"Uninhabitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moorland, sad, savage, storm-swept, snow-buried, save in the brief and uncertain summer months. We must not picture to ourselves an Alp, with thundering avalanches, roaring torrents, fierce alternations of heat and cold, uninhabitable by mortal man, save during that short period of the year when the maidens in the sennhutt watch the cattle upon the upland pastures. We must picture to ourselves mountains blazing day after day, month after month, beneath the glorious sun and cloudless ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... eagerly, "don't deceive me, there is something serious going on. Your wife is frightened, and if there are many persons like Pere Fourchon, this part of the country will be uninhabitable—" ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... no woods, but only stunted undergrowths sickening with the baleful fumes that proceed from the city of darkness in the distance, and black with the soot of a thousand chimneys. The member apologized politely enough for bringing us to this almost uninhabitable and Heaven-forsaken region; but I begged him not to mind: it was only a more blasted scene than the heath ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... place uninhabitable any longer to the Tascherons. Their deep religious feeling took them to church that morning; for how could they let the mass be offered to God asking Him to inspire their son with repentance that alone could restore to him life ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... got a hawser to the whale and was ready to fill away for the South Cape channel again. The vessels passed each other cheering, and the governor admonished his friend not to carry the carcass too near the dwellings, lest it should render them uninhabitable. But Betts had his anchorage already in his eye, and away he went, with the wind on his quarter, towing his prize at the rate of four or five knots. It may be said, here, that the Martha went into the passage, and that the whale ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... protection of her traders, forsooth! The outcome of the business, after an exciting situation lasting for months, was that Germany got a slice of territory from France, mostly swamps, which reaches from the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, and reported to be, by her own engineers, uninhabitable. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... to perform. But I suppose St. Cuthbert thought differently; and so he came to spend his days on the island. He must have found discomfort and privation enough to satisfy even him, for it is said that there was neither water nor vegetation upon the island, which was then altogether barren and uninhabitable. Besides that, it had the reputation of being haunted by malignant demons, which took up their abode there. The saint, however, was not afraid of evil spirits, nor anything else, and the spot became very dear ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... nicely polished floors, and simply furnished rooms, of a truly German style, stove included. The poorer abodes were mere hovels made of peat, admitting neither light nor air, and having the roofs covered with grass. One would have thought them almost uninhabitable, and yet I had seen dwellings nearly as bad around ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... in all its relations, I supposed a case in which the opportunity of gaining an extraordinarily high profit was connected with a certain definite locality, and asked what would happen then. 'Let us imagine that in a small valley surrounded by uninhabitable rocks or marshes, a mine of incalculable value is discovered, the exploitation of which would give twice or thrice as much profit as the average profit in Freeland at that time. Naturally everyone will labour at this mine until the influx ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... answered. "We didn't stay to study it very long. There are no heavy metals on Ragnarok's other sun. Its position in the advance of the resources of any value. We gave Ragnarok a quick survey and when the sixth man died we marked it on the chart as uninhabitable and went ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... planning to do. The Seer and I rode over there once and he told me about it. I'll show you, if you like. New! Why the West was ages old before the East was discovered! The Seer says that if Columbus had come first to the western coast New England to-day would still be an uninhabitable, howling wilderness." ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... and soon had commenced their first route march into the battle-ways of France, and, incidentally, at the first resting place, Mouflers, made cheerily light of what was their first experience of faulty billeting arrangements. One billet, for 150 men, at the Folie Auberge was uninhabitable, and the appearance of the billets in general was greeted with good-natured growls of amazement and disgust. The weather, however, was mild and sunny, and after about eight hours' work all the troops were more or less under cover. When every incident was an ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... had gathered up from the table at which he was standing, he exclaimed in tones of mingled surprise and asperity: "Still at the old song! still harping, harping, harping! Peace, no more of it. Heaven would be insufferable with but one hymn, hell thrice horrible with but one howl, earth uninhabitable with but one evil. Oh, variety, what a charm ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... southwards they adjoin with the great sea or ocean towards the Cape of Good Hope, and to the north are bounded by the great and dangerous Sea of Sand, lying between the great city of Cairo in Egypt and the country of Ethiopia; in which are many uninhabitable deserts continuing for the space of five days journey. It is affirmed, if the Christian emperor were not hindered by the deserts, in which there is great want of provisions and especially of water, that he would ere ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... fine city of Caracas were entirely destroyed. The walls of some houses not thrown down, as those in the street San Juan, near the Capuchin Hospital, were cracked in such a manner as to render them uninhabitable. The effects of the earthquake were somewhat less violent in the western and southern parts of the city, between the principal square and the ravine of Caraguata. There, the cathedral, supported ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... he observed of the country, on both these occasions, he was led to infer that beyond the limits of his advance the interior had a uniform level, and was, for the most part, uninhabitable and under water. Its features must have been strongly marked to have confirmed such an opinion in the mind of the late Surveyor-General. It stands recorded on the pages of his journal, that he travelled over ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... was put; for he was sadly deficient in a taste for the picturesque. But he cursorily observed, that in his blue-water opinion, Willamilla was next to uninhabitable, all view of ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... very next morning he had an architect to view it, and to examine its capabilities. It happened that, about this time, several of the noblemen and gentry, in the county in which Vivian resided, had been seized with this rage for turning comfortable houses into uninhabitable castles. And, however perverse or impracticable this retrograde movement in architecture might seem, there were always at hand professional projectors, to convince gentlemen that nothing was so feasible. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... and Farther India, of China, of the countries to the north of Hindostan, of the north and north-east of Asia, and of some of the Asiatic islands. In Africa, little besides the shores were known; but the nature of the interior, with its burning sands and climate, uninhabitable, or inhabited by inhospitable and barbarous tribes, held out little expectation that another century would add much to our knowledge of that quarter of the world; and though the perseverance and enterprise of the eighteenth century, and what has passed ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... presume that there will not come a time when our pride will abandon the work in discouragement? What appearance is there that, narrowly lodged and ill at its ease here below, our pride should obstinately persist in constructing an uninhabitable palace beyond the earth's atmosphere? Even if it should so insist, would it not be arrested by the confusion of tongues, which is already only too perceptible and too inconvenient in natural history? Besides, it is utility that circumscribes all. It will be utility ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... creatures were not slow to accept the invitation. They entered by twos, fours, sixes—at last by scores, insomuch that the room became uninhabitable except by the man himself, and his comrades soon retired to their own compartment, leaving him to ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... degree of which would be troublesome to us. Why, therefore, should it not be considered troublesome also to the Deity? For the earth itself, as it is part of the world, is part also of the Deity. We see vast tracts of land barren and uninhabitable; some, because they are scorched by the too near approach of the sun; others, because they are bound up with frost and snow, through the great distance which the sun is from them. Therefore, if the world is a Deity, as these are parts of the world, some of the Deity's limbs must be said ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... you there; to distinguish between the sunny spots where it is delicious to sleep and the patches of shade in which you shiver; to remark with stupefaction that the rain does not fall inside the houses, that water is cold, uninhabitable and dangerous, while fire is beneficent at a distance, but terrible when you come too near; to observe that the meadows, the farm-yards and sometimes the roads are haunted by giant creatures with threatening horns, creatures good-natured, perhaps, and, at any rate, ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... was silent. Her kind old friends heard no word or murmur of complaint or dissatisfaction. If the forlorn old house were distasteful to Marjorie, she didn't show it; if her room seemed to her uninhabitable, nobody knew it from her. She ran out to the fields, and returned with an armful of ox-eyed daisies, and bunches of clover; and, with some grapevine trails, she made a real transformation of the dingy, ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... we have scarcely done so well, yet well; having enjoyed a great deal in spite of drawbacks. Murray, the traitor, sent us to Fano as a 'delightful summer residence for an English family,' and we found it uninhabitable from the heat, vegetation scorched with paleness, the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants sufficiently corroborative of their words, that no drop of rain or dew ever falls there during the summer. A 'circulating library' 'which doesn't give out books,' and 'a ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... corresponded well with the exterior of the house. It was large, bleak, and ill furnished; the ample, uncurtained windows; the cold, white pannelled walls; the uncarpeted floor; all giving it an air of uninhabitable misery. A few chairs of the Louis-quatorze taste, with blue velvet linings, faded and worn, a cracked marble table upon legs that once had been gilt; two scarcely detectable portraits of a mail-clad hero and a scarcely less formidable fair, with a dove upon her wrist, formed the principal ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... a month to reach the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes; that the piano ordered from Paris for Chopin took two months to get to Majorca, were the least among their troubles. A rainy season of exceptional severity set in, and the villa quickly became uninhabitable. It was not weatherproof. Chopin fell alarmingly ill. Good food and medical attendance were hardly to be procured for him; and finally, the villa proprietor, having heard that his tenant was suffering ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... was nevertheless certain that the occupation of the left bank of the Rio Grande, without an attempt at an understanding, would bring about a collision. The country lying between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was then entirely uninhabited, and was thought uninhabitable, though subsequent years have shown the fallacy of that belief. The occupation of the country extended no farther than the Nueces, and the Mexican farmers cultivated their corn and cotton in peace in ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... number of paa, the last being of a redder colour than those of the Tsavo valley. Of natives or of human habitations, however, we saw no signs, and indeed the whole region was so dry and waterless as to be quite uninhabitable. The animals that require water have to make a nightly journey to and from the Sabaki, which accounts for the thousands of animal paths leading from ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make—a twig crackling in the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the screening foliage of a giant tree, a ...
— Options • O. Henry
... woman reached an end, her enemies did not cease their opposition. The mob made an attack upon her dwelling, which was also her schoolhouse. Doors and windows were broken in, and the building was so thoroughly wrecked as to be uninhabitable. Having no money with which to make repairs, she was forced to abandon the structure and her educational ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... on the rath of Tara—a fact which would seem to indicate that already, in little more than a century since the interdict had fallen on it, the edifices which made so fine a show in the days of Patrick were ruined and uninhabitable. Either at Tara, or some other of the royal residences, Adamnan on this visit procured the passing of a law, (A.D. 684,) forbidding women to accompany an army to battle, or to engage personally in the conflict. The mild maternal genius of Christianity is faithfully exhibited in such a law, which ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the peculiar conformation of Norway—extensive plateaus, forming the summit-level of the mountains—extends also to these islands, whose only valleys are those which open to the sea, and whose interiors are uninhabitable snowy tracts, mostly above the line ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... mentioning. Portugal's holding has not been increased in the recent "scramble"—only made more definite. France's holding, however, has been enormously increased, and is now the largest (3,300,000 square miles), although much of the French area is barren desert, and much of the rest of it uninhabitable by white people. Great Britain's holding also has been greatly increased, but not nearly so much so as it would have been if in the earlier years of the scramble the British government had not been singularly ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... they began bombarding the two stations, and anything that attempted to approach them, with gamma and atomic explosive bombs. Meanwhile they amused themselves occasionally by planting a gamma-ray bomb in each of Mars' major cities. They made Mars uninhabitable for Solarians as well as for Mirans, at least until the deadly slow-action atomic explosives wore off, or ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... may be bare and barren, uninhabitable and desolate; the cold winds of the snow-borne North may blow across it, and freeze it into ice-bound sterility; or the blazing fury of the tropic sun may pour down upon it, and scorch it into a dreary waste of glaring, burning sand; but if there is gold in it, ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... is observed, the preparations devolve entirely on me, and it is not very easy work, with so many people in our own house and on each of the farms, and all the children, big and little, expecting their share of happiness. The library is uninhabitable for several days before and after, as it is there that we have the trees and presents. All down one side are the trees, and the other three sides are lined with tables, a separate one for each person in the house. When the trees are lighted, and stand ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... people from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the canon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse, utterly silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of a multitude of our fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants. Centuries ago it was inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw America, built thousands ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... Vapours, which is the Cause of Rain, is another great Benefit to the World, in as much as this is very probably supposed to be the Source of Fountains, Rivers, Lakes, and other Magazines of fresh Water, without which the Earth would be uninhabitable, and to which in a very great Measure its Fertility is owing. We ought likewise to remember that though this be in itself so clear, and at the same Time so certain, yet there are Countries in the World where it very seldom rains, as in Egypt, and others where it hardly ever rains, as in ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... mission, and perceived that not seizure, but eviction, was the order of the day. They rushed to Malone's house, and, with his consent and assistance, tore off the roof, smashed the windows, and demolished the doors. The place was thus rendered uninhabitable. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Governor-General, having a population of about one hundred thousand souls, is unpleasantly situated between ranges of perfectly barren hills, and but for the River Kur, on the banks of which it is built, would be almost uninhabitable. Having driven through the suburbs on his way from the railway terminus, the traveller crosses the Kur over the Woronzoff Bridge, which at once brings him to the principal street, where he passes in succession ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... changed, indeed. We no longer build on the bend. We don't have bends if we can help it. They are dangerous and hard to maintain. A house on one would be uninhabitable with the dust. We do not seek the neighborliness of the road, but retire as far as we can to the back of our lot, with our telephone and newspaper. The old house on the bend now stands deserted. From country estates dimly seen in ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... town, sparing the abbey; but in 1523 Lord Dacre sacked and burned it. The abbot's house and buildings surrounding it, the chapel of the Virgin, and the cells of the dormitory were all reduced to ashes; the lead was stripped from the roof, and the abbey rendered uninhabitable. All religious services were stopped, and the monks had to retire in want and poverty to a village near. From 1536 to 1538 James Stewart, natural son of James V., was abbot, and drew the revenues. In 1542 the Duke of Norfolk, and in 1545 the ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... contains forty thousand square miles, five-sixths of it is uninhabitable. The present ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... that new city which was to have been built and which never reached completion are visible everywhere. Houses seven stories high, abandoned within a month of completion rise uninhabited and uninhabitable out of a rank growth of weeds, amidst heaps of rubbish, staring down at the broad, desolate streets where the vigorous grass pushes its way up through the loose stones of the unrolled metalling. Amidst heavy low walls which were to have been the ground ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... salubrious to Europeans than it otherwise would be. In the mountains one enjoys the coolness of spring, but the valleys, were it not for the daily breeze which blows from the northeast and east, would be almost uninhabitable for white men during part of the year. The climate of the north and south coasts of this island, though under the same tropical influence, is nevertheless essentially different. On the north coast it sometimes rains almost the whole year, while on the south ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... fires, many of the old landmarks have disappeared, and the city is "losing its look of picturesque antiquity." To make matters worse, there came, in 1886, an earthquake, rendering seven eighths of the houses uninhabitable until repairs aggregating some millions of dollars had been made. Up to the time of the earthquake the old mansion from which Lord William Campbell fled at the beginning of the Revolution, was adorned by a battlemented roof. It is recorded that when the shock ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... pleasure-houses in the waters, called him Xerxes in a gown. He had also fine seats in Tusculum, belvederes, and large open balconies for men's apartments, and porticos to walk in, where Pompey coming to see him, blamed him for making a house which would be pleasant in summer, but uninhabitable in winter; whom he answered with a smile, "You think me, then, less provident than cranes and storks, not to change my home with the season." When a praetor, with great expense and pains, was preparing a spectacle for the people, and asked him ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... noted: this room might conceivably have become physically repugnant to him, emotionally intolerable, morally uninhabitable. But no. Nothing of the sort (and he had himself dreaded it at first), nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, he liked his lodgings better than any other shelter he, who had never known a home, had ever hired before. He liked his lodgings so well that often, on that very account, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... that houses should be standing empty like that. Are they quite uninhabitable? Couldn't one camp here during this fine summer weather? To tell you the truth, I'm looking for a room—as cheap a room as I can get. Could you let me one ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... that the "Africa" of olden days was a different country: they had no camels. These beasts were unknown there at the time of Julius Caesar, and only came into common usage towards the end of the fourth century. The Africa of to-day, without camels, would be almost uninhabitable. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... than their sailor brethren. Rain came down, rendering the town almost uninhabitable by the horrible smells which arose, while the mud in many places was several feet deep. Such was the detestable spot in which the army was cooped up for ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... more than his due.—As to the vagabonds, the wretched, who, in the universal disorder and devastation, seek refuge under his guardianship, their condition is harder. The soil belongs to the lord because without him it would be uninhabitable. If he assigns them a plot of ground, if he permits them merely to encamp on it, if he sets them to work or furnishes them with seeds it is on conditions, which he prescribes. They are to become his serfs, subject to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... built was destroyed by fire. At first it seemed absurd to think that human habitations were to be built in that marsh, but the Sangleys, who are very industrious, and a most ingenious people, managed it so well that, in a place seemingly uninhabitable, they have built a Parian resembling the other, although much larger and higher. According to them it suits them better than the other, because on the firm ground where the four rows of buildings are located they have built their houses and the streets leading through the Parian, a separate ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... on the horizon that turned out in the end to be Madeira. She told Christopher how her husband, when he had first gone to Porto Santo, had taken there a litter of rabbits, and how the rabbits had so increased that in two seasons they had eaten up everything on the island, and rendered it uninhabitable ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... hold the eternity of the world hold that some region was changed an infinite number of times, from being uninhabitable to being inhabitable and "vice versa," and likewise they hold that the arts, by reason of various corruptions and accidents, were subject to an infinite variety of advance and decay. Hence Aristotle says (Meteor. i), that it is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... make his choice from a cursory inspection. After his choice had been narrowed down by a process of elimination he had to spend several hours in each of two or three hotels, in the room intended for J. P., so that he could detect any of the hundred noises which might make the room uninhabitable to its prospective tenant. ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... passed. A pension proving uninhabitable, and most of the better-class hotels being closed for the winter, I threw myself upon the mercy of an octroi official who stood guarding a forlorn gate somewhere in the wilderness. He has sent me to a villa bearing the name of a certain lady and situated ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... comments among themselves. They were evidently too utterly astonished by the goings on before them to have any other sentiment as yet beyond pure amazement. Here were two richly-dressed pale-faces, such as only lived in cities, out in the middle of an uninhabitable desert, in the freezing midnight, having a variety and minstrel show all to themselves, and, to make the exhibition the more unaccountable, without apparently seeing their auditors at all. Had they started up the show after being captured, Indian cunning would have recognized in ...
— Deserted - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... especially from the port of Bristol. When I was there the sea was not frozen, but the tides were so great that in some places it rose and fell twenty-six fathoms[4]. I have likewise been in the Portuguese fort of St George del Mina, under the equinoctial, and can witness that it is not uninhabitable, as some have supposed." In his book respecting his first voyage, he says that he saw some mermaids on the coast of Menegueta, but that they were not by any means so like ladies as represented in paintings. In another place he says, that, in several voyages between Lisbon and Guinea, he had observed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... age of maturity; man has come late, when a beginning of physical decadence had struck the globe, his domain." [12] Here is a fact to give enthusiasm over earthly progress serious pause. This earth, once uninhabitable, will be uninhabitable again. If not by wholesale catastrophe, then by the slow wearing down of the sun's heat, already passed its climacteric, this planet, the transient theatre of the human drama, will be no longer the scene of man's activity, but as cold as the moon, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Stein's big house and the two immense reception-rooms, uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full of solitude and of shining things that look as if never beheld by the eye of man? They are cool on the hottest days, and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave underground. I passed through one, and in the other I saw the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... such as Syracuse. Well, the populace of so large a city requires a surrounding district to supply it with agricultural produce. The Marchesato, the vast tract bordering on Cotrone, is now practically uninhabitable; the population (including the town) has sunk to 45 to the square ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... land-mark tower, closing in the horizon-altogether, as Carey said, a thorough "allegro" landscape, even to "the tanned haycock in the mead." But the summer sun made the place dazzling and almost uninhabitable, and the visitors, turning from the glare, could hardly see the casts and models that filled the shelves; nor was there anything in hand; so that they let themselves be hurried away to share the midday ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that by reason of them it is not possible to pass through and proceed further: but to me it seems that when they so speak, they say that which is not probable; for these creatures are known to be intolerant of cold, and to me it seems that the regions which go up towards the pole are uninhabitable by reason of the cold climate. These then are the tales reported about this country; and however that may be, Megabazos was then making the coast-regions of ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... heard of it, especially now when people are saying that——" He checked himself at this point. "It is the oldest of the seigniories," he continued. "In fact, it has never passed out of the hands of the original owners, because it is almost uninhabitable in winter, except by Indians. I understand that M. Duchaine has built himself a fine chateau there; but then he is a recluse monsieur, and probably not ten men have ever visited it. But mademoiselle is too fine a woman to ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... regarded the Dismal Swamp, as they called the morass, as utterly uninhabitable and impassable; he had never heard any sounds of life from within; he thought the place haunted; it abounded in quagmires, and corpse lights and baleful fires were seen on ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... brief outline of the cycle of evolution, and I went on: "What part does man play in this vast drama of a universe? Needless to say, he is not the only living form in a Cosmos, which for the most part is uninhabitable by him. As Science has shown living forms everywhere on the material plane, races in each drop of water, life throbbing in every leaf and blade, so the 'Secret Doctrine' points to living forms on higher planes of existence, each ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... stage in this denouement was that the small room in the turret became uninhabitable. This occurred through the fall of the worm-eaten oaken beam which supported the ceiling. Rotten with age, it snapped in the middle one morning, and brought down a quantity of plaster with it. Fortunately ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lose itself in interminable marshes, and as no trace could be found of its further course, Oxley concluded that they had reached the end of the river. As he looked around on the dreary expanse, he pronounced the country to be "for ever uninhabitable"; and, on his return to Bathurst, he reported that, in this direction at least, there was no opening for enterprise. The Lachlan, he said, flows into an extensive region of swamps, which are perhaps only the margin of a great ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... doubtless, existed for thousands of centuries. Then gradually the atmosphere becoming rarefied, the disc will again be uninhabitable like the terrestrial globe will one ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... these substances cannot be evaporated, they would accumulate to such a degree as to render the ocean uninhabitable by living creatures, had not God provided against this by the most beautiful compensation. He has filled the ocean with innumerable animals and marine plants, whose special duty it is to seize and make use of the substances thus swept ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... state furnish a nourishing, thirst-quenching food for domestic animals. The fruit of this immense plant is aromatic and delicate, and its seeds are at present worth far more than their weight in gold, since from them are to spring thousands of plants by means of which it is believed the uninhabitable portions of the desert may be made to ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... present to the mind, for these productions, in sandy soils at least, grow only where nothing else can vegetate. The horizon is flat, affording no relief to the eye from the dreary and inhospitable scene, which these solitudes present; and which extends over a great portion of the country, uninhabitable even by the aborigines. Yet here the patient labours of the surveyor have opened a road, although the stream of population must be confined to it, since it cannot spread over a region so ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... left it with precipitation, alledging, among other causes of retreat, that they could not sleep for frightful noises, and that my poor brother certainly walked after his death. — In a word, the house appeared uninhabitable; the barn, stable, and outhouses were in ruins; all the fences broken down, and the fields ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... get rid of these dead bodies, if we can," Stanley said, "or the place will be uninhabitable, in ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... "Yes—an uninhabitable old stone structure that has stood there for nearly a century. For years I have tried in vain to rent or sell it. I have left no stone unturned, Quinby. I know I am regarded as a visionary, a ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... was speedily rendered uninhabitable, and was destroyed by the falling stones; but two others—Herculaneum and Pompeii—which already had suffered from the down-pour of ashes, were gradually filled with a flood of water, sand, and ashes, which came down the side of the volcano, and ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... whether honestly we feel some thing to be good as an end, if only we can conceive it in complete isolation, and be sure that so isolated it remains valuable. Bread is good. Is bread good as an end or as a means? Conceive a loaf existing in an uninhabited and uninhabitable planet. Does it seem to lose its value? That is a little too easy. The physical universe appears to most people immensely good, for towards nature they feel violently that emotional reaction which brings to the lips the ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... many marshes, ditches, and unclean pools, rich in decomposing vegetable matter, and have thus notably checked the propagation of gnats and midges. I know an instance of a country mansion, situate in one of the best wooded parts of the home counties, which twenty years ago was almost uninhabitable, owing to the swarms of gnats which penetrated into every room. But the present proprietor, being the reverse of pachydermatous, has substituted covered drains for stagnant ditches, filled up a number of slimy ponds as neither useful nor ornamental, and now in most ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... in the house, which could be construed into a spiritual visitation. Has such a manifestation occurred?" he eagerly inquired. "Has it? has it? Am I to add her name to the list of those who have found the house uninhabitable?" ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... dinner, &c., and as she is the widow of the last Vicar, we are in duty bound to be civil to her, and I must go and call upon her. Oh! you poor thing, I forgot how deserted you will be, and really the drawing-room is almost uninhabitable with that Bengal tiger in it. Here is that delightful Norman Conquest for you to read; pray look at the part about Hereward ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... farther south. Here they found not only cattle, sheep and goats, but herds of camels, which were kept for their milk and hair alone. These villagers knew nothing of what lay beyond, save that it was desert and uninhabitable. ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... cities built, over on the mainland," I told him. "They're all abandoned now. The first one was a conventional city, the buildings all on the surface. After one day-and-night cycle, they found that it was uninhabitable. It was left unfinished. Then they started digging in. The Chartered Fenris Company shipped in huge quantities of mining and earth-moving equipment—that put the company in the red more than anything else—and they began making burrow-cities, like the ones ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... about three miles. It is a plain intersected by dykes and ditches, and mapped out into innumerable rice-fields. For more than half a year it lies under water, and during the other months exhales a pestilential vapour, which renders it as uninhabitable as the Roman Campagna; yet in springtime this dreary flat is even beautiful. The young blades of the rice shoot up above the water, delicately green and tender. The ditches are lined with flowering rush and golden flags, while ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Between this sterile, uninhabitable solitude and the precipitous, broken ridge forming the north-eastern boundary of the Loiret lies Courance. No road leads thitherward, no path approaches its forgotten gate. The stream which formerly flowed past the entrance-lodge is dammed up by the fallen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... they both look very much alike, and act alike and the bite of one hurts just as much as the bite of the other. Although cats and dogs are their normal hosts they are very often troublesome household pests, sometimes making a house almost uninhabitable. They are frequently found on rats, and therefore may carry the plague bacillus from rat to rat or ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... occupancy of an indefinite number of emigrants, much of which will not cost the purchaser over one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre. Without giving the extravagant estimates that have been made by many writers of the wide and uninhabitable desert between the Indian Territory west of Missouri and Arkansas, and the Rocky mountains, nor swampy and frozen regions at the heads of the Mississippi river, and around lake Superior, I will merely exhibit the amount of lands admitting of immediate settlement ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... trend of the water, for we had passed out of the swifter current and were close in to the eastern shore. The bank appeared low and unwooded, a mere black line barely above the water level and I guessed that behind it stretched uninhabitable marshes overflowed by ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... time was short, so he swam back to the sheltered nook where he had left his clothes, and improvising a towel from his handkerchief he dressed rapidly. The last train back left at seven. If he did not wish to spend the night in his new and uninhabitable abode he must make good time. It was later than he supposed, and he wished to go back to the station by way of the beach if possible, though it was out of his way. As he drew on his coat and ran his fingers through his hair in lieu of a brush, he looked wistfully at the bright ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... about twenty miles in diameter. Its internal heat is such that it has a delightful climate in spite of the extreme rarity of atmosphere common to even the best of asteroids. It has a small lake; in fact it has about everything a man could want. Yet, as I said, it is uninhabitable." ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... ceased. He always declined to say what he had witnessed. Ministers were exorcists in the last century, and the father of James Thomson, the poet, died suddenly in an interview with a guest, in a haunted house. The house was pulled down, as being uninhabitable. ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... to the study of a "minister" who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at Worcester. He still took refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to live at the farm he had to give her his stove, and consequently the room was uninhabitable for several ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... rid of them, and that the only "right" they were to be granted was the right to depart; that no enlargement of the Pale of Settlement could possibly be hoped for, and that only as an extreme necessity would the Government allow groups of Jews to colonize the uninhabitable steppes of central Asia or the swamps of Siberia. Well-informed people were in possession of much more serious information: they knew that the Jewish Committee attached to the Ministry of the Interior was preparing a monstrous plan of reducing the territory of the Pale of Settlement itself ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... against the others. In the first place the river came from the south—a direction in which the heat increased in intensity with every league, as far as travelers had explored it; and beyond those limits, they supposed that the burning sun made the country uninhabitable. It was preposterous to suppose that there could be snow and ice there. Then, besides, the Nile had been ascended to a great distance, and reports from the natives had been brought down from regions still more remote, and no tidings had ever been brought ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... parts of the world. Irrigation was as necessary as in Egypt, though for a different reason. The Chaldean plain had originally been a marsh, and it required constant supervision to prevent it from being once more inundated by the waters and made uninhabitable. The embankments which hindered the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris and kept them within carefully regulated channels, the canals which carried off the surplus water and distributed it over the country, needed continual attention. Each ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... horror. The storm, which began shortly after midnight, and continued with gathering force, seriously hampered the work of rescue. More than three inches of snow covered the debris in the section of the city struck by the cyclone. It rendered uninhabitable the houses of many who had prepared to retain temporary homes ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... our enjoyment entirely on the regular order of custom, or entirely on the caprices of accident. I have never had to vex myself now, because this thing is mislaid, or that thing is lost; because the room in which I live is uninhabitable, and I must have it repaired; because somebody has broken my favorite cup, and for a long time nothing tastes well out of any other. All this I am happily raised above. If the house catches fire about my ears, my people quietly pack my things up, and we pass away out of the town ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... at the present state of things, which his system of opinions obliged him to represent in its worst form, has observed of the earth, "that its greater part is covered by the uninhabitable ocean; that of the rest some is encumbered with naked mountains, and some lost under barren sands; some scorched with unintermitted heat, and some petrified with perpetual frost; so that only a few regions remain for the production of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... the country west of the Missouri River it was without civil government, inhabited almost exclusively by Indians. The few white men in it were voyageurs, or connected in some way with the United States army. It was supposed to be uninhabitable, without any natural resources or productiveness, a vast expanse of arid plains, broken here and there with barren, snow-capped mountains. Even Iowa was unsettled west of ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... round, there are still great forests; and a white and Amerindian population find it possible to live there all the year round, while animal life is extremely abundant. On the other hand, a good deal of the territory between Mackenzie River and Hudson's Bay is almost uninhabitable, except during the summertime, owing to the depth of the snow and the bare ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... outskirts of Timber Town stood a dilapidated wooden cottage. Its windows lacked many panes, its walls were bare of paint, the shingles of its roof were rotten and scanty; it seemed uninhabitable and empty, and yet, as night fell, within it there burned a light. Moreover, there were other signs of life within its crazy walls, for when all without was quiet and dark, the door opened and ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... if they venture beyond the shelter of the bank the whirling eddies threaten to sweep them away. The fords are treacherous, with shifting bottom and changing currents. The poets and prophets of the Old Testament give us a true idea of this uninhabitable and unlovable river-bed when they speak of "the pride of Jordan," "the swellings of Jordan," where the lion hides among the reeds in his secret lair, a "refuge of lies," which the "overflowing ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... If we think for a moment of the condition of the world were there no such decomposing agents to rid the earth's surface of the dead bodies of animals and plants, we shall see that long since the earth would have been uninhabitable. If the dead bodies of plants and animals of past ages simply accumulated on the surface of the ground without any forces to reduce them into simple compounds for dissipation, by their very bulk they would have long since completely covered the surface of the earth so as to ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... I see no reason why Atlanta should be excepted. Nor is it necessary to appeal to the dark history of war, when recent and modern examples are so handy. You yourself burned dwelling-houses along your parapet, and I have seen to-day fifty houses that you have rendered uninhabitable because they stood in the way of your forts and men. You defended Atlanta on a line so close to town that every cannon-shot and many musket-shots from our line of investment, that overshot their mark, went into the habitations of women and children. General Hardee did the same at ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... giving them more than they need. Other parts have been left with little. We shall also discover what wonderful things men are doing to make up for the failures of Nature, and to make habitable many of those places which she left uninhabitable. ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... the lagoons on which that city, as it were by a miracle, is built; and that, whenever those lagoons silted up with earth, the air would become infected and pestilential, and the city consequently uninhabitable, or at the least exposed to all the dangers that threaten cities on the mainland. He set himself, therefore, to think in what way it might be possible to provide for the preservation of the lagoons and of the site on which the city had been built in the beginning. And having found a way, ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... all was made, as they supposed the mutinous soldiery would leave at once for Delhi, which they would have done had not the Nana stopped them by large pay and larger promises. The barracks speedily became well-nigh uninhabitable under the fire of the enemy. At last they were burnt down, and no shelter remained from the fierce rays of the sun. One could not look on the spot, and consider the weakness of the defenders compared with the strength of the enemy, supplied as they were with the guns and ammunition of our arsenal, ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... a system of balances if left to itself. Some forms of insect life are so prolific that but for the voracity and industry of the birds the world would become almost uninhabitable. ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... in the world. Unlike most other great deserts, however, the land is very elevated, and it is to this elevation that its barrenness is, in a great measure, due. A large part of this desert consists of rocks and barren sands, and, in the time of which we are writing, was totally uninhabitable. It was so cold, too, on account of the great elevation of the land, that it was almost impossible to traverse it except in the warmest ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott |
