"Tortuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But how tortuous she had been behind that outward pride of hers! For four years she had let him think he was the only man who really mattered in the world, and all the time quite clearly and definitely she had deceived him. She ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... sign of water. And yet surely water must have made this bold cutting in the plateau. And if so, why is the lava sharp? My science gave out; but I could not but think it ominous and volcanic. The course of the stream was tortuous, but with a resultant direction a little by west of north; the sides the whole way exceeding steep, the expedition buried under fathoms of foliage. Presently water appeared in the bottom, a good quantity; perhaps thirty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through thirty-three miles of forest from York to Lake Simcoe. This shorter route to Lake Superior enabled the North-West Fur Company—established by Frobisher and McTavish, of Montreal, in 1776—to avoid canoeing up the Ottawa and its tortuous tributaries. The batteaux were brought up the St. Lawrence, breaking bulk at certain "carrying places," then under sail up Lake Ontario to York. From here the cargoes were hauled by horses over Yonge's military ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... of which commanded the road leading down the pass, and the other the road up the valley from the direction of the village. The outer vault is large and roomy, and extends back into a lofty dome-shaped cavern about forty feet high, behind which a long tortuous vault extends for several hundred feet. The place is quite dry, and sufficiently spacious to accommodate a large number of persons; and there can be no doubt as to the uses to which it was applied during the wars ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... rear; behind which was the office of the agent of the Associated Press. The plastering was about one-third gone from the ceiling. A small stove, used occasionally in the winter, was connected to the chimney by a tortuous pipe. The office was never cleaned. The switchboard for manipulating the wires was about thirty-four inches square. The brass connections on it were black with age and with the arcing effects of lightning, which, to young Edison, seemed particularly ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... accuracy over my dirty and clean linen bundles. Never again would I risk the ordeal of a surprise stocktaking; never again would I risk a combat with a ledger-fortified sergeant; never again would I risk any attempt at the tortuous in my dealings with the classifications of the eighty-one items on the tear-off leaf of that dire volume, the Check Book ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... boulders on his right, as if a whole cliff had crashed to fragments; and a great expanse of them, mossy and weed-covered, stretching on his left to the water's edge. He was aware of them, too, ahead of him, extending in the gloom indefinitely. And soon he had to pick out a tortuous way between the mighty heaps on one hand and the far-spread belt ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... not get near enough for a good shot; after a long pursuit I gave up, and concluded to return to the road. Just as I abandoned the chase the sun was setting. My notion of the direction I ought to go was not entirely clear, as I had followed a very tortuous ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... having such steep limestone cliffs on each side that it assumed quite the character of a ravine: it was about a mile wide and in it was a watercourse winding through deep flats. We however only found water in pools; the course of the stream was very tortuous and its mouth was almost blocked up by sandhills. The valley itself was both picturesque and fertile, and the appearance of the country to the east and north-east was highly promising. The stream I called ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... mansion surrounded by trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, I found myself, after walking a few rods farther, in full view of the Merrimac. A deep and rocky channel stretched between me and the Dracut shore, along which rushed the shallow water,—a feeble, broken, and tortuous current, winding its way among splintered rocks, rising sharp and jagged in all directions. Drained above the falls by the canal, it resembled some mountain streamlet of old Spain, or some Arabian wady, exhausted by ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... dissimilar as the refining, self-torturing, intellectual Duplessis-Mornay, the rude, aggressive, and straightforward Sully, the deep-revolving, restlessly plotting Bouillon, and the smooth, silent, and tortuous Villeroy—men between whom there was no friendship, but, on the contrary, constant rancour—had material in him to render valuable services at this particular epoch. Everything depended on patience, tact, watchfulness in threading the distracting, almost inextricable, maze which had been created ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... intermediate state of sinning manhood; and though his nature told him that he was not of the temper that attains sanctity all at once, he felt that he owed to his mother's hopes for him a sort of loyalty in which Aurora had made him fail. The reasonings of innocent sentiment are more tortuous than the wiles of the devil himself, and have amazing power to torment the unfledged conscience of a boy brought ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... town a seaport, and it is one still. More than that, it is the most inland port in Britain, owing to the Berkeley Ship Canal, which enables ships to dispense with the awkwardness of a voyage up and down the tortuous and dangerous Severn. It is to this canal that Gloucester owes much of its present trade, as, by sea-going vessels, corn and timber, its staple commodities, are brought in to the many wharves in ever-increasing quantities. To the railways—the Great Western and the Midland—the town also ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... them, darting down with what would have seemed, to any inexperienced eye, perilous velocity. The river at the place was about a hundred yards wide, with an unusually rugged channel, but with a distinctly marked run—deep and tortuous—in the middle. On both sides of the run, sweeping and curling surges told of rocks close to the surface, and in many places these showed black edges above water, which broke ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... at Chazy Junction. The foothills were sparsely settled and the inhabitants too humble to be attractive to gentlemen of the road, while the rocky highways, tortuous and uneven, offered no invitation ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... high banks and buildings, and so catch the breeze which would otherwise be intercepted. The build of the boats also is peculiar; they are very wide and flat bottomed, and the rudders are unusually large, so as to enable them to turn quickly in the narrow channels, which are often tortuous. The bow rises in a splendid curve high out of the water, and throws the spray clear of its low body, for the Egyptian loads his boat very heavily, and I have often seen them so deep in the water that a little wall of ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... basalt formation which runs through the plain of Esdraelon to Tabor and the Sea of Galilee.[128] Like most limestone formations, Carmel abounds in caves, which are said to be more than 2,000 in number,[129] and are often of great length and extremely tortuous. ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... time they lay as motionless as the granite bowlders around or squirmed and crawled over loose stones which a miss of hand or knee would have dislodged and sent clattering into the village. After an hour of this tortuous climbing the cave suddenly opened before them, and they beheld Umlimo. Burnham recognized that to take him alive from his stronghold was an impossibility, and that even they themselves would leave the place was equally doubtful. So, obeying orders, he fired, killing the man ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... his companions knew nothing of this as they were hurried along through the tortuous ways of the vast stretch of hovels, tents, and mud huts, till they reached the outskirts, and then the wide-stretching plain, where they had ample opportunity of learning the truth. For on every side, streaming towards Khartoum, where it ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... year after his release the Secretary engaged in a series of tortuous intrigues to gain the favour of the Medici. Many of the stories may be exaggerated, but none make pleasant reading, and nothing proved successful. His position was miserable. Temporarily crippled by torture, out of favour with the Government, shunned ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... through Snickersville, and up the romantic gorge or gap between the mountains, was a good pike, and in the best marching condition. At the crest the Brigade undoubled its files, and entered in double ranks a narrow, tortuous, rocky road, ascending the mountain to the left, leading through woods and over fields so covered with fragments of rock, that a country boy in the ranks, following up a habit, however, not by any means confined to the country, of giving the embodiment ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light. A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... nobility and of the Third Estate—which as may be imagined were all prepared in advance by the agents of the King, and were only subscribed to and sealed by the assistants—were addressed, not to the Pope, but to the college of cardinals. The despatch of the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and unreasonable enterprises of him who, at present, is at the seat and government of the Church, and declares that neither the nobility nor the universities nor the people require correction or imposition of any trouble, whether by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in 1683. William Pitt came to live here in 1801. St. James's Place is a medley of old and modern buildings, some having been built in the last decade. Wheatley speaks of it because of its tortuous course, as "one of the oddest built streets in London." Wilkes and Addison, and Mrs. Delaney, at whose house Miss Burney stayed, have been among the residents. Samuel Rogers lived for fifty years at No. 22, which looked out over ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... speculate in the dying why exclude the dead? the principle would serve the same faith in Christianity. The heart that can purchase the dying must be full of sad coldness, dragging the woes and pains of mortality down to a tortuous death. Save us from the feelings of speculation,—call them Christian, if you will,—that makes man look upon a dying mortal, valuing but the dollars and cents that are passing away with his life," she interrupts, giving vent to ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... this movement, sent the Buffs up to hold the Kotal, and camped at the foot with the rest of his force. The situation of the camp, which had been adopted with a view to the advance at daybreak, favored the approach of an enemy. The ground was broken and intersected by numerous small and tortuous nullahs, and strewn with rocks. Any other site would, however, have necessitated a long march the next day, and no ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... long enough to reach half-way across the yard, and it took time and patience to set a stitch. For very weariness the senora nodded over her labor, and made many little appeals to the saints that they might guide aright the tortuous course of ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... of the gold of human excellence in these good people," he said; "but the avenues to it are so tortuous and difficult, it seems hardly worth while seeking for. They are capable of the most stupendous sacrifices provided they are out of the common; but it is the regular system and uniformity of the natural and human law that they despise. But have ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... at one of the entrances to the great building, the girls went in. After following devious directions and tortuous ways, they found the perfumery counter, and as they had now sufficient command of the French language to make their wants accurately known, they inquired for the precious Cyclamen. The affable salesman was at first quite sure he could supply it, but ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... the city, however, the bay becomes very shallow, and the ship channel is both dangerous and tortuous. It is, moreover, obstructed by double rows of pine piles, and all sorts of ingenious torpedos, besides being commanded by carefully constructed forts, armed with heavy guns, and built either on ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... its tortuous pathway from right to left and from left to right, crushing and twisting the Titans of the woods from their trunks in its awful rush of destruction. The wheeling clouds and tumultuous atmosphere were lashed through and through with the fiery lightning, and masses ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... the season, and he adopted the weapon to which a person whose use of tobacco is only occasional resorts when every one else produces a cigar—he puffed the spasmodic, defensive cigarette. He accepted as to what he had done the postulate of the obscurely tortuous, abounding so in that sense that his critics were themselves bewildered. Some of them felt that they got, as the phrase is, little out of him—he rose in his good humour so much higher than the "rise" they had looked for—on his very first encounter with the world after his scrimmage with his ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... tortuous saving of floor creaks and the interminable opening and closing of a door that Carrie Samstag, the beaded bag in her hand, found herself face to face with herself in the mirror of ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... post unshaken, throwing his great strength on the sweep this way and that—endeavoring to keep it in the centre of the current—in the middle of the tortuous channel through which the boat was racing like mad. And the hind-sweepman, doing his part, responded, with all the weight of body and strength he possessed, to Bruce's low-voiced orders almost before they ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... Cleveland, until the construction of the Ohio canal, was without either of those two requisites for a manufacturing point. The Cuyahoga river, though giving abundant water power along a considerable portion of its course, enters Cleveland as a slow moving stream, winding its sluggish way in so tortuous a course that it seems reluctant to lose its identity in the waters of the lake. Water power, under such circumstances, is out of the question, and, as with no coal, and a rapidly decreasing supply of wood, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... too, dot the surface of the land, and tiny brooks go babbling across the fields. One stream, famous in Swedish history, bisects the district from north to south, passing through various lakes, and finally pours its waters into the Baltic. This tortuous river, called the Dalelf, is in some places broad and majestic, while in others it is narrow and goes foaming like a cataract over the rocks. Along the banks of this stream Gustavus traced his steps, ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... Sarmiento and Smyth's Channels, which form a comparatively safe and remarkably picturesque inside route for small steamers, about 338 m. in length, separate another series of archipelagoes from the mainland. These channels are in places narrow and tortuous. Among the islands which thickly fringe this part of the coast, the largest are Azopardo (lying within Baker Inlet), Prince Henry, Campana, Little Wellington, Great Wellington and Mornington (of the Wellington archipelago), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... three tiny donkeys, we followed a tortuous, foaming stream in the bottom of a splendid valley, ever going upward. At night we slept in the open, and next day crossed the mountain into a forest of oak and pine sprinkled with silver birches. Hundreds of wood-cutters passed us on the trail, each carrying a single log upon ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... bravely for a good half-hour. More witnesses were called; each answered with wonderful aptness, ease, and clearness; none were confused or timid; these were not men to be the playthings of others who made tortuous cross-questionings their trade. They, also, were Frenchmen; they knew how to speak. The judge and the Coutances lawyer continued their jokes and their squabblings. And still only the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... This street—now little frequented, hot in summer, cold in winter, dark in certain sections—is remarkable for the resonance of its little pebbly pavement, always clean and dry, for the narrowness of its tortuous road-way, for the peaceful stillness of its houses, which belong to the Old town and are over-topped by the ramparts. Houses three centuries old are still solid, though built of wood, and their divers aspects add to the originality which ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... stronger, and for my own sake as well as yours I should abstain from any action against him. Mind, at present I have only vague suspicions, but if those suspicions turn out true, it will be evident that your father has been pursuing a very tortuous policy, to put it no stronger, in order to gain possession of Fairclose. I cannot say definitely as yet what I shall do, but at present I incline to the opinion that I shall ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... They proceeded around the yard and hay-yard; but all was calm and lonely, and no sound saluted their ears but the shrill barking of some neighbouring cur, or the sluggish murmuring of the little tortuous river in the distance. Satisfied that "all was right," they again went in, replenished the expiring fire, and sat down to finish whatever still remained in ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... of the large towns, there is no ambition beyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore. There is no such thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility of name, up or down the whole tortuous length of the Ohio. As yet the land is not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep it to themselves or come away to spend it in European travel, or pause to waste it unrecognized on the ungrateful Atlantic seaboard. The only distinctions that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... tortuous paths, with prompters blind, we trust One Guide—to lead us forth and set us free! Give us, Lord God! all merciful and just! The FAITH that is but ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... and romantic thoughts, I lost count of streets and passages, turning this way, that and the other, through many narrow and tortuous byways and alleys, until I realized I was hopelessly lost. With my fair guide in front and my good sword by my side, lightly I recked of streets or houses. Yet I dared not forget I was on an errand for the Governor and must not ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... silk-cotton (bombax); but beneath, a perfect net-work of sipos or creepers and llianas choked up the path, and the hunters had to clear every step of the way with their machetes. Even the dogs, with all their eagerness, could make only a slow and tortuous advance among the thorny vines of the smilax, and the sharp spines that covered ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... for a minute or so to gaze with ever increasing interest at the unusual spectacle. Then as the three boys once more started to make their tortuous way along, avoiding all manner of obstacles, Max went ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... The only clear idea in the heads of the robed and wigged wiseacres was, that the case, Napier versus Napier, was a puzzle which no man could read or solve. It seemed fated to be as famous as the old Sphinx, the insoluble Moenander, or the tortuous labyrinth, or the intricate key of Hercules—ne Apollo quidem intelligat; and if it had not happened that Lord Kames suggested the possibility of getting an additional piece of evidence through the examination of the coffin wherein Mrs. Napier ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... sound of the wind was in the trees, waving their bare limbs as in fantastic grief against the dull clouds. There was no comfort in youth and health and prettiness of face and form; no pride in possession of lands and money, when a hot and tortuous thing like conscience was lying so ill-concealed behind the thin wall ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... the town must all of them be forced, and that at no distant date, either into religion or pauperism, just as small bodies floating in a pond are sucked into connection with one or other of the logs which lie among them. The shops in the one tortuous street block the footpaths in front of their doors with piles of empty packing-cases. The passenger is saluted, here by a buffet in the face from a waterproof coat suspended outside a draper's, there by a hot breath of whisky-laden air. Two shops out of every three are public-houses. ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... Peter Grimm came out of his tortuous reverie. He had reached a decision. And, having once made up his mind, he was not a man to delay ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the resemblances between them. Giant force was in both of them; both were enigmas; but the deeper we penetrate into Borrow, the more we like him; not so with the blue-eyed Dean. Borrow's depths are dark and tortuous, but never miasmic; and as we grope our way through them, we may stumble upon treasures, but never ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Huddled in gray annihilation, split, Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these, The anatomies of unknown winged things, And fishes which were isles of living scale, And serpents, bony chains, twisted around 305 The iron crags, or within heaps of dust To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags; and over these The jagged alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once 310 Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores, And weed-overgrown continents of earth, Increased ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... everywhere, and in almost every home were rude images smeared with the blood of sacrifice. The dreaded Long Juju was discovered in a gloomy defile about a mile from Arochuku. The path to it wound a tortuous way through dense bush, with others constantly leading off on both sides, evidently intended to puzzle the uninitiated. A watch-tower was passed where sentinels had been posted. At the bottom of the valley, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... this way, Choulette lighted one of those long and tortuous Italian cigars, which are pierced with a straw. He drew from it several puffs of infectious ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... carved doorways of Norwegian workmanship, of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, in which scrolls are entwined with contorted monsters, or, to quote Mr. Lovett's description, "dragons of hideous aspect and serpents of more than usually tortuous proclivities." The woodcut of a carved lintel conveys a fair idea of this work, and also of the old Juniper wood tankards of ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... about by himself; but there was a vast difference between going alone over ground which he had traversed several times with guides in the immediate neighbourhood of Chamouni, and being left in a region to which he had been conducted by paths so intricate, tortuous, and difficult, that the mere effort to trace back in memory even the last few miles of ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... probably sincere display of goodwill towards England, the apparent complacency with which the French nation acquiesced in his rule, and the outward prosperity accompanying it, did their natural work in conciliating approval, and in making men willing to forget the obscure and tortuous steps by which he had climbed to power. One day he and France were to pay for these things; but meanwhile he was a popular ruler, accepted and approved by the nation he governed, anxious for its prosperity, and earnest in keeping ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... being led by an old Jew, dressed in a Moslem robe and turban, through one of the most tortuous and crowded parts of Granada. It would seem that this Jew was known there, for his appearance, accompanied by a veiled woman, apparently caused no surprise to those followers of the Prophet that he met, some of whom, indeed, saluted him ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... round sleek stream of water slipped from the rock into the darkness, like a serpent from its hole. Above this stream a dark spot defied the torchlight, and John Rex felt his heart leap with one last desperate hope as he comprehended that close to him was one of those tortuous drives which the worm-like action of the sea bores in such caverns as that in which he found himself. The drive, opened first to the light of the day by the natural convulsion which had raised the mountain itself above ocean level, probably extended into the bowels of the cliff. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... is best made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it—except perhaps during the droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Certainly he helped to ruin Poland; and now his conduct at Vienna clogged the efforts of Morton Eden and Malmesbury to strengthen the Coalition against France. Eden complained that he behaved as an intriguing subaltern rather than as an ambassador; and rumour credibly ascribed his tortuous and exasperating conduct to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... was upon the fugitive, the contraband. Homesickness in spite of him, it might be. Oh, surely freedom was not bare to him as a winter-rifled tree? Not a bud of promise swelling along the dreary waste of tortuous branches? Possibly some ties had been ruptured in making his escape, which must be knit again before he could enter into the joy he had so fairly won. For you and me it would hardly be perfect happiness to feast at great men's tables, while the faces we love best, the dear, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... coves scarcely exists in the length and breadth of the State of Tennessee. The physical possibilities were arrayed against the project, so steep was the comblike summit on either side, so heavy and tortuous the outcropping rock that served as the bony structure of the great mountain mass. True, the river pierced it, the denudation of solid sandstone cliffs, a thousand feet in height, betokening the untiring energy of the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... funny. We had comfortably settled ourselves in the belief that the rapids had all been passed. Job and Gilbert had taken off their "shoe-packs" with the prospect of a good day's paddling, and here were the rapids again. Our course for four miles above this point was up a tortuous, rapid river. It seemed to flow from all points of the compass, and, in almost continuous rapids. They were not rough, but the currents were fearfully swift, and seemed to move in all directions. These are more difficult to ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... garden, where the soft perfume of china-tree blossoms filled his nostrils. Keeping on he passed many of the hacienda buildings, a sugar mill, a cotton factory, warehouses, stables with corrals, and entered a tortuous street between adobes, where he found the hacienda store. Here the administrador was watching the clerks who sold and the peons who bought. The latter were mostly women, barefooted and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten corn, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... step of the great, gentle creatures. So our travellers set out in high feather, and their entry into Poitiers, though not so magnificent as Alexander's into Babylon, was still in very fine style indeed. As they threaded their way through the narrow, tortuous streets of that ancient town, the noise of their horses' iron shoes ringing out against the rough stone pavement, and the clatter of their wheels drew many inmates of the houses they passed to the windows, and a little crowd collected around them as they stood waiting ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... conduct of state affairs. This man, who covered a temperament of terrific violence with a masque of Venetian dissimulation and the most icy reserve, met with no opposition, unless it were occasionally from Father Anselm, the confessor. He delighted in the refinements of intrigue, and in the most tortuous labyrinths of political manoeuvring, purely for their own sakes; and sometimes defeated his own purposes by mere superfluity of diplomatic subtlety; which hardly, however, won a momentary concern from him, in the pleasure he experienced at having found ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... us was the salient, studded with broken villages that became household names during the two epic Battles of Ypres. The brown soil was dirty, shell-ploughed, and altogether unlovely. Those strange markings, which from our height looked like the tortuous pathways of a serpent, were the trenches, old and new, front-line, support, and communication. Small saps projected from the long lines at every angle. So complicated was the jumble that the sinister region of No Man's Land, with ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in the town, save where some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices of house shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting drinking-songs. The streets were all white with ice; ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... endearments, to have been artlessly and gushingly glad to make their acquaintance. They had not in the least seen what was manner, the minimum of decent profession, and what the subtle resignation of old races who have known a long historical discipline and have conventional forms and tortuous channels and grimacing masks for their impulses—forms resembling singularly little the feelings themselves. Francie took people at their word when they told her that the whole maniere d'etre of her family inspired them with an irresistible sympathy: that was a speech of which Mme. de Cliche ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... was bolted and barred; but he supposed that the back door would be open. He never thought of the entrance to the garden by which Brian Luttrell had got into the house. He dashed down the staircase; he was nimbler and lighter-footed than Fane, who was immediately behind him, and he knew the tortuous ways and winding passages of the house, as Fane did not. He gained on his pursuer. Down the dark stone passages he fled: the door into the back premises stood wide open. There was a flight of steep stone steps, which led straight to a kitchen and thence ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... quickly and lightly, like as one does when following tortuous paths on a mountain slope. Nothing seems to weigh on one in those short, quick walks through the invigorating air of those heights, neither the body, nor the heart, nor the thoughts, nor even cares. On that day I felt nothing of all that crushes and tortures our life; I only ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... terror of pursuit, refused to record the physical exertions of that last bitter hour; his body labored mechanically, without cognizance of the strain put upon it. He had traversed fifteen miles of the blackest of forests and by way of the most tortuous of roads. A subconscious triumph now inspired him, born of the certainty that he had left his enemies far behind. It was this oddly jubilant spur that drove him safely, almost instinctively, into the heart of S——. The music of a band both attracted ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... rode down the tortuous street, fairly racing now, the blood whipped into her face, she caught a glimpse of a man standing by his horse, preparing to swing up into the saddle. His eyes followed her with a look in them easy to read and unpleasant; something too ardently admiring to be ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... in the proposal, and they accordingly proceeded to the cloisters of Saint George's Chapel, and threading some tortuous passages contrived among the canons' houses, passed through a small porch, guarded by a sentinel, and opening upon a precipitous and somewhat dangerous flight of steps, hewn out of the rock and leading ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was the safety-valve of his ill-temper, he set a black mark against Mr. Gallatin's name in these words: "Gallatin is a man of first-rate talents, conscious and vain of them, and mortified in his ambition, checked as it has been, after attaining the last step to the summit; timid in great perils, tortuous in his paths; born in Europe, disguising and yet betraying a superstitious prejudice of European superiority of intellect, and holding principles pliable to circumstances, occasionally mistaking the ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... my notions of the rule of right. The unanimous surprise of the company before whom I uttered these words soon convinced me that I had confounded mental with bodily obliquity, and that there was nothing tortuous about the old ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... best manner possible. In the first place, therefore, as the river Euphrates ran in a straight course through the city, she formed excavations at a distance above it, by which means its course became so tortuous that it three times passed a certain town of Assyria, called Ardericca; travelers from our sea,[10] in descending the Euphrates toward Babylon, three times arrive at that town in the course of three days. She also raised both banks of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... theories of Mr. Calhoun to the past, but no intelligent student of the institutions of the United States can afford to neglect his elaborate, conscientious, able discussions. Taken with Mr. Webster's works they exhibit the most complete examination, the most comprehensive analysis of the often tortuous and ill-defined line which separates the powers of the National Government from the functions which properly belong to the States. Mr. Calhoun's public service may be regarded as continuous from 1810, when he was elected to Congress at twenty- eight years of age, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... a neighbouring eucalyptus tree where it could be seen and hardly heard. The chief plumber found buckets and filled them with water, and the electrical expert rigged up a series of lanterns inside the shanty, even illuminating its tortuous staircase. There was much badinage, but as it was all in American, a language of which the twins were not yet able to apprehend the full flavour, they responded only with pleasant smiles. But their smiles were so pleasant and the family dimple ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... is usual with his tribe, had two entrances to his lodge, one a tortuous passage opening under water and leading inward about a foot, then slanting upward five or six feet, the other leading to the open air, its exit cleverly concealed by a tussock of coarse grass. Here he lived a life ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... field with a hollow where one could lie in shelter and see the whole of the bay and the eastern cliffs in one direction, and the Axe Valley in another, and here he sat for a while, smoking and reading and now and then trying to follow the tortuous windings of the Axe as it came down the marsh ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... do I thank thee for thy kindness, young sir; and gladly will I show thee in return the trick of yon chamber. If thou canst kindle a torch it will light us better, for the way thither is wondrous tortuous ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... line of priestesses, followed by hundreds of worshippers, had vanished through the tortuous and narrow entrance of the temple, and ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... hope they will be by "His own arm," (as dear J.T. said,) their presence will not be laid to my charge. Alas, that I am so often guilty of dallying with them! What wonder that the wilderness is so long and tortuous, when I reckon the molten calves, ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... treading the tortuous mazes of fashion, it was well for her to be guided and guarded by such an old campaigner as Lady Kirkbank, a woman who, in the language of her ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... in rear of the firing line, and so proceed to their appointed place. But on this occasion the German artillery happened to be "distributing coal" among the billets behind. This made it necessary to approach our new home by tortuous ways, and to take to subterranean courses at a very early stage of the journey. For more than two hours we toiled along a trench just wide enough to permit a man to wear his equipment, sometimes bent double to avoid the bullets of snipers, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... intention, adroitly concealed as it was. This made her uncomfortable, ashamed. And yet she was irritated with herself. Why should she particularly care what this woman thought in ways as subtle as this? Obvious kindness was her intention, not mental charity pursued into tortuous by-paths. And, besides, her frank, boyish cynicism, its wariness, revolted, even while she felt herself flattered at the prospect of the confidences that seemed to tremble on Mrs. Denby's lips. It wouldn't do to "let herself in for anything"; to "give herself away." No! She adopted ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Dolgelly; in others of dioryte, as in Santo Domingo; and in many parts of South America and Australia. In North Wales we have, firstly, an intrusion of diabase, occurring in great mountain masses; secondly, Irregular tortuous dykes of diabase; thirdly, Elvan dykes; and, lastly, auriferous quartz veins. In every region of intrusive plutonic rocks that has been thoroughly explored, a similar succession of events, culminating in the production of mineral veins, has been proved ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... distance from the "big bell," down a tortuous little lane, we come to what is undoubtedly a very ancient work of art. This is a pagoda, made of solid marble, and adorned with beautiful carvings all the way up to the top. To me this pagoda seemed to be of Chinese origin, but, though much speculation has been exercised in Seoul as to ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... where the rushing waters were beaten into spray, and where granite walls were shining like great sapphires reflected in the sun's bright rays, I wondered how many centuries it took to chisel that mighty water way fifty-two miles through this tortuous mountain. Perpendicular walls of fully 2000 feet are standing sentinels above this silvery water which goes roaring and ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... darkness. But he remembers it well, as well he may; and without going astray arrives at a spot he has still better reason to recall; that where, but a little more than twelve hours before, he supposes himself to have committed murder! Delayed along the narrow tortuous track, some time has elapsed since his entering among the sumacs. Only a short while, but long enough to give him a clearer light, for the day has meanwhile dawned, and the place is less shadowed, for it is an open spot where ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... established him in the novel-writing habit, he thereafter had leisure to polish and expand his faculty to the utmost. No talent of his was folded up in a napkin: he did his best and utmost with all he had. Whereas the path of genius is commonly tortuous and hard-beset: and while we are always saying of Shakespeare, or Thackeray, or Shelley, or Keats, or Poe, "What wonders they would have done had life been longer or fate kinder to them!"—of Bulwer we say, "No help was wanting ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Bruges at least as long as we had stayed in Ghent, and what moments I could spare from the obsession of Ghent I spent in contemplating the Belfry. Very soon it was time to go back to the Convent. The way to the Convent was through many tortuous streets, but I was going in the right direction, accompanied by a kind Flamand and her husband, when at the turn by the canal bridge I was nearly run over by one of our own ambulance cars. It was Bert's car, and he was driving with fury and perturbation away ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... have seen it ranked only as a third-rate seaport. Its streets tortuous and narrow, with pavements in the middle, skirted by mud or dirt as the season happened. The sidewalks rough with sharp-pointed stones, that made it misery to walk upon them. I have seen houses, with little ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... ceased, because they now turned from the broad highway into a narrower road, on which they traveled for a long time in silence on account of its tortuous course, and because in some places the snow formed drifts difficult to traverse. In the spring or summer, on rainy days, this road ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... strove to obey the latter's directions implicitly. Now with all his strength he heaved upon his sweep; now he backed water violently; at no time did he trust himself to look at the cliffs which were scudding past, nor to contemplate the tortuous turns in the gorge ahead. That would have been too much for him. Even when his clumsy oar all but grazed a bastion, or when a jagged promontory seemed about to smash his craft, he refused to cease his frantic labors or to more than lift his eyes. He saw that Rouletta Kirby was very ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... patriotism of the French people with the following exhortation: "Let us show to Europe that we understand our own resources; let us immediately take the broad road to our liberation instead of dragging ourselves along the tortuous and obscure paths of fragmentary loans." It concluded by recommending an issue of paper money carefully guarded, to the full amount of four hundred million livres, and the argument was pursued until the objection to smaller notes faded from view. ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... crystal rivulets, every few hundred yards threading the road, and going to swell the wider streams which every mile or two cross the traveller's way, laving his horse's sides with refreshing coolness, as they hurry on in their tortuous course from the mountain heights to the sea. Farther west the mountains and hills assume gentler and more rounded forms, particularly in the parish of St. Anne, the Garden of Jamaica. I regret that I know only ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... omnipresent. It is he who writes nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific or skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For the man who thinks backwards ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... proved to be worthier of trust than her beautiful namesake of the days of Ulysses, and she not only made her way safely out through the tortuous channel among the reefs, but led the yacht with the boys on board to the open ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... then the beautiful Bermudas rose out of the sea, we entered the tortuous channel, steamed hither and thither among the bright summer islands, and rested at last under the flag of England and were welcome. We were not a nightmare here, where were civilization and intelligence ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... business, they cordially offered to conduct us through the water and saw-grass to the camp. The wading was annoying and, to me, difficult; but at length we secured dry footing in the jungle on the island, and after a tortuous way through the tangled vegetation, which walled in the camp from the prairie, we entered the large clearing and the collection of lodges where the Indians were. These lodges, placed very close together and seemingly without order, were almost all made of white cotton cloths, which were each ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... up the Kongone branch it was found that, by keeping well in the bends, which the current had worn deep, shoals were easily avoided. The first twenty miles are straight and deep; then a small and rather tortuous natural canal leads off to the right, and, after about five miles, during which the paddles almost touch the floating grass of the sides, ends in the broad Zambesi. The rest of the Kongone branch comes out of the main stream considerably ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... speak to Val Beverley and to learn what had taken place during her interview with Inspector Aylesbury, but Harley led the way toward the tower wing, and by a tortuous path through the rhododendrons we finally came out on the northeast front and in sight of ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... solved the mystery. A buttress of rock, which in the distance looked like a part of the mass, screened the entrance to a narrow waterway. Down this waterway the cacique navigated the canoe. It ran in tortuous course between rocks so high that at times we could see nothing save a strip of purple sky, studded with stars. Here and there the channel widened out, and we caught a glimpse of the sun; and at an immeasurable height above us towered the nevados ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... door revealed a tortuous stairway at the back of the house, descending mysteriously into cavernous gloom. "Let's go down here," she continued. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... She had changed her course. The boat seemed to be drawing away from him! His heart sank, but almost at once, the boat turned again, following the tortuous channel of ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... Sutormann Pass (2,700 feet) was reached in about four hours, and now the deep blue Adria was spread out before us, and our tortuous descent commenced. Commanding the pass still stands a mighty but much-battered fortress, taken by the gallant Montenegrins in that memorable battle. But nowhere could the historical old town and fortress of Bar, or Antivari, be seen. In fact, not till we were within a few hundred yards of the ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... Tortuous little streets lead through the town of Coucy into a great green space which commands the castle. It is approached from the new and rather pretentious lodge in which the keeper of the castle now resides, through one of the finest and loftiest ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... weather had changed again, and a blinding snowstorm, accompanied by a buffeting gale from the northwest, made it almost impossible to see a path and to keep it. In the central part of the town some tentative efforts had been made to open walks, but these were apparent only as slight and tortuous depressions in the depths of snow. In the outskirts, the unfortunate pedestrian had to wade to ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... went toward the pits beneath the structure, and at a safe distance behind I followed the flicker of their torch. The way led through a maze of tortuous corridors, unlighted save for the wavering light they carried. We had gone perhaps a hundred yards when the party turned abruptly through a doorway at their right. I hastened on as rapidly as I dared ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was struck by the expression of Derues' countenance and by this half answer, which appeared to hide a mystery and to aim at diverting attention by offering a bait to curiosity. He might have stopped Derues at the moment when he sought to plunge into a tortuous argument, and compelled him to answer with the same clearness and decision which distinguished Monsieur de Lamotte's question; but he reflected that the latter's inquiries, unforeseen, hasty, and passionate, were perhaps more likely ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... keep out of your sight. My deformed face and her fatal beauty shall hunt you through the world. The terrible secret of your dishonour, and of the atrocity by which you avenged it, shall ooze out through strange channels, in vague shapes, by tortuous intangible processes; ever changing in the manner of its exposure, never remediable by your own resistance, and always directed to the same end—your isolation as a marked man, in every fresh sphere, among every new community ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Sechard meant to sell dear; David, of course, to buy cheap; his son, therefore, was an antagonist, and it was his duty to get the better of him. The transformation of sentiment into self-seeking, ordinarily slow, tortuous, and veiled by hypocrisy in better educated people, was swift and direct in the old "bear," who demonstrated the superiority of shrewd tipple-ography over ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... try the patience of a better man. Take an instance. Unable one morning to find my own horse, I saddled his and started him off, so as not to waste time, with his spare animal and the three mules. It so happened that our line of march was rather tortuous, owing to some hills we had to round. Still, as there were high mountains in the distance which we were making for, it seemed impossible that anyone could miss his way. It was twenty minutes, perhaps, before I ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... suddenly sprung up in opposition to the ease with which foreigners secured suffrage and office; and, although it shrewdly avoided nominations for governor and President, it demoralised both parties by the strange and tortuous manoeuvres that had ended in the election of a mayor of New York in the preceding spring. It operated, for the most part, in that city, but its sympathisers covered the whole State. Then, there was the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... and daisies. Tempered and secluded from the sun's rays by its lofty shadows, the delicious obscurity of the canyon was in sharp contrast to the fiery mountain trail that in the full glare of the noonday sky made its tortuous way down the hillside, like a stream of lava, to plunge suddenly into the valley and extinguish itself in its coolness as in a lake. The heavy odors of wild honeysuckle, syringa, and ceanothus that hung over it were lightened and freshened ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... inspiration could have impelled Jack to apply the adjective "wild" to that ill-behaved and disreputable river which, tipsily bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far Northwest, totters, reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles and which, encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved Mississippi at Alton, and forcing its company upon this splendid river (as if some drunken fellow should lock arms with a dignified pedestrian), contaminates it all ...
— The Denver Express - From "Belgravia" for January, 1884 • A. A. Hayes
... nothing of the spray which was flung up in clouds from the thundering masses of yellow waves dashing at the foot of the cliffs below. Sir Henry Durwood, at any rate, was very glad when his companion turned away from the cliffs into one of the narrow tortuous streets running off the ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... Dick, will you tell me what I do know, if I do not read every turn and trick of their tortuous nature? They are occasionally hard to decipher when they're displeased. It's very big ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, formerly one of the darkest and most tortuous of the streets about the Hotel de Ville, zigzagged round the little gardens of the Paris Prefecture, and ended at the Rue Martroi, exactly at the angle of an old wall now pulled down. Here stood the turnstile to which the ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... never left the patient till the surgeon came with all the instruments required; amongst the rest, with a big, tortuous pair of nippers, with which he could reach the glottis, and snip it. But they consulted, and thought it wiser to continue the surer method; and so a little tube was neatly inserted into Dick's windpipe, and ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... tortuous, and in some places it is very narrow; and the road runs along through it like a white thread, suspended, as it were, half way between the lofty summits of the mountains and the roaring torrent of the Rhone ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... but Thalassa knew the passage, and steered the ketch through a tortuous channel above sunken needle-pointed rocks to a little sheltered harbour inshore. Here they made the ketch fast, and landed on a beach of volcanic violet, where they sometimes sank knee deep into sulphuric water, and felt squirming sea things squelch beneath their tread. Above this margin of violet-black ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... another chamber almost as large as the one which we occupy; while beyond that again there are other passages and chambers—seven of the latter in all—communicating with each other, and ending in a long, tortuous cleft forming a passage which leads out there, behind those bushes. But it is the last chamber of all, the one nearest in this direction, that is the marvel. Unlike the others—all rock chambers—the one about which I am now speaking is a great hollow in what appears to be a 'fault' of ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... of Ireland had been only one of many gratifications which had been bestowed upon Monk, when he was created Duke of Albemarle, in recognition of the substantial benefits to the King which had resulted, when the long-drawn disguises of his tortuous and self-interested policy had gradually unmasked themselves. As general over the Irish army under the Cromwellian administration, he had contrived to secure an estate in Ireland worth some four thousand a year, and it was of the ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... It was a tortuous path and one in which the old man himself, knowing, as he thought he did, every foot of the country around, could easily have been lost. Above, through the trees, the moon shone dimly, and no path could be seen under foot. But Jack Bracken ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... he discovered that he was lost. Then came the usual confusion of mind and the hurry to get somewhere. Mexico was anxious to redeem the situation, twisting with alacrity along the tortuous labyrinths of the jungle. At the moment his master's sureness of the route had failed his horse had divined the fact. There were no hills now that they could climb to obtain a view of the country. They came upon a few, but ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... favor with the Governor Accien or Baghisian, who had intrusted to him, him and his family, the ward of three of the towers and gates of the city. Emir-Feir, whether from religious remorse or on promise of a rich recompense, had, after the ambiguous and tortuous conversations which usually precede treason, made an offer to Bohemond to open to him, and, through him, to the crusaders, the entrance into Antioch. Bohemond, in covert terms, informed the chiefs, his comrades, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and passages are naturally very tortuous. A large proportion of these ways are known only to expert pilots among the fishermen, and not infrequently Selenites are lost for ever in their labyrinths. In their remoter recesses, I am told, strange creatures lurk, some ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... xxvii., it is especially ver. 1 which attracts our attention: "In that day the Lord with His sword, hard, great, and strong, shall visit the leviathan, the tortuous serpent, and killeth the dragon that is in ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... was thrown on the tortuous course of Russian diplomacy by a speech of Count Eugen Zichy to the Hungarian Delegations about a year later. He made the startling declaration that in the summer of 1885 Russia concluded a treaty with Montenegro ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the tortuous road to the western crest. His long legs hadn't taken him far from the car when he heard ...
— The Invaders • Benjamin Ferris
... room, with a large window facing the west. This contains some finely carved panelling in a good state of preservation, and was evidently the chief room of the house. From it a passage extends to the back buildings. A narrow and particularly tortuous staircase leads from the front room to the upper rooms at the back of the house, to which access cannot be gained by the main stairs. On passing through the hall, the visitor finds himself in a large kitchen, where provision is made for an exceptionally big fireplace. ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... haunted windows peering out upon the high heavens, stone-fretted ceilings that are lost in a magic mist. By a sort of diabolic modulation the artist conducts our eye from these dizzy angles and granitic convolutions down tortuous and tumultuous staircases that seemingly wind about the axis of eternity. To traverse them would demand an eternity and the nerves of a madman. Lower barbaric devices reveal this artist's temperament. He is said to have executed the prison set "during the delirium of fever." This is of the same ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... enough. The girl, though not nearly as active under the increased pull of gravity as a person of Earth might be, was yet more agile than the Rogans. And she was the faster mover in this tortuous, snail-like race. While the Rogan leader was still several feet away, she ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst |
