"Arid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the king's own box, where sat she who had once been a laughing maid by his side and with whom he had played that diverting pastoral, called "First Love." It was only an instant's return into the farcical but joyous past, and a moment later he was sharply recalled into the arid present by ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... unattended, to find out what a well-armed enemy is doing and how many fighting men are to be expected in the morrow's battle. But just as Cervantes could "engender" the ingenious Don Quixote in a miserable prison, so Baden-Powell in the arid times of peace finds means of enjoying the fascinations of scouting. When out in India he used to spend many an early morning in practising, and he gives the result of one of these mornings in his little book on Scouting, ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... outer hall, and she heard no more, except the indistinct murmur of a sudden brief dialogue between the visitor and the two girls, who must have come in from the garden. Then the front door banged heavily. He was gone. The vast and arid tedium of her life closed in upon her again; she seemed to exist in a colourless void peopled only by ominous dim ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... mildly curious, had been watching a certain dust cloud for half an hour. At first he had thought it only a whirling dervish—one of those restless columns of sand that continually shift over the arid lands. But it was following the course of the trail below him on the desert—rounding each bend and ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... the wall of the station looking stolidly at nothing. The station itself, a long, rambling building containing its entire accommodation for man and beast under one monotonous, shed-like roof, offered nothing to attract the eye. Still less the prospect, on the one side two miles of arid waste to the stunted, far-spaced pines in the distance, known as the "Barrens;" on the other an apparently limitless level with darker patches of sage brush, like the scars of ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... gaiters and a shabby cloak and packed him off to Russia, third class. It would seem that Fortune had turned her back upon our hero. Not at all; Fortune, who lets whole populations die of hunger, showered all her gifts at once upon the little aristocrat, like Kryloff's Cloud which passes over an arid plain and empties itself into the sea. He had scarcely arrived in St. Petersburg, when a relation of his mother's (who was of bourgeois origin, of course), died at Moscow. He was a merchant, an Old Believer, and he had ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that would presently grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set down in the very midst of that historic little company that frolicked through Italy and climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills. ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and R. V. read: 'Boughs of thick trees'], i.e. the myrtle, which is fragrant, "and the branches of palm-trees, and willows of the brook," which retain their greenness a long time; and these are to be found in the Land of promise; to signify that God had brought them through the arid land of the wilderness to a land of delights. On the eighth day another feast was observed, of "Assembly and Congregation," on which the people collected the expenses necessary for the divine worship: and it signified the uniting of the people and the peace granted ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... sterile land, impressing one as a desert in the first stages of reclamation into productive soil, or a productive soil in the last steps of deterioration into a desert. It is a vast expanse of arid, yellow sand, broken at intervals by foul swamps, with a jungle-life growth of unwholesome vegetation, and teeming With venomous snakes, and all ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... that if she had obeyed that simple law of human nature which forbids a marriage in which love is not the primary consideration, if she had followed that simple humble path, she would never have reached the arid wilderness towards which her own guidance had ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... to little anxiety during the spring and summer of 1915 in consequence of the signal discomfiture which the Turks had suffered on the Canal early in the year; the arid tract known as the Sinai desert indeed provided a satisfactory defence in itself during the dry months. But as autumn approached, the prospect of Ottoman efforts against the Nile Delta had to be taken into serious consideration, the more so that neither the Dardanelles ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... seen, was to a very great extent swallowed up in curiosity as to what lay before them. Shortly after effecting their morning's start the fertile region over which they had hitherto been travelling came abruptly to an end, and they found themselves passing over an arid sandy desert, utterly destitute of even the feeblest suggestion of vegetation, without a trace of water or even of moisture, and of course with no sign of a living creature anywhere upon it. So uninteresting a region offered no temptation for loitering or dalliance, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... reaching from the river Delaware to the very shore of the Atlantic—are marls and sands of different qualities, of which the most common is a fine, white, angular sand, of the kind so much in request for building-purposes and the manufacture of glass. In such an arid soil the coniferae alone could flourish, and accordingly we find that the wide-spreading region is overgrown almost entirely with white and yellow pine, hemlock, and cedar. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... fifteene dayes before the later Lady day, and endeth on our Lady Eeuen. The fourth Lent beginneth on Saint Martin's day, and endeth on Christmas Eeuen: which Lent is fasted for Saint Philip, Saint Peter, Saint Nicholas, and Saint Clement. For they foure be the principall arid greatest Saints in that Countrey. In these Lents they eate neither Butter, Egges, Milke, or Cheese; but they are very straitely kept with Fish, Cabbages, and Rootes. And out of their Lents, they obserue truely the Wednesdayes and Fridayes throughout the yeere: and on the Saturday ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... plateau over which the train rolls, hour after hour, is the result of a great uplift. It was not sudden; it was slow but sure. This result is arid and plateautudinous, in a manner of speaking—not the best manner. It makes me think of democracy—and prohibition. To this complexion we shall come at last. To be sure, the genius of man will continue to cut ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... purchasers in the open market. This country must be that market; and it behooves us to look to it that the market be well stocked. There is land enough now and to spare, but will it be so fifty or a hundred years hence? Our arid lands will be made fertile by irrigation, but they will add only a small percentage to the amount already in quasi-cultivation. Our future food supplies must be drawn largely from the six million farms now under fences. These farms must be made to yield fourfold their present product, or they ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... light of a missionary's pen only to relapse into the unfathomable darkness of the past. The few traditions that come down to us in Manbo legendary song and oral tradition furnish but little light in the darkness, arid that little is probably not the pure and simple light of truth, but the multicolored rays of the popular imagination that have transformed warriors into giants and enemies into hideous monsters. Thus Dbao, of whom mention will be made presently, was a giant according to ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... By purchasing of arid and overflow lands and the State reclamation of all such lands now held by the State or that may be acquired ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... on beds of leaves or straw; in Portugal Dr. Torrend finds it on or in dead leaves of Agave americana! Evidently an American species, and belonging to arid regions; its occurrence ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... hand, that for their own good it is as important that workmen should not be very much over-paid, as it is that they should not be under-paid. If over-paid, many will work irregularly and tend to become more or less shiftless, extravagant, arid dissipated. It does not do for most men to get rich too fast. The writer's observation, however, would lead him to the conclusion that most men tend to become more instead of less thrifty when they receive the proper ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... obliged to use some extraordinary expedients to satisfy their family and countrymen of their identity, and to recover the respect which was their due, by a public acknowledgment of their name, family, and rank. For this purpose, they invited all their relations arid connections to a magnificent entertainment, at which all the three travellers made their appearance in rich eastern habits of crimson satin. After the guests were seated, and before the Polos sat down, they put off their upper garments which they gave to the attendants, appearing still magnificently ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... makes the appreciation of cost often unaesthetic is the abstractness of that quality. The price of an object is an algebraic symbol, it is a conventional term, invented to facilitate our operations, which remains arid and unmeaning if we stop with it and forget to translate it again at the end into its concrete equivalent. The commercial mind dwells in that intermediate limbo of symbolized values; the calculator's senses are muffled by his intellect and by his ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... the turtle-dove and recommenced his journey, following the course of the wind as it changed and chopped about to different points of the compass. The country gradually grew sadder and more arid; and, as night approached, the path led between bare and sombre rocks, a vast black mass among them being the tower wherein dwelt the witch whom the boy was in search of. The sight of the hideous place terrified ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... plains in a "prairie schooner," and, eventually, took up six hundred and forty acres of Government land in San Lorenzo County. With incredible labour, inspired and sustained by his natural acuteness, he wrought a miracle upon a singularly arid and sterile soil. I have been told that he was the first of the foothill settlers to irrigate abundantly, the first to plant out an orchard and vineyard, the first, certainly, to create a garden out of ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... a fact. God can cause the most discordant agencies to agree in effecting his purpose. Babylon is alternately an overflowed swamp, from the inundations of the obstructed Euphrates, and an arid desert, under the scorching rays of an Eastern sun. Says Mignon: "Morasses and ponds tracked the ground in various places. For a long time after the subsiding of the Euphrates great part of this place is little better than a swamp." At another season it was "a dry waste and burning plain." Even ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... itself almost immediately. This little stream showed plainly the manner in which the mountain waters lose themselves in sand at the eastern foot of the Sierra, leaving only a parched desert and arid plains beyond. The stream enlarged rapidly, and the timber became abundant as ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... and for filling the space at his disposal. He was either unable or unwilling to compose a background of trees, meadows, and pastoral folk in the manner of his predecessors. Nothing but the infinite variety of human forms upon a barren stage of stone or arid earth would suit his haughty sense of beauty. The nine persons who make up the picture are all carefully studied from the life, and bear a strong Tuscan stamp. S. John is literally ignoble, and Christ is a commonplace child. The Virgin Mother is ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Braster Grange was a long grim pile of buildings, which had been unoccupied for many years. Between it and the sea was nothing but empty marshland. It was one of the bleakest spots along the coast—to the casual observer nothing but an arid waste of sands in the summer, a wilderness of desolation in the winter. Only those who have dwelt in those parts are able to feel the fascination of that great empty land, a fascination potent enough, but of slow growth. Mr. Moyat's remark ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... turned a corner, crossed the street, descended into a cave, smiled sweetly at a man who was closing a door and who, seeing that smile, smiled at it, smiled wantonly, held the door open, yet, noting then but an arid blankness where her smile had been, banged the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... The arid plain around Salonica was crossed by numerous roads. The trains of artillery, the rosaries of automobiles, were rolling over recently opened roads that the rain had converted into mire. The mud ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and bushes of hoary-leaved camel-thorn, and long-spined shittim or acacia, nothing bearing fruit for human beings. There were strange howlings and crackings in the mountains, the sun glared back from the arid stones and rocks, and the change seemed frightful after the green meadows ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... directions. The Government has taken to itself unprecedented and unthought-of powers because of the necessities of our condition. I say that to meet the problem of the returned soldier we ought to take advantage of this opportunity to do the work now that must eventually be done and reclaim these arid lands of the West. Turn the waters of the Colorado over the desert of Arizona, store those waters in the Grand River and in the Green River, and let them flow down at the right times on that desert so as to raise cotton and ...
— Address by Honorable Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... concealed, except for their nodding heads and plodding legs, by the bunches of green-golden fruit heaped upon their backs. On doorsills sat women combing their long, black hair and calling, one to another, across the narrow thoroughfares. Peace reigned in Coralio—arid and bald peace; but ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... day. We woke to find a thick covering of sticky ice crystals on everything—a frost rime. I cleared my ski before breakfast arid found more on afterwards. There was the suggestion of an early frosty morning at home—such a morning as develops into a beautiful sunshiny day; but in our case, alas! such hopes were shattered: it was almost damp, with temperature near ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... something in her air that drew the spirit nigh, Beyond the common witchery that dwells in woman's eye! With reverence deep, like any slave of that peculiar land, I bowed my forehead to the earth, and kissed the arid sand; And then I touched her garment's hem, devoutly as a Dervise, Predestinated (so I felt) forever ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Army List, either as active or retired. The whole panorama of the mystic land of the Hindus was unrolled once more by the memories of fifteen clouded years, He saw again his far-away theater of varied action, with its huge grim mountains towering far over the snow line, its arid wastes, its fertile plains bathed in intense sunshine, its mystic rivers, and its silent, solemn shrines of the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... which could not hope for happiness or continuance; for which there was no perfumed oasis, no blooming myrtle-wreath to crown its dark and stormy path. They might be sure that the farther they advanced, the more trackless and arid would be the desert opening before them. Tears and robes of mourning would constitute ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... consciousness: and we must remember that when these masters of the spiritual life speak of purity, they have in their minds no thin, abstract notion of a rule of conduct stripped of all colour and compounded chiefly of refusals, such as a more modern, more arid asceticism set up. Their purity is an affirmative state; something strong, clean, and crystalline, capable of a wholeness of adjustment to the wholeness of a God-inhabited world. The pure soul is like a lens from which all irrelevancies and excrescences, all the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... stretch of time and space from that gilded restaurant of that night to the arid plans of Arizona, and back through the years of work and struggle and development to the condition of a sailor on shore beating his way, horseback and afoot, across the country from the Gulf to the Pacific. But ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... wicked and foolish. The manufacturing system and free trade, indeed the whole doctrines of the political economists in the lump, he looks upon alternately with horror and disdain. He seems to consider the State and Church as an organized body for the education of the people, whose duty is obedience, arid who have no right to think for themselves in religion or politics, for they would be pretty sure to think wrong. All benevolent societies, in which persons of different religious views combine for a common object, he considers as productive of evil, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... Clearlier to manifest, I tell how next A plain we reach'd, that from its sterile bed Each plant repell'd. The mournful wood waves round Its garland on all sides, as round the wood Spreads the sad foss. There, on the very edge, Our steps we stay'd. It was an area wide Of arid sand and thick, resembling most The soil that erst by Cato's foot was trod. Vengeance of Heav'n! Oh ! how shouldst thou be fear'd By all, who read what here my eyes beheld! Of naked spirits many a flock I saw, All weeping ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... hundred and fifty thousand souls, to say nothing of herds and flocks past all reckoning. These had all perished: ox, 10 cow, horse, mule, ass, sheep, or goat, not one survived—only the camels. These arid and adust creatures, looking like the mummies of some antediluvian animals, without the affections or sensibilities of flesh and blood—these only still erected their speaking eyes to the eastern 15 heavens, and had to all appearance come out from this long tempest of trial ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... one's own club going down Pall Mall is in mid-September, or as a draught of Giesler's '68 to an epicure who has been about to perish on ginger-beer—so did Herbert Pryme's face shine upon Maurice Kynaston out of the arid waste of ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... LA has been unable to keep a very human touch out of his arid record: matri displicebat, uolebat enim eum secum semper habere. This is our last glimpse of poor Darerca, and it does much to soften the rather lurid limelight in which our ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... the neck and underparts have narrow dark borders, thus giving the plumage a scaly appearance, from which the birds take their name. They have a small tuft of whitish or buffy feathers on the top of the head. It is especially abundant in the dry arid portions of its range, being found often many miles away from water. Their eggs are laid in a shallow hollow under some small bush or cactus, and number from eight to sixteen; they are creamy white, ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... honoured, powerful—and sixty. What could be more suitable? So suitable that I ran away—an absurdly young thing to do at forty—and I am writing to you in the train on my way to Scotland.... You see, Biddy, I quite suddenly saw myself growing old, saw all the arid years in front of me, and saw that it was a very dreadful thing to grow old caring only for the things of time. It frightened me badly. I don't want to go in bondage to the fear of age and death. I want to grow old decently, and ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... square the blatant orator balanced himself on a stone trough which was arid and dust-choked. He harangued the group of unkempt men; sweating, blinking, apathetic men; slouchy men; men who were ticketed in attire and demeanor with all the squalid marks of ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... a reactionary glow of hope and confidence the young astronomer traversed the circumference of his lofty eyrie, pausing from time to time to gaze through one of the embrasures of the parapet upon the incomparable scene below. Accustomed as he was to the arid glory of California, he found a grateful refreshment in this far greener country. The tower was like a Pisgah, from which he gazed upon the promised land with eyes that wearied of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... forest; with the delicato there are Puck-like rustlings, and all the while the pianist without imagination is exercising wrist and ringers in a technical exercise! Were ever Beauty and Duty so mated in double harness? Pegasus pulling a cloud charged with rain over an arid country! For study, playing the entire composition with a wrist stroke is advisable. It will secure clear articulation, staccato and finger-memory. Von Bulow phrases the study in groups of two, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... of California, near the Arizona line, is the famous Death Valley—a tract of arid, alkaline plain hemmed in by steep mountains and lying below the level of the sea. For years it was believed that no human being could cross that desert and live, for horses sink to their knees in drifts ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... and there are many arid spots in the wet states. While I cannot hope to live to see the final triumph, I have faith to believe my children and my children's children will live in a saloonless land, a land redeemed from a curse that has soaked its social life in more blood and tears ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... forgot what I heard around the campfire. In 1894 the Carey Irrigation Act was passed by Congress. A million acres of land was given to each of the arid States. I was the first man to receive a concession of two hundred thousand acres from the Wyoming ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... how close a parallel to classical training could be made out of that palaeontology to which I refer. In the first place I could get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its terminology, so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat the recent famous production of the head-masters out of the field in all these excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... extinction from the same relative condition of causes—syphilis, scrofula, and phthisis—has been observed among the open-air dwellers of the New Mexican Plains, in the mountains of Arizona, and on the arid wastes of the Colorado Desert, where the appearance of consumption cannot be attributed to housing or incipient civilization, as it is attributed to housing among the Chippeways, Sioux, or Mandans ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... and anecdotes, which abounded in Scott's conversation, rose naturally out of the subject, arid were perfectly unforced; though, in thus relating them in a detached way, without the observations or circumstances which led to them, and which have passed from my recollection, they want their setting to give them proper relief. ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... Alta-Pacific, for instance. He merely did not elect to choose them for partners in the big game in which he intended to play. What that big game was, even he did not know. He was waiting to find it. And in the meantime he played small hands, investing in several arid-lands reclamation projects and keeping his eyes open for the big chance ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... speaking, no longer existed—but of men of erudition that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead; that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that, possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism. It is essentially similar to that ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... choice from its rich profusion. But ere she was aware she had lost herself in a desert; the oasis had vanished like a mirage, and she had no choice at all. That which her heart craved with an intensity which fairly made it ache, seemed as hopeless as a sudden bloom and fruitage from arid sands. ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... But something kept her still. And perhaps it was just as well. Mrs. Gilbert, considering the two, did have a moment's thought about refusing them; she, too, liked to maintain the social tone of her establishment, and certainly servants as guests did not help; but then the arid season for boarding-houses was at hand, and she was not one to sacrifice ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... sun-scorched Aden, where, while the coal-bunkers were filled up again, the lad had amused himself by inspecting the place with his glass as he sat contentedly under the awning, preferring to submit to the infliction of the flying coal-dust to a hot walk through the arid place. Then he leaned over the side and half-contemptuously threw threepenny-bits and sixpences into the clear water in response to the clamouring young rascals who wanted to scramble for them far below and show their swimming ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... Hebrew ended his adjuration he drew a phial from his bosom, and sprinkled a few drops upon the arid fuel. A pale blue flame suddenly leaped up; and, as it lighted the haggard but earnest countenance of the Israelite, Muza felt his Moorish blood congeal in his veins, and shuddered, though he scarce knew why. Almamen, with his dagger, severed ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... camellias to have the flowers opened. More warmth, a closer atmosphere, is brought to bear upon them, and down fall the buds in showers on stage or floor—the chief cause of this slip between the buds and the open flowers being a rise of temperature. A close or arid atmosphere often leads to the same results. Camellias can hardly have too free a circulation of air or too low a temperature. Another frequent cause of buds dropping arises from either too little or too much water at the roots. Either a paucity or excess ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... herbs. The darkened dwelling was wrapped in silence, broken only by the bells, by the chanting of the offices heard through the windows of the church, by the call of the jackdaws nesting in the belfries. The region is a desert of stones, a solitude with a character of its own, an arid spot, which could only be inhabited by beings who had either attained to absolute nullity, or were gifted with some abnormal strength of soul. The house in question had always been occupied by abbes, ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... name Altabin,) a wise man and a great warrior, knowing well both his own strength and that of his enemies, handled the matter so, as he cut off their land-forces from their ships; and entoiled both their navy and their tamp with a greater power than theirs, both by sea and land: arid compelled them to render themselves without striking stroke and after they were at his mercy, contenting himself only with their oath that they should no more bear arms against him, dismissed ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... the little ones away. It was such a look as his men might have seen in their commander's eyes as he doggedly led them on to avenge some of the blood that has flowed so free and red to enrich the arid plains of South Africa, at the cost, alas! of the impoverishment of many a desolated heart. But none of his home folks had ever seen those frank, smiling eyes snap and sparkle in the way they did now, like broken steel; not one of them would have imagined that those almost boyish ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Anticipations. The mind may easily be allowed so to dwell on its scenes, that imagination shall take the place of reality. Circumstances often warrant but moderate expectations; yet amid the most arid waste you see, like the deceived traveller in the deserts of Zahara, the enchanting mirage, a beautiful lake ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... of the famous Rose of Jericho (Anastatica hierochontina) or Holy Rose—a low, gray-leaved annual, utterly unlike a rose, growing abundantly in the arid wastes of Egypt, and also throughout Palestine and Barbary, and along the sandy coasts of the Red Sea. One of the most curious of the cruciferous plants, it exhibits, in a rare degree, a hygrometric action in its process of reproduction. During the hot season it blooms freely, growing close ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... whose houses are scattered throughout the breadth of Southern Italy. The position of their Vesuvian settlement is certainly unique, for the rising ground on which it is perched appears like some verdant oasis amid the arid fields of sable lava. Secure in its commanding site, the monastery has many a time been completely surrounded by burning streams, which have invariably left the building and its woody demesne unscathed. More than once have the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... of the Chateau. And he thought of the great, sudden wind of freedom that had blown out of Italy, before which dogmas and slaveries had crumbled to dust. In contrast, the world today seemed pitifully arid. Men seemed to have shrunk in stature before the vastness of the mechanical contrivances they had invented. Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini; would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today everything was congestion, the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... dropped into his usual place at the rear of the party. For some miles the trail was followed at a hand gallop, for the grass was several inches in height, and the trail could be followed as easily as a road. The country then began to change. The ground was poorer and more arid, and clumps of low brush grew here and there. Still, there was no check in the speed. The marks made by the frightened flock were plain enough, even to the horsemen; and bits of wool, left behind on the bushes, afforded an unmistakable ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... agreeable, commonplace "Lower city" of the plain, he came to the bridge, and there, sitting on its parapet, near the ancient Cross, he feasted his longing eyes on that perfect vision of Mediaevalism. The high, arid, and almost isolated hill of the Cite stood before him, and at the top rose battlements and flanking towers in double range, bristling, war-like, and strong; yet beautiful in their mass of uneven, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... lemons, are of figs and olives. The cork-oak covers considerable tracts, but is less attended to than in Spain. A non-European aspect is imparted by the tufts of cactus and aloes which abound in the most arid localities. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... decisive results as might have been expected. Jugurtha avoided any general action, and eluded the pursuit of Metellus by the rapidity of his movements. Even when driven from Thala, a strong-hold which he had deemed inaccessible from its position in the midst of arid deserts, he only retired among the Gaetulians, and quickly succeeded in raising among those wild tribes a fresh army, with which he once more penetrated into the heart of Numidia. A still more important accession was that of Bocchus, king of Mauritania, who had been prevailed upon ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... larger part of the public lands of the United States are arid; that is, they cannot be cultivated without irrigation. By a law of 1902, the proceeds received from the sale of public lands in certain Western States and Territories will be expended by the National ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... return thirsty. He has nothing to give them, no bubbling water of life, no geniality, no such graces of the spirit as appeal to buoyant childhood. He lacks a sense of humor, and that lack makes arid the exuberant sources of life. He may solve problems in arithmetic, but he cannot compass the solution of the problem of life. The children pity him, and no greater calamity can befall a teacher than to deserve and receive the pity of ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... hieroglyphic warning to those who rashly approach. They seem to say, 'here begins the empire of Sterility and Death; enter if thou darest!' Doubtless the Arab tales had some influence on our minds, increasing the well-grounded fears inspired by the natural features of these arid wastes. Several of us mentally repeated ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... achieve magical pictures of the sea and the "mad naked summer night." His early poem, Walt Whitman, is for me his most spontaneous offering. He has at times the primal gift of the poet—ecstasy; but to attain it he often wades through shallow, ill-smelling sewers, scales arid hills, traverses dull drab levels where the slag covers rich ore, or plunges into subterrene pools of nocturnal abominations—veritable regions of the "mother of dead dogs." Probably the sexlessness of Emerson's, Poe's, and Hawthorne's writings sent Whitman to an orgiastic extreme, and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... down the women, and stared at himself with admiration by the coal porters. Of his frame of mind at that moment his face offered a lively if an unconscious picture. He was lividly pale, and his lip was caught up in a smile that could almost be called a snarl, of a sheer, arid malignity that appalled me and yet put me on my mettle for the encounter. He looked me up and down, then bowed and took off his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of most of the available lands of the public domain in existing or planned reclamation projects largely completes the original purpose of the Reclamation Service. There still remains the necessity for extensive storage of water in the arid States which renders it desirable that we should give a wider vision and purpose to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover
... debating. For to cultured ears and to men of the highest eloquence my speech will appear to have little marrow in its views, and its poverty of words will seem jejune. For idle is it, and utterly superfluous, to offer that which is arid to the eloquent, and that which is stale to men of knowledge and wisdom. Whence our Moral Seneca, and, ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... bed, as if for the support of some frail victim of disease, he beheld the lord of the mansion. His look was wild and haggard;—no moisture floated over his eyeballs: they were glazed and motionless; arid as the hot desert,—no refreshing rain dropped from their burning orbs, dimmed with the shadows ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... ignorance of times to be when at "Vicksburg and the Bends" this same waiter would bring his coffee made of corn-meal bran and muddy water, with which to wash down scant snacks of mule meat. The listless eye still roamed the arid page as the slave returned with the fragrant pot and cup, but now the sitter laid it by, lighted a cigar ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... In that arid land, where was green vegetation you may be sure there was water also. And presently the nine were distributed along a rod or two of irrigating ditch, thankfully watching the swallows of water go sliding hurriedly down the ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... months during a great tribal gathering. That the Arunta could provide supplies for so prolonged and large an assembly, argues high organisation, or a region well found in natural edible objects. Yet the region is arid and barren, so the organisation is very high. For all these reasons, even if we do not regard paternal descent of the totem as a step in progress from maternal descent, the Arunta seem greatly advanced in ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... of the Indians from Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois had paralleled the similar removal from the lower South. But during the fifties, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota succeeded in pushing the natives into the arid Nebraska Territory. And now as the great "American Desert" proved to be desirable country for the pioneers, it was proposed to shift the Northwestern Indians into the Southern hinterland, now known as Oklahoma, and thus to bar the ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... Donga, deep with squirming gnats And acrid coils,—a hole of Death! And runnels thick with arid dung, Flow past a Temple's swoll'n arch, Where warring tribes of hungry cats Fish for green lizards filched of breath; A palace-dome where runes are sung As Satan views his squadron's march, Flare twin mineral lights of blue That lure each legion foul of home. ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... and laughed. Cynicism is an arid growth, found to perfection on the pavement, and this little Frenchman wore ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... but tropical in Hawaii and Florida and arctic in Alaska, semiarid in the great plains west of the Mississippi River and arid in the Great Basin of the southwest; low winter temperatures in the northwest are ameliorated occasionally in January and February by warm chinook winds from the eastern slopes ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... sleep more sweetly and soundly than those who are labored for, and could fail to see by comparing the Persians' manner of living with their own, that it was the most abject and slavish condition to be voluptuous, but the most noble arid royal to undergo pain and labor. He argued with them further, how it was possible for anyone who pretended to be a soldier, either to look well after his horse, or to keep his armor bright and in good order, who thought ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... influences.' Leghorn, the seaport of Tuscany, is built in a sunk locality, in the midst of a marshy country. Beggars, galley-slaves, assassins, smugglers, these are the picturesque portions of the inhabitants; and the promenade is an arid beach, anything but soothing to the respiratory organs. The English cemetery is a touching spectacle, with its numerous monuments of brilliant marble; among which stands conspicuous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... Geneva and the frank, exuberant hero of the German Reformation. Their doctrines were similar; there was a likeness between their mistakes; but what a diversity in their natures! Calvin was the perfect type of the theological pedant—vain, meagre, and arid; while Luther had in him, as Heine remarks, "something aboriginal"; and the world has, after all, profited by "the God-like ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... in Hawaii and Florida, arctic in Alaska, semiarid in the great plains west of the Mississippi River, and arid in the Great Basin of the southwest; low winter temperatures in the northwest are ameliorated occasionally in January and February by warm chinook winds from the eastern slopes of the ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... in that gulf; but I have fished up an island in Maracaybo, or Venezuela Gulf. It is called Curacoa, and is arid and sterile. There is very little water, and only one well in the island, and the water is sold at a high price. Its capital is Williamstadt, one of the neatest ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... in the region of country they had now entered, was waste and arid—for the most part sand, a few stunted trees being the sole vegetation. These trees had nothing pleasant in their appearance, as forest trees usually have. The branches seemed destitute of sap, as the leaves were of verdure; they had not reached ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... Bartholomew. "You must excuse me, Zara. I hope you will teach your adopted child better manners, arid get rid of a little of ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... pelerine to the waists, and terminated at the seam of the shoulder, trimmed with lace. Hat of yellow satin, long at the cheeks, and rounded, ornamented with a bouquet of white flowers resting on the side, arid a puff of tulle ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... crater are covered with strange bushes, its glaring shingle spotted with bright green Manchineels; while on the cliffs around, aloes innumerable, seemingly the imported American Agave, send up their groups of huge fat pointed leaves from crannies so arid that one would fancy a moss would wither in them. A strange place it is, and strangely hot likewise; and one could not but fear a day—it is to be hoped long distant— when it will ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... once and for all, the arid region of genealogy, it may be worth mentioning that Sir Bysshe Shelley by his second marriage with Miss Elizabeth Jane Sydney Perry, heiress of Penshurst, became the father of five children, the eldest son of whom ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... its right on Leissow, and has Cavalry in the kind of wood which there is to rear. Friedrich, having settled the positions, rides out reconnoitring; hither, thither, over the Heights of Trettin. "The day being still hot, he suffers considerably from thirst [it is our one Anecdote] in that arid tract: at last a Peasant does bring him, direct from the fountain, a jug of pure cold water; whom, lucky man, the King rewarded with a thaler; and not only so, but, the man being intelligent of the localities, took with him to answer questions." Readers too may desire to gain some knowledge ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and equal distribution of the water supply of the arid regions has had much attention from Congress, but has not as yet been put upon a permanent and satisfactory basis. The urgency of the subject does not grow out of any large present demand for the use of these lands for agriculture, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... the general impression of the weather was, to one and all, conveyed in a sense of discomfort and oppression, with a vague struggling expectancy of approaching thunder. Few raised their eyes beyond the thick warm haze which hung low on the sooty chimney-pots, and trailed sleepily along in the arid, dusty parks. Those who by chance looked higher, saw that the skies above the city were divinely calm and clear, and that not a cloud betokened so much as ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... discharge of artillery in the outskirts, and the church bells begin ringing; but the peals dwindle away to a melancholy jangle, and then to silence. Simultaneously, on the northern horizon of the arid, unenclosed, and treeless plain swept by the eye around the city, a cloud of dust arises, and a Royal procession is seen nearing. It means the new ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... themselves struggle a long time against that grace of love which is more terrible than the thunderbolt that fell on the road to Damascus. A woman oftenest yields to the passion of love only when age or solitude does not frighten her. Passion is an arid and burning desert. Passion is profane asceticism, as harsh as religious asceticism. Great woman lovers are as rare as great penitent women. Those who know life well know that women do not easily bind themselves ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... under the supreme government of another; like Montesquieu, he devotes attention to the adaptation of government to the varieties of race and climate. The attempts at a general history of France in the earlier part of the sixteenth century preserved the arid methods and unilluminated style of the mediaeval chronicles;[3] in the second half of the century they imitated with little skill the models of antiquity. Histories of contemporary events in Europe were written with conscientious impartiality ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... thus or thus." Cannot you fancy a man getting utterly tired of himself and his own thoughts—knowing himself by heart, and finding the lesson a dreary one? Perhaps not. A girl's life seems all brightness. What should such happy young creatures know of that arid waste of years that lies beyond a man's thirtieth birthday, when his youth has not been a fortunate one? Ah, there is a break in the sky yonder; the ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... about her. The country at this point was broken and rocky; there was much sand; the line of hills, of which the one on which her pony stood was a part, were barren and uninviting. There was much cactus. She made a grimace of abhorrence at a clump that grew near her in an arid stretch, and then looked beyond it at a stretch of green. Far away on a gentle slope she saw some cattle, and looking longer, she observed a man on a horse. One of the Flying W men, of course, she assured ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Mayberry as she beamed across the little sleeve she was basting in an apron. "And this brings me to the mention of another little Bible character we have a-running about amongst us. It's 'Liza Pike, as should be called one of God's own little ravens arid you ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... banks, spread their rude waves abroad, By strong winds vext; and clasp within their arms The tortuous shores: and marshes wide he adds, Pure springs and lakes:—he bounds with shelving banks The streams smooth gliding;—slowly creeping, some The arid earth absorbs; furious some rush, And in the watery plain their waves disgorge; Their narrow bounds escap'd, to billows rise, And lash the sandy shores. He bade the plains Extend;—the vallies sink;—the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... an elevated arid tract for twelve miles to the village of Carondalet, without encountering a house, or an acre of land in cultivation. On this tract, which formed a sort of oak orchard, with high grass, and was a range for wild deer, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... had not yet been to that spot—and, dismounting, picked up Pete's rope. He glanced at Gary, shivered, and swung to his horse. Riding so that his trail would be easy to read he set off toward the open country, east. The fact that he had no food with him, and that the country was arid and that water was scarce, did not trouble him. All he hoped for was to delay or mislead the posse long enough to enable Pete to reach the southern desert. There Pete might have one chance in twenty of making his final escape. Perhaps it was a foolish thing to do, but Andy ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... periodical rains, followed by one of those tremendous famines which form such a fearful feature of Indian life. In Bengal, where the monsoon is regular, and the alluvial soil moist, these things are almost as unknown as in England: but the arid plains of Hindustan, basking at the feet of the vastest mountain-chain in the world, become a perfect desert, at least once in every quarter of a century. The famine of 1783-4 has made a peculiarly deep impression upon ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... place at which we could pass, and so avoid much soft heavy ground. The ramifications of the watery Narran penetrated into the hollows of the stony ridge, presenting there little hollows full of rich verdure and pools of water, a sight so unwonted amongst rocks characteristic of D'Urban's arid group. In one little hollow, to the westward of our camp, it seemed possible for two men with a pickaxe and shovel to have continued it through, and so to have opened a new channel for the passage of the waters ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... in bed, he began to drink, as with the thirst of a drunkard, those flowing verses of an inspired being who sang, like a bird, of the dawn of existence, and having breath only for the morning, was silent in the arid light of day; those verses of a poet who above all mankind was intoxicated with life, expressing his intoxication in fanfares of frank and triumphant love, the echo of all ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... fallen in the attack upon the wall of gold were buried where they lay. This was a very different climate from that of the Peruvian coast, where the desiccating air speedily makes a mummy of any dead body upon its arid sands. ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... care little for the wonders of our own. Yet, when we go abroad, we cannot help blushing to acknowledge that we have not seen the most striking features of our own country. I speak from experience. Scott, describing the arid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... convert. I would not have believed it possible, and now I cannot believe that I ever thought differently. I suppose it is the way with all converts—in religion as well—and with all people who are taken up by a fair-winged genius from an arid desert and set down in a 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 ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... the Van Reenen Railway ends at Harrismith, an arid but cheerful little town at the foot of the great cliffs of the Plaatburg. It boasts its racecourse, golf-links, musical society, and some acquaintance with the German poets. The Scotch made it their own, though a few Dutch, English, and ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... other, embracing the flower of the infantry and all the cavalry, higher up towards the mountain-range, concealed by the bushes. On debouching from the mountains, the Romans saw the enemy in a position completely commanding their right flank; and, as they could not possibly remain on the bare and arid crest of the chain and were under the necessity of reaching the river, they had to solve the difficult problem of gaining the stream through the entirely open plain of eighteen miles in breadth, under the eyes of the enemy's horsemen ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... earth, considerably more than six millions of square miles are occupied in Africa and Asia alone by sandy deserts. With but the interruption of the narrow valley of the Nile, an enormous zone of arid sand, full nine hundred miles across, stretches from the eastern coast of Africa to within a few days' journey of the Chinese frontier: it is a belt that girdles nearly half the globe;—a vast "ocean," according to the Moors, "without ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... ire the solar splendor flames; The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames; His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes, And dreams of erring on ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... man was dead, and on his body, Jaga-Jaga said, he discovered sundry things which he now brought to the store to sell. What would Sinkum Fung give for them? The payment must be made in food, for the tribe were nearly starving. Food was difficult to procure in the intense heat; the ground was arid ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... blotting out groves and meadows with monuments of brick and mortar. Where {16} the friends of George the First could have hunted and gunned and found refreshment in secluded country ale-houses, the friends of George the Third were familiar with miles of stony streets and areas of arid squares. London was not then the monster city that another century and a half has made it, but it was even more huge in its proportion to the size of any of its rivals, if rivals they could be called, among the large towns of England. The great city did not deserve the adjective ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... them appeared in general to have a whitish cast. The coast seemed very irregular, projecting into low points forming creeks and bays, some of which seemed to be deep; very little verdure was any where discernible; in many spots the ground looked arid and sterile. At night we perceived several fires lighted on the coast, at many of which, no doubt, were some of the native inhabitants, to whom it was probable our novel appearance must have afforded matter of curiosity ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... of a vast forest, the exhalations from extensive marshes, all tend to diminish materially the power of a southern sun.[210] On the other hand, intensity of heat is aggravated by the neighborhood of arid and sandy deserts, or rocky tracts. The action of long-continued heat creates a more permanent effect than the mere darkening of the outer skin: it alters the character of those subtile juices that display their color through the almost ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... slowly dying of tuberculosis in the desert; there a famous geologist from Washington who, after a night of amazing talk with the young prodigy while awaiting a train, took him along on a mountain exploration; again an artist and his wife who were painting the arid and colorful glories of the waste places. From these and others he got much; but not friendship or permanent associations. He did not want them. He was essentially, though unconsciously, a lone spirit; so his listener gathered. Advancement could have been ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the vine on the housetop Habib muttered, too, and twitched a little. It was as if the arid months had got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves. The girl's eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms. His face was ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... other side of the bend, where he and the men would stop, pitch our night-tent, and wait for me. Herndon assented, and we parted. The low fields around us changed, as I went on, to firm, hard, rising ground, that gradually became sandy and arid. The luxuriant vegetation that clung around the banks of the river seemed to be dried up little by little, until only a few dusty bushes and thorn-acacias studded in clumps a great, sandy, and rocky tract of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... all the constellations; her image, one, immortal, golden, rises on your eye as our western star at evening rises on the traveler from his home; no lowering cloud, no angry river, no lingering spring, no broken crevasse, no inundated city or plantation, no tracts of sand, arid and burning, on that surface, but all blended and softened into one beam of kindred rays, the image, harbinger, and promise of love, hope, and ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... is of all writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, to many minds, illogical. His sequences are not the sequences of other men. His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy tale. His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his banqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch. He begins an essay about trivialities, and the conclusion is in the other world. And the peculiar character of his writing, like the peculiar character of all writing which is worth anything, arises from constitutional ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... irrigate large tracts of land which would be otherwise worthless. By means of irrigation, the farmer has control of his water supply and is able to get larger returns than are possible where he depends upon the irregular and uncertain rainfall. It is estimated that in the arid regions of western United States there are 150,000 square miles of land which may be made available for agriculture by irrigation. Perhaps in the future the valley of the lower Colorado may become as productive as that of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... knee-deep from end to end of the pond, an advantage much appreciated in the hot and thirsty summer. Away to the east stretches of rolling green form a joyous playground for all at holiday times, but are bare and arid compared with ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... "Mountain of the Bell," is situated about three miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders which witnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and in which the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wilderness of rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab of the desert, that there rose at times from this hill a strange, inexplicable music. As he leads his camel past in the heat of the day, a sound like the first low tones of an Aeolian harp stirs ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... he identify those arid, parched, glinting rocks with the Basque landscape, with the humid, green, shaded countryside of Azpeitia? It was easy to see that the anterior image of a landscape existing in the mind of that priest, provided only the general idea of a mountain, and that he was unable to distinguish, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... took a violent fancy for the Wady Sharma: the water-scenery enchanted him. His sketches were almost confined to the palm-growth, and to the greenery so unexpected in arid Midian, where, according to the old and exploded opinion, Moses wrote the Book of Job. The idea of Arabia is certainly not associated with flowing rills, and waving trees, and rustling zephyrs. Every morning I used to awake surprised by the song of the Naiad, the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... steep and dusty streets—hot and dusty, although it was but nine o'clock in the morning. Thence the guide conducted us into some little dust-powdered gardens, in which the people make believe to enjoy the verdure, and whence you look over a great part of the arid, dreary, stony city. There was no smoke, as in honest London, only dust—dust over the gaunt houses and the dismal yellow strips of gardens. Many churches were there, and tall half-baked-looking public ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Grewgious, an arid, sandy man who looked as if he might be put in a grinding-mill and turned out first-class snuff. He had scanty hair like a yellow fur tippet, and deep notches in his forehead, and was very near-sighted. He seemed to have been born old, so that when he came to London to call on Rosebud amid all ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... the river Ucker, in pleasing contrast with the sandy plains of Brandenburg; it lies at no great distance from Berlin, so that it forms the favourite goal for a short excursion with the people of that arid city. ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... That may be a literally true reproduction of his condition, if indeed the old idea is correct, that this is a work of David's; for there is no more appalling desert than that in which he wandered as an exile. It is a land of arid mountains without a blade of verdure, blazing in their ghastly whiteness under the fierce sunshine, and with gaunt ravines in which there are no pools or streams, and therefore no sweet sound of running waters, no shadow, no songs of birds, but all is hot, dusty, glaring, pitiless; and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... said Will Osten, turning to his dark-skinned companion, "shall we encamp on this arid part of the plain and go waterless as well as supperless to rest, or shall we push on? I fear the horses will break down if we try to ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... Climate: arid to semiarid; mild, wet winters with hot, dry summers along coast; drier with cold winters and hot summers on high plateau; sirocco is a hot, dust/sand-laden wind ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... presenting brown tufts of vegetation where not half-a-dozen other plants can exist. The branches are densely interwoven, very harsh and woody, wholly depressed; whence the shrub, spreading horizontally, and barely raised two inches above the soil, becomes eminently typical of the arid, stern climate it inhabits. The latest to bloom, and earliest to mature its seeds, by far the smallest in foliage, and proportionally largest in flower, most lepidote in vesture, humble in stature, rigid in texture, deformed in habit, yet the most ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... sweetness of his rich and careless life. It was possible, if—if he could once meet the fate he shuddered from, once look at the bitterness of the life that waited for him, and enter on its desolate and arid waste without going back to the closed gates of his forfeited paradise to stretch his limbs within their shadow once more ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... up system and the quantity of trees required in consequence. It should also be remembered that we require our shade not only to protect our coffee from the sun's rays, but to shield it from those parching winds which sweep across the arid plains of the interior of India, and to prevent the drying up of the land. And is it not perfectly obvious that if we trim up the trees so as to produce a long stem with a small crown, the parching winds will sweep unchecked over plants and soil? ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... time of ev'n, The murmuring breeze, the blushing skies, And day's last smile on heaven. But thoughts of thee, and such as thou art. That mingle with these sacred hours, Give deeper pleasure to my heart Than song of birds arid breath of flowers. Then welcome the hour when the last smile of day Just lingers at the portal of ev'n, When so much of life's tumults are passing away, And earth seems exalted to heaven. H. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... things he shows any present intention of doing—am but a soldier of fortune: an officer under the command of the excellent and most noble procurator Albinus," he added sarcastically. "For the rest," he went on, "I have spent a year in this interesting and turbulent but somewhat arid land of yours, coming here from Egypt, and am now honoured with a commission to investigate and make report on a charge laid at the door of your virtuous guardians, the Essenes, of having murdered, or ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... abundance of water, and considerable portions of the regions best known for fruit are watered by irrigating ditches and pipes supplied by ample reservoirs in the mountains. From natural rainfall and the sea moisture the mesas and hills, which look arid before ploughing, produce large crops of grain when cultivated after the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... of manners and agreeability to Vienna, sums up all in one prodigious yawn. "The same evenings at Metternich's, the same lounges for making purchases and visits on a morning, the same idleness and fatigue at night, the searching and arid climate, and the clouds of execrable fine dust"—all conspiring to tell the great of the earth that they can escape ennui no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Quarrying for paving-stones appears to be the chief pursuit of the Elizabethans. At Rose Clare, Ill., a string of shanties three miles below, are two idle plants of the Argyle Lead and Fluor-Spar Mining Co. Carrsville, Ky., is another arid, hillside hamlet, with striking escarpments stretching above and below for several miles. Mammoth boulders, a dozen or more feet in height, relics doubtless of once formidable cliffs, here line the riverside. The palisaded hills reappear in Illinois, commencing at Parkinson's ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... roused an enthusiasm seldom witnessed in the old State House. She was introduced by the Governor, who was chairman of the meeting, and fully three- fourths of the members of the Senate and the House were present. Miss Drake's speech was a rare combination of originality, humor, arid pathos. Her aptitude at anecdote, her gift for description and dialect had fairly astounded her audience. The applause was so constant and persistent that the brave young speaker had difficulty in pursuing her theme. And when it was over the members of the House ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... enough, it has chanced that hand in hand with the experiments leading to such a goal have gone other experiments arid speculations of exactly the opposite tenor. In each generation there have been chemists among the leaders of their science who have refused to admit that the so-called elements are really elements at all in any final sense, and who have sought eagerly for proof ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... offered nothing but the most horrifying possibilities to me. "What is the Biltmore to a man in uniform, anyway?" I remember thinking to myself as I lay there with my nose pressed flat to an ant hill, "all the best parts of it are arid districts, waste places, limitless Saharas to him. Death, where is thy sting?" I continued, as an outraged ant assaulted my nose. The world came throbbing back. I felt myself being dragged violently away from my resting place. I was choking. ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... bright, dazzling. The architect, Louis Christian Mullgardt, has caught the feeling of the South,—not the rank, jungle South of the tropics; nor the mild, rich South of our own Gulf states; but the hard, brilliant, arid South of the desert. This court expresses Arizona, New Mexico, Spain, Algiers,—lands of the Sun. The very flowers of its first gardens were desert blooms, brilliant in hue, on leafless stalks. There are orange trees, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... persons who seem to smell blood and presage crime, reached Avignon from Versailles: his name was Jourdan. He is not to be confounded with another revolutionist of the same name, born at Avignon. Sprung from the arid and calcined mountains of the south, where the very brutes are more ferocious; by turns butcher, farrier, and smuggler, in the gorges which separate Savoy from France; a soldier, deserter, horse-jobber, and then a keeper of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... where the soil, although more elevated, would yet be quite cool (frais) so as to allow the plant to live, and then after having lived there, and passed through many generations there, it should gradually reach the poor and almost arid soil of a mountain side—if the plant should thrive and live there and perpetuate itself during a series of generations, it would then be so changed that the botanists who should find it there would describe ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... at South East to Nepaug Beach was long and dusty, tedious enough to the traveller at any time, but especially on this July afternoon when the sun beat down pitilessly upon its arid stretches, and the dust, stirred by passing wheels, ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... that. (Looking from the window.) Is this real? Am I here alone? My mother gone? The army gone? brothers and sisters gone, and those woods full of armed Indians? I am awake. This is not the light of dreams,—'tis the sun that's shining there. Not the fresh arid tender morning sun, that looked in on that parting. Hours he has climbed since then, to turn those shadows thus,—hours that to me were nothing.—Alone?—deserted—defenceless? Of my own will too? There was a law in that will, though, was there not? (Turning suddenly from the window.) Shall ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon |
