"Opalescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figure were more rounded than theirs, the skin smooth, well oiled, and free from disease. On his chest, suspended from a single string of porpoise-teeth around his throat, hung a big crescent carved out of opalescent pearl-shell. A row of pure white cowrie shells banded his brow. From his hair drooped a long, lone feather. Above the swelling calf of one leg he wore, as a garter, a single string of white beads. The effect was dandyish in the extreme. A narrow gee-string completed his costume. Another man ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... mist, driven and dispersed by day's last flash of self-assertion, lay heaped and tumbled in the valleys, and the mountains stood knee-deep in an opalescent sea of foam. It was as though Nature, in a mood of capricious kindliness, had rent the veil, that mortals might share in the triumphal passing of the sun, whose supremacy had been in ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... moon came up. And as the three tall white figures sped, with soundless tread, through the opalescent light, they appeared like specters flying from hateful shadows. Suddenly, in the air before them, not farther up than a low hill-top flared a lambent flame; as they looked at it, the apparition contracted into a focus of dazzling lustre. Their hearts ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of raw whiting. The flesh is white, delicate, partly translucent, easy for our stomachs to digest and no less suited to the grub's dissolvent. It turns into an opalescent fluid, which runs like water. In fact, it liquefies in much the same way as hard-boiled white of egg. The worms at first wax fat, as long as the conditions allow of some solid eyots remaining; then, when foothold fails, threatened ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... on a low chair at some distance from her. He had brought her a large bunch of early violets, for he knew that she was fond of flowers, and these lay upon her lap, against the opalescent grey of her gown. ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... brightest and cleverest naturally revolved. She changed the large, drafty rooms of the old palace into charming reflections of her own personality. A woman of wide sympathies and cultivated tastes, she delighted in the clever cosmopolitan society that gathered in her drawing-room; and it was in this opalescent social sea that she launched young ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... sugar is dissolved, the flask is held above the level of the eye, in which position any undissolved crystals can be easily seen at the bottom. The character of the solution is now observed. If it be colorless or of a very light straw color, and not opalescent, so that it will give a clear transparent liquid on filtration through paper, the volume is made up directly with water to the 100 c.c. mark on the flask. Most sugar solutions, however, will require the addition of a clarifying or decolorizing agent in order to render them sufficiently clear ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... most part the road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes it climbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-worn and wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the black legs of the negro children paddling in the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hour then gliding, with pitiless beats, toward the past. Already the moon had ceased to weave her magic; the sun rose over the unrebukable sea, and the distant coast, obscured in a purple vapour, seemed but a line of darkness against the flushed horizon. The sky was grey, opalescent in the north, tenderest green and azure in the east, while large, motionless clouds, as blue as vine-clad hills, shadowed in great clusters the vast canopy. But if the dawn of day wrought a progressive disenchantment of the dreamer, Robert felt with ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... which the eruption makes its appearance. A number of raised red papules appear on the trunk, either on the back or chest; in from twelve to twenty-four hours these develop into tense vesicles filled with a clear fluid, which in another thirty-six hours or so becomes opalescent. During the fourth day these vesicles dry and shrivel up, and the scabs fall off, leaving as a rule no scar. Fresh spots appear during the first three days, so that at the end of that time they can be seen in all stages of growth ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... through the silent streets on our way to Charing Cross Station. The first faint winter's dawn was beginning to appear, and we could dimly see the occasional figure of an early workman as he passed us, blurred and indistinct in the opalescent London reek. Holmes nestled in silence into his heavy coat, and I was glad to do the same, for the air was most bitter, and neither of us had ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... been reduced to ash, and what seemed like several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone's interior workings, his mind was as blank as a baby's. The lovely, opalescent dawn began to show in the East, and Malone tendered it some extremely rude words. Then, Haggard, red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a solution, he fell into a fitful ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... supported a machilla, a canopied hammock of white duck that swung from a bamboo pole. They were Wasena, specially trained for this fatiguing work, maintaining a smooth step over the roughest ground. Lilla reclined in the hammock. Her face, half concealed by the fringe of the awning, appeared opalescent in the filtered sunlight. Her tapering figure had the grace of Persian queens and Roman empresses floating along in their litters on ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... hands, with their oval nails polished and opalescent, were exceedingly beautiful; and, where the creamy foam of the fine lace fell back from the dimpled wrists, quaintly carved jet serpents with blazing diamond eyes coiled around the throbbing thread-like pulses of ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... and I found this region in June, I must admit that its August charms are more entrancing and pervasive. Instead of the clear blues, greens and purples of June, the light haze that veils the mountain tops brings out the same indescribable opalescent shades of heliotrope, azure and rose that we thought belonged exclusively to the Dolomites. However, these mountains are first cousins, once or twice removed, to the Eastern Italian and Austrian Alps and have a good right to a family likeness. There is something almost intoxicating in ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... I dote upon it. It is so pliable, so dreamy, and so opalescent that I can scarce restrain my enthusiasm. But if I should fit one of my boys out with the equipment necessary for a blacksmith, and then he should become a preacher, I'd find the situation embarrassing. ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... eyes was enacted a more wonderful change than the gradual transformation of transparent absinthe into an opaque opalescent liquid. Simard, under the influence of the drink, was slowly becoming the Simard I had known ten years before. Remarkable! Absinthe having in earlier years made a beast of the man was now forming a man out of the beast. His staring eyes took on ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... level plain of Holderness, and towards the Wolds there is only a very gentle rise. It depends, therefore, solely upon its architecture. The first view of the city from the west as we come over the broad grassy common of Westwood is delightful. We are just sufficiently elevated to see the opalescent form of the Minster, with its graceful towers rising above the more distant roofs, and close at hand the pinnacled tower of St. Mary's showing behind a mass of dark trees. The entry to the city from this direction is in every way prepossessing, for the sunny ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... seeds finished with a perfectness and beauty we are hardly acute enough to discover. The microscopist revels in the forms of the dainty scales of its armor and the opalescent tints of its color. The sunset is not more delicate and exquisite. But the big tree never makes but one kind of seed, and leaves no one ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... all very new and interesting to him—the shore with its spectral palms and giant caravansary, the misty, opalescent sea where a white steam-yacht lay anchored north of him—the Ariani—from which he had come, and on board of which the others were still doubtless asleep—Portlaw, Malcourt, and Wayward. And at thought of the others he yawned and moistened ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... vile place to raid to-day, and as I listened with sick heart to the report of it, suddenly I saw the Canyon and F.'s broad back on his mule and the glorious line of the rim lifting from opalescent mists."—Enoch's Diary. ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... with the molasses, Flint left him to struggle with the contents of the wagon, while he himself escorted Brady up the narrow, sagging stairs, and ensconced him in a room next his own,—a room whose windows looked out like his over the purple stretch of ocean, now opalescent ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... attained to so complex a design and such an elaborate ornamentation remaining in the Stone-age; and, somewhat curiously, the locality of that stone blade is fixed, by its being of that semi-transparent opalescent calcedony which Humboldt describes as occurring in the volcanic districts of Mexico—the concretionary ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Tara?" Instantly there flashed a vision of the walled lane leading to New College; Dyan's embittered mood and bewildering change of front.... Looking back now, the thing seemed glaringly obvious; but, through the opalescent mist of his own dreams, he had seen Dyan in one relation only. Just as well perhaps. Even at this distance, the idea amazed and angered him. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the little summer-house, and there they sat down and surveyed the scene. The evening lights were all opalescent on the water, there was peace in the air and brilliant fresh green on the trees, and soft and liquid rose the nightingale's note. So at last Hector broke ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... little table beneath it at which Paragot and myself were seated. I sipped luxuriously a celestial liquor which I have since learned was grenadine syrup and water; in front of Paragot was a curious opalescent milky fluid of which he drank great quantities during those ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... sun, for first he inundates it with a splendor unknown to the earth, and then generously covers it with a gorgeous screen of cloud which cuts off his scorching beams but suffers the light to pass, filtered to opalescent ether?" ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... But the more I think it over the more unnatural and inhuman it seems. Yet to hunt for help, in this busy land, is like searching for a needle in a hay-stack. Already, in the clear morning air, one can hear the stutter and skip and cough of the tractors along the opalescent sky-line, accosting the morning sun with their rattle and tattle of harvests to be. And I intend to be in ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... very little while the dust-cloud cleared. One figure struggled insanely. Upon him descended—from an oil drum of cylinder-oil stored above the rafters—a tranquil, glistening rod of opalescent cylinder-oil. His last bullet had punctured the drum. Oil turned the bone-black upon him into a thick, sticky goo which instantly gathered more bone-black to become thicker, stickier, and gooier. He fought it, while his unconscious companion lay with his head in a ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... shows me that I am wrong. The luminosity comes from the cluster of eggs forced out of the ovary. Besides, as laying-time approaches, the phosphorescence of the eggs is already made manifest without this clumsy midwifery. A soft opalescent light shines through ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... went down in an opalescent glow of mauve and pink and pearl that spread far over the veldt, and she felt that the beauty of it was almost more than she could bear. It hid so much that was terrible ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... leaned over the balustrade. My eyes were met at first by the darkness above me, where, like gigantic spiders, the big chandeliers rotated slowly, hanging from the ceiling. Only one of them was lit, and its Murano-glass pendants, its carnations and roses, shone opalescent in the light of the guttering wax. This chandelier lighted up the opposite wall and that piece of ceiling with the goddess and the green peacock; it illumined, but far less well, a corner of the huge room, where, in the shadow of a kind of canopy, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee |
