis of Fezzan, 10th March, 1846.—This evening the female slaves were unusually excited in singing, and I had the curiosity to ask my negro servant, Said, what they were singing about. As many of them were natives of his own country, he had no difficulty in translating the Mandara or ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... at night instead of in the day time. This wilderness is about sixty miles wide and it took them five days to cross it. Whenever a wind rose on this desert the mouth, eyes, ears and nose were filled with dust, making life miserable. At Durands, a solitary farmhouse stood like an oasis. They got a fresh supply of water there. After leaving the Caroo they entered a desert called Kope. In crossing this waste, they stumbled on many and many a skeleton of poor fellows, who had no doubt succumbed on account of the heat and lack of water. The crossing of these two deserts cost them ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... the very horror of the denunciation holds within it a thought of beauty, like an oasis in a burning desert. "My REST"—that sweet haven which does truly await all those who will but follow ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Roud (White River). Rice is largely grown, but to-day not a trace of vegetation is visible; nothing but the vast white plain, smooth and unbroken, save where, here and there, a brown village blurrs its smooth surface, an oasis of mud huts in this ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... roasting en appolas, on sticks around the fire, and the guard were never without company. With pleasant weather and no enemy to fear, and abundance of the most excellent meat, and no scarcity of bread or tobacco, they were enjoying the oasis of a voyageur's life. Three cows were killed today. Kit Carson had shot one, and was continuing the chase in the midst of another herd, when his horse fell headlong, but sprang up and joined the flying band. Though considerably hurt, he had the good fortune to break no bones; and Maxwell, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... but this, we were told, did not matter. We were here, we were informed, "for a special purpose" and for action against distant targets only. There was an orchard on the flat just behind our guns, a little oasis of fertility in that barren land, and wooden crosses marking the graves of some of the Italian Trench Mortar ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... to have taken his stand not far from the rose-clad oasis of Jericho, on the banks of the Jordan; and men of every tribe, class, and profession, gathered thither, listening eagerly, or interrupting him with loud cries for help. The population of the metropolis, familiar with the Temple services, and accustomed to the splendour ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... pulling up his boots and examining the lock of his gun with rather a gloomy expression, "do you see those reeds?" He pointed to an oasis of blackish green in the huge half-mown wet meadow that stretched along the right bank of the river. "The marsh begins here, straight in front of us, do you see—where it is greener? From here it runs to the right where the horses are; there are breeding places ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... small oasis is formed in, or rather on, the barren. This becomes a place of refuge for seed wanderers,—in fact, a nursery. Up the slope I saw a young pine standing in a kinnikinick snow-cover. In the edge of the snow-tuft by me, ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... of 1874. Midsummer had another story to tell. A story of a wrathful sun in a rainless sky above a parched land, swept for days together by the searing south winds. In all the prairie there was no spot of vivid green, no oasis in the desert of tawny grasses and stunted brown cornstalks, and bare, hot stubble wherefrom even the poor crop of straw ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... ascending from the extra fatigue it entailed in lifting our weary feet in stepping upwards; and although we climbed up several trees that looked taller than the rest near, so that we might better observe our whereabouts, when perchance we might discover some welcome oasis in sight in the midst of this desert of green, not a single yard could we see beyond the tree tops immediately near, which closed in the view completely—the only break apparent being the intense glaring blue of the burning sky just overhead, with its molten coppery disc of a sun darting ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Dolores Street, a broad parked avenue where automobiles rushed by one another, shrieking a warning to the pedestrian. Suddenly I found myself alone. My companion had darted across the crowded street to a little oasis of grass where a mission bell hung suspended on an ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... lagoons, while curlews, snipe, ducks and other aquatic fowls flock on their shores; and not the least of the gifts with which the munificent hand of nature has so bountifully endowed this delicious oasis of the ocean is its delightful and soft, yet invigorating, climate, that makes well nigh useless the ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... in July, under a sky resplendent with stars, amid the perfume of gardens and caressed by the cool night breeze, we made our entry into the village of St. Martinville—the Little Paris, the oasis in ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... not last. The husband left them too much undisturbed. The fact is, that man was a philosopher. His wife gone, he had closed the green door of his oasis and quietly set about trimming his roses again, happy in the thought that these at least, attached to the soil by long roots, would not be able to run away from him. Our reassured lovers returned to Paris and then suddenly the young woman felt that some change had come ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... the country. There are public schools, for example, in certain parts of that city where there is not a child of American parentage. There is one, in particular, which I visit frequently and which I call the "oasis" in the desert of humanity (Walt Whitman's Sahara), where two or three thousand children are gathered, literally from the plains of Russia, the valleys of Italy, and other parts of Europe—for these were their ancestral homes, though they ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... as she moved amongst her uncouth surroundings. Her beautiful face and graceful figure was like to an oasis of stately flora in a desert of trailing, vicious brambles, and he marveled at the familiarity with which she came among these people. Moreover, he became beset with misgivings as he remembered the old stories which linked this girl's name with that of Retief. He struggled ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... cities which may be regarded as indispensable. At the edge of the Great Gobi and the converging point of the Nan-lu and Pe-lu—that is, the southern and northern routes to the western world—this oasis is a necessary resting-place. During our stop of two days, to make necessary repairs and recuperate our strength for the hardships of the desert, the usual calls were exchanged with the leading officials. In the matter of social politeness the Chinese, ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... everyday martyrs whom one meets so often among the Jews of Judea, men who day by day see their ambitions vanishing under the weight of a crushing duty. It was sad to see how he lingered over the farewell when I left him. I said that his house had seemed an oasis in the desert to me, that I could never forget the time spent with him. "And what of me?" he answered. "Your visit has been an oasis in the desert to me, but you go and the desert remains." Surely, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... West-world Embassy drank bourbon and Scotch, or at most the products of the vines of California. The styles of Budapest rivaled those of Paris and Rome, New York and Hollywood, but a feminine employee of the embassy wouldn't have been caught dead in local fashions. It was a home away from home, an oasis of the West in ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... hostile to Christians and Europeans as Mahometans are in general. He therefore resolved to go thither; as from it he could either proceed into Abyssinia by Kordofan, or traverse Africa from east to west. He therefore left Assiou in Egypt with the Soudan caravan in 1793, passed through the greater Oasis, and arrived at Sircini in Darfur: here he resided a considerable time, but he found insurmountable obstacles opposed to his grand and ulterior plan. He ascertained, however, the source and progress of the real ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... of regulars and marines, who marched quietly in prompt obedience of orders; and we made our way through the disorder like a steamer through the surging waves. All the treatises on discipline that were ever written would not have been so convincing as that little oasis of organization. They marched very slowly, and often halted to cover ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... we sought. Sunrise found us on our way, and a tramp of several weary hours, with occasional breaks for rest and refreshment, brought us at last to the desired spot. It was a quaint, picturesque little hamlet, embosomed in a mountain recess, a sheltered oasis in the midst of a wind-swept, snow-covered region. The usual Swiss trade of wood-carving appeared to be the principal occupation of the community. The single narrow street was thronged with goats, whose jingling many-toned bells made an incessant and agreeable symphony. Under the projecting ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... shaking hands with me. He alighted from his horse, and we walked together towards the town. I fell a victim to him, and forgot that he wrote. His writings were what packed dates might be to one who sat for the first time under a palm in some far oasis; they were but ice in a tumbler compared with seracs. He was first a man, and then a writer. The pitiful ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts |
