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More "Arid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Julia returned to England he broke ground to his mother on the subject of her making the mistress of Broadwood understand that she and the girls now regarded their occupancy of that estate as absolutely over. He had already, several weeks before, picked a little at the arid tract of that indicated surrender, but in the interval the soil appeared to have formed again to a considerable thickness. It was disagreeable to him to call his parent's attention to the becoming course, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... superstitious age— May He be praised that sent the healthful tempest And scatter'd all these pestilential vapours! But that we owed them all to yonder Harlot Throned on the seven hills with her cup of gold, I will as soon believe, with kind Sir Roger, That old Moll White took wing with cat arid broomstick, And raised the last night's ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... praises. After speaking of what nature really does for it in the way of vegetation and fruits, he continues: "An admirable terrace-cultivation, where art and industry have combined to overcome the obstacles of nature, has everywhere converted the slopes, naturally sterile and arid, into a succession of gardens, loaded with the choicest vegetable productions. A delicious climate there brings the finest fruits to maturity; the grapes hang in festoons from tree to tree; the song of the nightingale is heard in every grove; all nature seems ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Alarcon was sent to sail up the Sea of Cortes (now the Gulf of California) to keep in touch with the land expedition, and Melchior Diaz, of that sea party, forced his way up what is now the Colorado River to the arid sands of the Colorado Desert in Southern California, before death and disaster ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... light in which he is estimated by most modern critics, as the explicit champion of rationalism and nothing more. For he is connected with another idea, the course of which is as the course of that great river of his native Arcadia which, springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers strength and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of Olympia and the light ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... case of glaciation of the Lake copper deposits, denudation follows close on the heels of alteration, and the surface is so rapidly removed that we may have the primary ore practically at the surface. Flat, arid regions present the other extreme, for denudation is much slower, and conditions are most perfect for deep penetration of oxidizing agencies, and the consequent alteration and concentration of ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... coast, no smoke arose in the distance to indicate that Bennet Islet was inhabited. But William Guy had not found any trace of human beings there, and what I saw of the islet answered to the description given by Arthur Pym. It rose upon a rocky base of about a league in circumference, and was so arid that no vegetation existed ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... women without culture or knowledge of literature or of music have succeeded a former generation who were passionately interested in these things, an interest which extended down even to the wayside cabin. The loss of these elevating influences in Irish society probably accounts for much of the arid nature of Irish controversies, while the reaction against their suppression has given rise to those displays of rhetorical patriotism for which the Irish language has found the expressive term raimeis, and which (thanks largely to the Gaelic movement) ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... sufficient volume to support the Nile throughout its entire course of thirty degrees of latitude. Thus the parent stream, fed by never-failing reservoirs, supplied by the ten months' rainfall of the equator, rolls steadily on its way through arid sands and burning deserts until it reaches the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... you, Madam, of the heroine of this strange love-story?" he asked with a touch of bitterness in his voice. "Does it not strike you that even in this arid world of much deception, there may be after all such a thing as innocence?—such a treasure as true and trusting love? Were not the eyes of this girl Gloria, when lifted to your face, something like the eyes of a child who has just said its ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... First, on account of its cold and bracing climate; second, because, having never been a slave state, the white population there are more thrifty and industrious, and of course the influence of such a community was better adapted to form thrift arid industry in ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... convicted of partiality, we should be left with little to instruct subsequent ages beyond the dry records of men such as the laborious, the useful, though somewhat over-credulous Clinton, or the learned but arid Marquardt, whose "massive scholarship" Mr. Gooch dismisses somewhat summarily in a single line. Such writers are not historians, but rather compilers of records, upon the foundations of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 of soda ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... reached the zone of arid compliment, tended to languish. They had now reached Learning's side of the trolley-tracks, and rills in the great morning flood of the scholastic life were beginning to gather about them and to unite in a rolling stream ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... tame in the extreme; the land dropped gently to scarcely more than half its depth, with barely a tree visible on its surface; and at the foot of the hill, stretched out as far as the eye could reach, was a howling, blank-looking desert, all hot and arid, and very wretched to look upon. It was the more disappointing, as the Somali had pictured this to me as a land of promise, literally flowing with milk and honey, where, they said, I should see boundless prairies of grass, large roomy trees, beautiful valleys with deep brooks running down them, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... variety of shrubs and small plants, and yielded a delightful harvest to the botanists; but to the herdsmen and cultivator it promised nothing: not a blade of grass, nor a square yard of soil from which the seed delivered to it could be expected back, was perceivable by the eye in its course over these arid plains. ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... too—the great barren, undulating deserts that roll up to the foot of the Urals, Caucasus, Altai, Yablonoi, and Stanovoi Mountains—and the Tundras along the shores of the Arctic Ocean—dreary swamps in summer and ice-covered wastes in winter. Here, at night, they wander over the rough, stony, arid ground, picking their way surreptitiously through the scant vegetation, and avoiding all frequented localities; pausing, every now and then, to slake their thirst in deep sunk wells, or to listen for ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... his long habit of sojourning there had obtained. The clatter of English tongues at table d'hote began to weary him; the heated controversy which waged over the gambling-tables of the little principality across the bay left him arid and tired; and the gossip of the place struck him as even more tedious and unprofitable than of old. He could no longer feign a decent interest in the flirtations of the three Miss Smiths, as they were recounted to him ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... from thy lofty height, thy words shall fall Upon their spirits like bright cataracts That front a sunrise; thou shalt hear them call Amid their endless waste of arid facts, As wearily they plod their way along, Upon the rhythmic zephyrs of ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... emerge from the fissures of the rock. A few plants or vines creep over the surface of that grey and parched soil; in the distance, is occasionally seen a grove of olive-trees, casting a shade over the arid side of the mountain—the mouldering walls and towers of the city appearing from afar on the summit of Mount Sion. Such is the general character of the country. The sky is ever pure, bright, and cloudless; never does even the slightest film of mist obscure the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... of desolate space—across the plains, through North-eastern Kansas and into Nebraska, up the valley of the Platte, across the Great Plateau, into the foothills and over the summit of the Rockies, into the arid Great Basin, over the Wahsatch range, into the valley of Great Salt Lake, through the terrible alkali deserts of Nevada, through the parched Sink of the Carson River, over the snowy Sierras, and into the Sacramento Valley—the ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... began fresh and cool, burned, that year, into a scorching heat, until the torrid skies bent in a blue arch of arid cruelty and the ridges stood ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... bid adieu wholly to the world, that she might give herself all to God and live only by His love." To mark her entire separation from the world, she assumed a peculiarly grave style of dress, dismissed her servants, gave up her house, and returned to her father's, where free from all care arid responsibility, she found herself as she desired, alone with God alone. She chose an apartment in the upper story as the most retired, and between this and the adjoining oratory, she passed most of her time in prayer. She was never ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... of pure affection bloomed in the arid desert of Tommy's existence for all that. In the preceding fall a new family had come to Arundel and moved into the tiny house next to the Puffers'. It was a small, dingy house, just like the others, but before long a great change ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma; both declared in favor of legislation against monopolies and trusts; both favored liberal pensions, the construction of an Isthmian canal, irrigation of arid lands, reduction of war taxes and protection of American workmen against cheap foreign labor. Yet it does not by any means follow that a majority of the people voting really endorsed even these planks which were ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... wolf does not curry favor with the sheep-dog when it hungers for a lamb. Such was her creed. In brief, Sylvia had received her training in none of the social schools. She was a daughter of the desert—a bit of that jetsam which the Rio Grande leaves upon its arid banks as it journeys stealthily ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... lonely mountains, honey-combed with dens and caves; arid valleys and barren hills; dreary deserts that glistened under the blinding glare of the sun that poured its heat upon them steadily all the year; strange, grotesque rocks and peaks that assumed all sorts of fantastic shapes ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... here," he said, in an arid voice, and held wide the door of the room where he and Rudyard had settled the first chapter of the future and closed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... several, to make navigation more easy. They did the same on several other rivers,—nor knew that they were destroying the last remaining vestige of a great people's civilization,—for these dams had been used to save the water and distribute it into the numerous canals, which covered the arid country with their fertilizing network. They may have been told what travellers are told in our own days by the Arabs—that these dams had been constructed once upon a time by Nimrod, the Hunter-King. For some of them remain even still, showing ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... By the shades of Knickerbocker's History of New York I seem now to have gotten at the beginning; but patience, the sun is no detail out in the arid country. It does more things than blister your nose. It is the despair of the painter as it colors the minarets of the Bad Lands which abound around Adobe, and it dries up the company gardens if they don't watch the acequias mighty sharp. To one just out of ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... food as the following: "God—a being who supports all the world at one time;" "Preestablished harmony—the eternal union of things;" "Ratio sufficiens—the sufficient ground;" with many other arid definitions of the same class. One preacher, in explaining the eighth chapter of Matthew, thought it necessary, when noticing the fact of Jesus descending the mountain, to define the term mountain ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... well-budded 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... atmosphere capable of absorbing heat at an elevation of 190 miles. The probable range of temperature on the moon was discussed by Professor Very in 1898.[953] He concluded it to be very wide. Hotter than boiling water under the sun's vertical rays, the arid surface of our dependent globe must, he found, cool in the 14-day lunar night to about the temperature ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... 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 been privy to the murder ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... like a locomotive oil can, designed to poke in out-of-the-way places. With this device she was able to get through my beard and find my mouth. As she gently tipped it, the goodly nectar trickled upon my desert tongue, to be quickly evaporated in that arid area before it reached far along the parched wastes. I wanted to swim in it, but these hospitals provide poor ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... equally against her conscience, the poor old woman took it; but, by so doing, ere long recovered health and spirits, famous appetite, and glad again to see her friends; and having by this experience broken the ice of arid abstinence, never afterwards kept ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... summer walk, The withered tufts of asters nod; And trembles on its arid stalk The hoar plume of the golden-rod. And on a ground of sombre fir, And azure-studded juniper, The silver birch its buds of purple shows, And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild-rose! Last Walk in ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... fields with Di,— Fields fresh with clover and with rye; They now seem arid: Then Di was fair and single; how Unfair it seems on me, for now ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... cry of the fisherman, and the "cockler's" whistle, plying his scanty trade among the shoals and sandbanks about the coast. It is scarcely possible to conceive a situation more desolate and uninviting. Hills of arid sand skirting the beach, without vegetation or enclosure, except where the withered bent and little golden-starred stone-crop gave their own wild and peculiar aspect to the scene. The shore is flat ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... subject, of literary as well as philosophic interest, which he was minded to treat before turning his back finally upon the arid wastes of theory;—the subject of realism versus idealism, or, as he decided to phrase it, of naive and sentimental poetry. This essay, published in 1796, was briefly analyzed in the last chapter. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... traveller begins to observe the effect of liberal agriculture on the sandy soil, while, farther on toward the heart of the region, every thing is still bare and uncultivated. As far as the eye can penetrate, nothing is to be seen in that quarter but arid plains thinly covered with stunted vegetation, while the horizon is bounded by that blue and cloudy line which always marks the limit of a desert. Yet, as we journey over these vast spaces, it is impossible ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... grasp of the hand, and a few words of condolence, neither interrupted the calm depression rather than grief in which I found myself. When I returned home, there was with my aunt a married sister, whom I had never seen before. Up to this time she had shown an arid despair, and been regardless of everything about her; but now she was in tears. I left them together, and wandered for hours up and down the lonely playground of my childhood, thinking of many things—most of all, how strange it was that, if there ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... so gray and wasted. The few books she owned and loved had generally lain unopened, it is true, upon her bedroom table, and she held herself as having far too little learning to be a worthy companion for Ivory Boynton; but all the beauty and cheer a comfort that could ever be pressed into the arid life of the Baxter household had come from Waitstill's heart, and that heart had grown in warmth and plenty year ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 'You were expected, you perceive,' he said. A delightful sense of well-being came into my mind. I sat down in the sweetness of ease after fatigue, of refreshment after weariness, of pleasant sounds and sights after the arid way. I said to myself that my past experiences had been a mistake, that this was where I ought to have come from the first, that life here would be happy, and that all intruding thoughts must soon vanish and ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... one of the book auctions yielded up a copy of the "Complete Works of Miss Mitford." You perhaps can imagine how a city boy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each year at the most on the arid New Jersey seacoast, fell upon "Our Village." It became an incentive for long walks, in the hope of finding some country lanes and something resembling the English primroses. I read and reread "Our Village" until I could close my eyes at any time and see the little world in which Miss ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... may be roughly characterized as a vast sandy plain, arid in the extreme; or rather as two such plains, separated by a chain of mountains running northwest and southeast. In the southern part of the reservation this mountain range is known as the Choiskai ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... employ 3,000. Surely it will have place for one more, then! I am impressed with its grandeur as it rises, red-bricked, with proud, straight towers toward its centre—impressed and frightened by its insistent call as it rattles and hums to me across the one-sixteenth of a mile of arid sand track. At one side Christianity and doctrine have constructed a church: a second one is building. On the other side, at a little distance, lies Granton, second largest mill. All this I take in as I make my way Excelsiorward. Between me and the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... Lifter was with you still. But I am glad that he has left you. We shall fish arid talk here. Has The Lifter told you anything about the history ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... country, and make a short cut across to the 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 country, which rolled monotonously back from the river border with a steadily increasing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the talkers of the Ghetto, earnest as their forefathers before the great folios of the Talmud, made an Oriental oasis amid the simoom whirl of the Occident. And the Heathen Journalist who had discovered it felt, as so often before, that here alone in this arid, mushroom New York was antiquity, was restfulness, was romanticism; here was the Latin Quarter of the city ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... by them... For almost five centuries it was appealed to as the decisive authority on behalf of the people... To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, constitute the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind. Her Bacons arid Shakspeares, her Miltons and Newtons, with all the truth which they have revealed, and all the generous virtues which they have inspired, are of inferior value when compared with the subjection of men and their rulers to the principles of justice; if, indeed, it be ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... 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 ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... 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 ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... and law, and a striking example of the marvellous power which plants, like animals, possess, of adapting themselves to the local peculiarities of their habitat, whether in the fertile shades of the luxuriant 'monte' or on the arid, parched-up plains of ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... gratitude, wandering about Italy, in a blind quest of the girl who had been snatched away from him. He thought of the girl herself, and the love that not all Mrs. Burgoyne's jealous anguish had been able to deny. And then his mind returned to Mrs. Burgoyne, and the arid ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to twelve or thirteen hundred. This weak army was destitute of commissariat and the engines necessary for such a siege. Before long it was a prey to the horrors of thirst. "The neighborhood of Jerusalem," says William of Tyre, "is arid; and it is only at a considerable distance that there are to be found rivulets, fountains, or wells of fresh water. Even these springs had been filled up by the enemy a little before the arrival of our troops. The crusaders issued ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... which and the Cave of the Smell his existence alternated with the monotony of a pendulum—was situated midway on the block on the north side of the street. It boasted a front yard fenced off from the sidewalk with a rusty railing: a plot of arid earth scantily tufted with grass, suggesting that stage of baldness which finally precedes complete nudity. Behind this, the moat-like area was spanned to the front door by a ragged stoop of brownstone. The four-story facade ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... broke the crests of the long Pacific swell that lazily rose and fell on the beach, which only a slanting copse of scrub-oak and willow hid from the cottage. Nevertheless, she knew this league-long strip of shining sand much better, it is to be feared, than the scanty flower-garden, arid and stunted by its contiguity. It had been her playground when she first came there, a motherless girl of twelve, and she had helped her father gather its scattered driftwood—as the fortunes of the Millers were not above ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... coming brings such glad refreshment As May rain o'er the pasture flings! Lifted from passion's melancholy The life breaks forth in fairer flower, The soul receives a new enrichment— Fruition sweet and full of power. But when on later altars arid It downward sweeps, about us flows— Love leaves behind such deathly traces As Autumn tempests where it blows To strip the woods with ruthless hand, And turn to soggy waste ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... than on the arid wastes of the Causse. There were trees, and birds in the trees, moving faintly. The great moon, which had now risen, shone also upon scanty grass and (from time to time) upon the trickle of water passing in runnels ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... the post-office and despatched a telegram. Then, partially eased, she returned to the arid and ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... "Out of 360 meditations made by a priest during the year, 300 of them are arid." We have the testimony of Abbe d'Astros on the efficacy of prayers committed to memory, who was in prison for three years under the first empire and without any books. "I knew the psalms by heart and, thanks to this converse ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in the eastern portions. From latitude forty-three to fifty, embracing portions of Kief, the Caucasus, and other southern possessions of the empire, the winters are comparatively temperate, and the summers warm and long; but here, again, a great portion of this country consists of mountains, arid plains, and deserts, and it is subject to extreme and terrible droughts. Here is a vast extent of territory, comprising about one hundred and sixty-five degrees of longitude and thirty-five of latitude, which contains within its limits a greater variety ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... 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." ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lamented my former ungenerous suspicions; but he had wronged us, still—I hoped, I trusted that he had. He had not attempted to cheek the course of our love by actually damming up the streams in their passage, but he had passively watched the two currents wandering through life's arid wilderness, declining to clear away the obstructions that divided them, and secretly hoping that both would lose themselves in the sand before they could be joined in one. And meantime he had been quietly ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... doors. The women, in twos and threes, bareheaded and in white aprons, gossiped in the alley between the blocks. Men, having a rest between drinks, sat on their heels and talked. The place smelled stale; the slate roofs glistered in the arid heat. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... shadow of a thorn bush, and the two mites, tired with play, cuddled themselves by her side, unreproved. She looked tenderly, delectably feminine. The moon shone full upon her face; but there are no ugly lines to hide, for there are no parched and arid places in her nature. Dews of sympathy, sweet spring floods of love and compassion, have kept all fresh, serene, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... miraculous rod that smote his petrified affections, and a wellspring of tenderness gushed forth, freshening, softening, and clothing with verdure and bloom his arid, sterile, stony temperament. Long-buried dreams of his boyhood stirred in their chilly graves and flitted dimly before him, and a hope that had slumbered so soundly he had utterly ignored its memory, started up, eager and starry-eyed, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... supposed that we were making for the actual summit; but on the second terrace my captress bore away to the left and led us by a track that slanted across the northern shoulder of the ridge. A sentry started to his feet and stepped from behind a clump of arid sage-coloured bushes, stood for a moment with the sun glinting on his gun-barrel, and at a sign from the girl dropped back upon his post. Just then, or a moment later, my ears caught the jigging notes of a flute; whereby I knew Mr. Badcock to be close at hand, for it was discoursing the ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... down into the village and could see its extent, precisely how it was placed in the Sahara, in what relation exactly it stood to the mountain ranges, to the palm groves and the arid, sunburnt tracts, where its life centred and where it tailed away into suburban edges not unlike the ragged edges of worn garments, where it was idle and frivolous, where busy and sedulous. She realised for the first time ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... mirage. As it fades away, we discern an arid waste. War broke out between France and Austria within two months of this sanguine utterance. It soon embroiled France and England in mortal strife. All hope of retrenchment and Reform was crushed. The National Debt rose by leaps and bounds, and the Sinking Fund proved to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... a frightful orgy, and now arid as the Sahara desert and quite as flat and dreary, the bachelor dinner was in truth more often than not, a ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... to himself he was bound to answer "Yes." He lived on the whole a Christian life, prayed but badly, but at any rate prayed without ceasing; only—only—Alas! How worm-eaten, how arid were the poor recesses of his soul! He wondered, with anguish, whether they would not end like the Manor in Edgar Poe's tale, by crumbling suddenly, one fatal day, into the dark waters of the pool of sin which was undermining ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the water. The moment he suspends the straggle or relaxes his watchfulness, the desert reclaims them and overwhelms them with sterility. Sit was the spirit of the mountain, stone and sand, the red and arid ground as distinguished from the moist black soil of the valley. On the body of a lion or of a dog he bore a fantastic head with a slender curved snout, upright and square-cut ears; his cloven tail rose stiffly behind him, springing from his loins like a fork. He also assumed a human form, or retained ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... thing stirred at the far end of Au Fer reef. A scorched and weakened steer came on through salt pools to stagger and fall. Presently another, and then a slow line of them. They crossed the higher ridge to huddle about a sink that might have made them remember the dry drinking holes of their arid home plains. Tired, gaunt cattle mooing lonesomely, when the man came about them to dig with his bloody fingers in ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... that he would duplicate this bathroom in his own residence as soon as he had his homestead going. Wallie's knowledge of Wyoming was gathered chiefly from an atlas he had borrowed from Mr. Cone. The atlas stated briefly that it contained 97,890 square miles, mostly arid, and a population of 92,531. It gave the impression that the editors themselves were hazy on Wyoming, which very likely was the truth, since it had been published in Mr. Cone's childhood when ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... his livelihood—and a good one, too—as publisher of the Social Era, a sprightly weekly chronicle of happenings in fashionable society, would have appeared anomalous in any but a man gifted in the Greek sophistries and their modern innumerable and arid offshoots. Haynerd was a laughing Democritus, an easy-going, even-tempered fellow, doomed to be loved, and by the same graces thoroughly cheated by the world in general. He had in his rapid career of some thirty-five ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... picture of the huge river of labor that winds its course through arid plains of want and poverty and starvation, which it is capable of fertilising and converting into a modern Paradise? True that on its banks and in its immediate neighbourhood are strips of luxuriant vegetation. But those only show up in painful relief the utter barrenness of ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... arid parts of Australia, where rain rarely occurs, the blacks have acquired much out-of-the-way knowledge on the means of obtaining water. White men, unable to read the secret signs of its existence, have perished in all the agonies of thirst ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... I have special talent for sustaining and enlivening a conversation; there is something in that, I admit, but to do her justice, I must say that in this respect Madame de Maintenon is without a rival. She has quite a wealth of invention; the most arid subject in her hands becomes attractive; while for transitions, her skill is unequalled. Far simpler than myself, she gauges her whole audience with a single glance. And as, since her misfortunes, her rule ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... trees, to say nothing of vines, bushes, and vegetables. He developed the drip of the hills in the canyons and worked out an efficient irrigation scheme, ditching the water from canyon to canyon and paralleling the ditches at different altitudes. His narrow canyons became botanical gardens. The arid shoulders of the hills, where formerly the blazing sun had parched the jungle and beaten it close to earth, blossomed into trees and shrubs and flowers. Not only had the Nature Man become self-supporting, but he was now a prosperous agriculturist with produce ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the neighbors about them. The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an oasis, an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can, under certain circumstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in relation to Holland, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... spread its cruel net around him. The stony wastes bore no fruit but briers and thorns. The dark ledges of rock thrust themselves above the surface here and there, like the bones of perished monsters. Arid and inhospitable mountain ranges rose before him, furrowed with dry channels of ancient torrents, white and ghastly as scars on the face of nature. Shifting hills of treacherous sand were heaped like tombs along the horizon. By day, ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... was complete. All around us lay the dunes, monstrous as still leviathans. Here and there, between their strange, suggestive shapes, under the dark sky one could see the ghastly whiteness of the saltpetre in the arid plains beyond, where the low bushes bent in the chilly breeze. I thought of London—only a few days' journey from me—revelled for a moment in my situation, which, contrary to my expectation, was rather emphasised ...
— The Desert Drum - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... Stagyrite repaired the injustice of his conduct by giving it a pretty long one. My opinion now, as you are anxious to know it, is, that it was a lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was, raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced as an eternal jewel into the great vault ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... before. When? Suddenly he recollected the night he had sat at this same window, at the beginning of this terrible journey; and his thoughts and feelings then, his deep loneliness of soul, the prevision of the pain even of fulfilment—an endless, endless arid waste, with the welling forth of that black spirit of evil in his own nature, as the only vital thing to bear him secret company—a moment that was wolfish to his better nature. Almost with the remembrance came the same mood, but only as reflected ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... 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
... nickel-plating, nor will such an unnecessary expenditure be made as was involved in the construction of the "West Shore"; nor will the feat of Gould and the Santa Fe be repeated of each building two hundred and forty miles, side by side, for construction profits, much of which is located in the arid portion of Kansas where there is never likely to be traffic for even one railway. Much of the republic is covered with closely parallel lines which would never have been built under national ownership, and this process will continue as long as the manipulators ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the principal range of the wild sheep in America to-day there are still a few of its old haunts not in the mountains which are so arid or so rough, or where the water is so bad that as yet they have not to any great extent been invaded by the white man. Again to the south and southwest, in portions of Arizona, Old Mexico, and Lower California, ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... scene all about me, how different it was from those to which I had been accustomed on Earth! Out of a pink sky flakes of frozen dew were gently falling, starching the arid, verdureless soil with a glistening coat of evanescent white. Along the river bank, tall, slender, lightly-rooted trees reached far up into the breathless air, but there was never the movement of a bough or the rustle of a leaf, except from the flutter ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... and looked one at the other with an air of utter despair. The order to march from this distressing spot was unwillingly and slowly obeyed. So fondly does the human soul cling to the very faintest semblance of hope, that the adventurers would rather have wandered up and down these barren and arid banks, in vain search after water, than tear themselves away by one bold effort from the deceitful expectations held out to them by ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... the coast beginning at Cape Blanco, and extending to the arm of the river Senegal, called the Marigot of the Maringouins; is so very arid, that it is not fit for any kind of cultivation; but from that Marigot, to the mouth of the river Gambia, a space, which may be about a hundred leagues, in length, with a depth of about two hundred, we meet with a vast country, which ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... make their money in the one and live in the other, as though the Queen of Watering-places were an industrial centre. Worthing has a great advantage in its fine old trees; as a matter of fact the place would be unbearably arid and glaring without them in the summer months, for it has undoubtedly proved its claim to be the sunniest south coast resort; a claim at one time or other put forth by all. The most convincing proof to the sceptical stranger will be the miles of glass houses ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... bounds, Within a washerwoman's grounds. Where, hanging on a line to dry, A crimson skirt inflamed his eye. With bellowings that woke the dead, He bent his formidable head, With pointed horns and gnarly forehead; Then, planting firm his shoulders horrid, Began, with rage made half insane, To paw the arid earth amain, Flinging the dust upon his flanks In desolating clouds and banks, The while his eyes' uneasy white Betrayed his doubt what foe the bright Red tent concealed, perchance, from sight. The garment, which, all undismayed, Had never paled ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... I should know it again. The hills around it, the beautiful lake, into which falls many a sparkling stream, rushing down amid rocks and tall trees. Would that we were there now instead of toiling over this arid desert. How delightful it would be to plunge into some cool and sheltered pool where no crocodile or hippopotamus could reach us. What draughts of water we would drink," and the black opened his mouth as if to pour some of the longed-for ...
— Ned Garth - Made Prisoner in Africa. A Tale of the Slave Trade • W. H. G. Kingston
... acrimony of the secretions formed under the influence of a tropical sun and torrid air, with a scanty and irregular supply of water. Plants, likewise, are preserved in a vegetative and living state, mid sandy and arid wastes, by the quantity of gum stored up in them. Hence succulent plants, such as cacti and others, may be found in the steppes and sandy plains of South America, verdant and healthy, though no rain may fall to convey fresh sap into them for months, or even a year. In the ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... passed through Miss Norman's room, they formed a striking contrast, Sir John Dene short, thick-set, alert, with the stamp of the West-End upon all he wore; Sir Jasper Chambers tall, gaunt arid dingy, with a forehead like the bulging eaves of an Elizabethan house, and the lower portion of his face a riot of short grizzled grey hair that seemed to know neither coercion nor restraint. His neck appeared intent on thrusting itself as far as possible ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... something quite appalling to a young traveller like me; but my companions rode over everything with the greatest unconcern, confident in the sure-footedness of their horses. Having once ascended the mountains, we entered upon the arid plains of Persia, and here my master's knowledge of the country was again conspicuous. He knew every summit the moment it appeared, with the same certainty as an experienced Frank sailor recognizes a distant ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... behind, knelt; and fragments of his prayer were brought me by the wind, 'O Heavenly Father! let not this blooming soul wither away upon this arid earth! Lead it not into the temptation of human servitude; remove from it all sinful stain! Let it serve Thee alone! Thee and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... skin resembles a piece of good-for-nothing wrinkled parchment. The lips partake of the prevailing sallow tint, and the mouth hangs a little awry. From the cloth in which the head is so elaborately bandaged up strays forth, here and there, an arid lock of hair. The lack of united expression in his features produces an effect seldom observable in a living face. The eyes are lustreless, and densely black; or possibly (the suspicion is a startling one) we are looking ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... society round his splendid palace of Versailles. Versailles is the clou to the age of Louis XIV. The huge, almost infinite building, so stately and so glorious, with its vast elaborate gardens, its great trees transported from distant forests, its amazing waterworks constructed in an arid soil at the cost of millions, its lesser satellite parks and palaces, its palpitating crowds of sumptuous courtiers, the whole accumulated mass of piled-up treasure and magnificence and power—this was something far more significant than the mere country ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... mastery and triumph in the young man's face, something in the pale radiance of the girl's, something of the mingled joy and anguish of the pierced maternal heart shining in the Mother's great grey eyes, had conveyed to the exultant little woman that the plant that had thriven upon the arid soil of Gueldersdorp had borne a perfect blossom with a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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 ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... birds inhabiting them.), who shews that in the United States many species of birds gradually become more strongly coloured in proceeding southward, and more lightly coloured in proceeding westward to the arid plains of the interior. Both sexes seem generally to be affected in a like manner, but sometimes one sex more than the other. This result is not incompatible with the belief that the colours of birds are mainly ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... that the dust-covered train was rolling across the arid solitudes at the edge of the great alkali desert with our party of friends on board. All were looking forward to adventures, but how strange and unexpected some of the happenings that befell them were to be not one of ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... these classes, although in tolerably easy circumstances, consign to misery, goes on increasing since the peace, if we may believe M. Benoiston de Chateauneuf, one of the most courageous of those savants who have devoted themselves to the arid yet useful study of statistics. We may guess how deep-seated is the social hurt, for which we propound a remedy, if we reckon the number of natural children which statistics reveal, and the number of illicit adventures ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... this category are those that are widely distributed in the western United States and that occur in Colorado in both the mountains and the lower more arid intermontane areas. Some of these species are differentiated into subspecies, one of which inhabits the mountains and another the lowlands. Wide-spread species that do not have subspecies in the lowlands different than the subspecies in the mountains ...
— Mammals of the Grand Mesa, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... produced, very excellent for frying. In order to use this oil it requires to be purified by fire, and set in a flame, which must be suffered to die away of itself; the most greasy particles are thus consumed, and its arid qualities wholly destroyed. "When the Moors gather these fruits they drive their goats under the trees, and as the fruit falls the animals carefully nibble off the skins, and then ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... then! I am impressed with its grandeur as it rises, red-bricked, with proud, straight towers toward its centre—impressed and frightened by its insistent call as it rattles and hums to me across the one-sixteenth of a mile of arid sand track. At one side Christianity and doctrine have constructed a church: a second one is building. On the other side, at a little distance, lies Granton, second largest mill. All this I take in as I make my way ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... operating, instead of leading him into the quicksands of scepticism, had never left the hard rock of earnest religious belief inherited from ten generations of Puritan ancestors. Nevertheless, though his feet never strayed from that rock, his was too active and living a soul to rest content with the arid face of a by-gone orthodoxy; God's rain of truth had fallen upon him and it, and he had hewn and delved until the face of his rock blossomed a very Eden of exalted Christianity. To sum up briefly and in full, he was a Christian gentleman of the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... as her snowy fingers sweep once more the organ keys, which tremble joyfully as it were to the familiar touch. Low, deep-toned, and heavy is the prelude to the song, and they who listen feel the floor tremble beneath their feet. Then a strain of richest melody echoes through the house, arid the congregation hold their breath, as Maude De Vere sings to them of the Passover once ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... within half a mile of it that it resolved itself into a copse of butternut-trees sunken below the distant levels. Here once, in geological story, the waters of Butternut Creek, despairing of ever crossing the leagues of arid waste before them, had suddenly disappeared in the providential interposition of an area of looser soil, and so given up the effort and the ghost forever, their grave being marked by the butternut copse, chance-sown by bird or beast in ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... no terrors for me. And as I Went onward with my hand held firmly in that close yet gentle grasp, my thoughts became as it were suddenly cleared into a heaven of comprehension—I looked back upon years of work spread out like an arid desert uncheered by any spring of sweet water—and I saw all that my life had lacked—all to which I had unconsciously pressed forward longingly without any distinct recognition of my own aims, and only trusting to the infinite powers of God and Nature to amend my ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Their conversations, interests, shallow mental attitude to life, bored her. That curious brief period of mental rejuvenescence had been due to the novelty and excitement of being in love again, after long and arid years. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... my heart commences seventeen years ago. In the glow of youth there were times every now and then when I felt the necessity of a strong inspiration of soulthought. My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances. ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... to me: 'Here is where you will play your little comedy to-morrow; this is the spot which the queen has herself appointed, and every thing which takes place is at the express command of her majesty.' That entirely quieted me, arid I turned back to Paris overjoyed, in company with the countess and her companion. They kept me that night in their beautiful home, and on the next day we drove again to Versailles, where the countess had a small suite of apartments. She herself dressed me, and condescended ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... hot and dry, and barren of vegetation excepting in two or three areas of jungle along the equator. "The planet is inhabited by numerous small unintelligent animal species which seem well-adapted to the semi-arid conditions. Of higher animals and mammals only two species were discovered, and of these the most highly developed was an erect biped with an integrated central nervous system and the intelligence level ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... O'Connor said, "it was noon. Here it is nine o'clock, and hardly as warm. The atmosphere is quite arid, and about twenty degrees below ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of this now almost-forgotten race—the Saracen—are still to be found on the northern seaboard of Africa, in the kingdom called Morocco, where they strive to eke out a scant existence from the arid plains of ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... regarded as barbarians—potent only by their standing army, not upon the larger basis of civic strength; and, even under this limitation, they were supposed to owe more to the circumstances of their position—their climate, their remoteness, and their inaccessibility except through arid and sultry deserts—than to intrinsic resources, such as could be permanently relied on in a serious trial of strength between the two powers. The kings of Parthia, therefore, were far enough from being regarded in the light of antagonist forces to the majesty of Rome. And, these ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... by most modern critics, as the explicit champion of rationalism and nothing more. For he is connected with another idea, the course of which is as the course of that great river of his native Arcadia which, springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers strength and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of Olympia and the light and laughter ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... station presided over by his uncle was near a poor hamlet surrounded by arid, stony tracts upon which grew neither tree nor bush. A Siberian temperature reigned in those parts, but the inclemencies of Nature were nothing to bother a little boy, and gave Manuel not ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... which empties its waters into the Paraguay, is one of the most mysterious of rivers. Rising in Bolivia, its course can be traced down for some considerable distance, when it loses itself in the arid wastes, or, as some maintain, flows underground. Its source and mouth are known, but for many miles of its passage it is invisible. Numerous attempts to solve its secrets have been made. They have almost invariably ended ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... administration of the forest reserves will be not less helpful to the interests which depend on water than to those which depend on wood and grass. The water supply itself depends upon the forest. In the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production. The western half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country to-day if the waters that now run to waste were saved and used for irrigation. The forest and water problems are perhaps the most vital ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... best of physical conditions to racial deterioration and 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 in the regions that formerly formed the Northwest Territory. The question is very ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... morning's walk was chiefly poor stony ground, it was covered with timber, and was pleasing to the eye. At half past one o'clock, the party came to a low piece of ground where they found water, and which, in any future excursion, would be a good sleeping place. The country continued a dry, arid soil, and the surface was mostly covered with loose stones, till forty minutes past three o'clock, when they came to some pools of good water, which were very acceptable, as one of the party was taken ill. Here they made fires and laid down for ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... foot or two, 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
... GHAZI KHAN contains an area of 5306 sq. m. The district is a long narrow strip of country, 198 m. in length, sloping gradually from the hills which form its western boundary to the river Indus on the east. Below the hills the country is high and arid, generally level, but sometimes rolling in sandy undulations, and much intersected by hill torrents, 201 in number. With the exceptions of two, these streams dry up after the rains, and their influence is only felt for a few miles ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... active; power struggles among various groups for control of Kabul, regional rivalries among emerging warlords, traditional tribal disputes continue; support to Islamic fighters in Tajikistan's civil war; border dispute with Pakistan (Durand Line) Climate: arid to semiarid; cold winters and hot summers Terrain: mostly rugged mountains; plains in north and southwest Natural resources: natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, talc, barites, sulphur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious and semiprecious stones Land ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... within a few brief months, the harvest seemed, as by a miracle, to be approaching simultaneously over the whole surface of the extended field. The grains of truth long since lodged in an arid soil, and apparently destitute of all vitality, had suddenly developed all the energy of life. France to the reformers, whose longing eyes were at length permitted to see this day, was "white unto the harvest," and only the reapers were ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... nothing to distinguish Ismailla or the smiling lake before you from the rest of the desert, and all was sand. It is the canal which has raised up the numerous handsome villas and fine gardens. Fresh water is all that is needed to turn the arid desert into a fruitful soil; and the supply of this is provided by the subsidary canal which the company has formed side by side with that broad salt one which now unites two worlds. Wonderful stories are told of the productiveness of the gardens, and a walk ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... and clean, in order that their material may come into the hands of the manufacturer in a perfect condition—if heedless, lazy, shiftless, dishonest, ignorant, good-for-nothing D. keeps about him a herd of sick, disconsolated racks-of-bones, to wander over his arid and desolate fields in search of food and drink in summer, or with backs humped up, hover together for shelter under the lea of a wheat-straw stack, their only food in winter, and using a kit of dairying tools, the very best article of which is an old, water-soaked, dirty wooden ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... constant, though not always an honest, interest in the navy. He hated Holland for more reasons than one, but among these reasons was his hatred of England's most formidable and malicious trade competitor. He also disliked her arid and ugly Protestantism, and blood being thicker than water, he hated Holland for what he considered her shabby treatment of his youthful nephew, whose ultimate destiny was happily hidden from Whitehall. Among Charles's ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... sometimes alone and 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, which I would have you read in its entirety. It is a book which has many ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... of receiving a letter, and in the same connection see muddy water, or an arid landscape. Closely following, in waking life, she is astonished to receive a letter in about the same manner of her dream, but the muddy water and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... more; The varying frowns and favours of the deep, That now almost engulphs, then leaves to creep With crazy oar and shatter'd strength along The tide, that yields reluctant to the strong; Th' incessant fever of that arid thirst Which welcomes, as a well, the clouds that burst Above their naked bones, and feels delight In the cold drenching of the stormy night, And from the outspread canvas gladly wrings A drop to moisten ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... Signore, I think I may venture. The well known Hebrew, Levi of Livorno, has left with me a sack, containing the very sum of which there is question, and, under the conditions named, I will convert it to my uses, arid repay the good jeweller his gold, with moneys of my ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of the one ever striving to temper the flaming zeal of the other, as though the spindrift of the Atlantic, sweeping inland from the dim sadness of far western coasts, should strive with relentless fierceness of sunglare outpoured on some high-lying walled city of arid central Spain! Mist is but a weak thing as against rock and fire; and what his mother must have suffered in moral and spiritual conflict, let alone all question of active dread, was to her son almost too cruel to contemplate, although it ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... in to-morrow what flies with to-day. 'Twas the same little fatal and mystical word That now, like a mirage, led my lady and lord To the waters of Ems from the waters of Marah; Drooping Pilgrims in Fashion's blank, arid Sahara! ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... unhallowed ears, arid hearts more hard Than winter clods fast froze with northern wind, But most of all, foul tongue! I thee discard, That blamest all that thy dark straitened mind Cannot conceive: but that no blame thou find; Whate'er my pregnant muse brings forth ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... themselves should be desired, rather than those virtues which are useful in war; but how and by what means this is to be acquired is now to be considered. We have already assigned three causes on which it will depend; nature, custom, and reason, arid shown what sort of men nature must produce for this purpose; it remains then that we determine which we shall first begin by in education, reason or custom, for these ought always to preserve the most entire harmony with each other; for it may ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... rolled back. He felt again all, or nearly all, that he had felt then of helplessness, abandonment, despair. It was frightful to go out thus alone, to be extinguished in the burning heat of Africa, and laid in that arid soil, where the vipers slid through the hot crevices of the earth, and the scorpions bred in the long days of the summer. Now it was evening. He heard the call to prayer, that wailing, wonderful cry which saluted the ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... in due time at Toulon. The town is not very striking in itself. It is surrounded by an amphitheatre of mountains of hard magnesian limestone. These are almost devoid of vegetation. This it is which gives so arid an aspect to this part of the coast. Facing the south, the sun's rays, reflected from the bare surface of the rocks, place one at mid-day as if in the focus of a great burning mirror, and send every one in quest of shade. This intense temperature has its due effect upon the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... number of laths that had been nailed in front of a hole in the wall, "Those are wood rascals, those two; they fly away directly if one does not keep them well locked up. And here's my old sweetheart 'Ba.'" Arid she pulled out by the horn a Reindeer, that was tied up, and had a polished copper ring round its neck. "We're obliged to keep him tight, too, or he'd run away from us. Every evening I tickle his neck with a sharp knife, and he's badly frightened ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... elder days lived at Stanford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for it had an allowance so large, that he spent at the rate of 1,000 guineas a-year, as I have heard. Shakespeare, Dray ton, arid Ben Jonson, had a merie meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted" (Diary of the Rev John Ward, A M Vicar of Stratford upon Avon, extending from 1648 to 1679, p 183 ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the teacher. "In winter," they used to say, "the Ants were putting their damp food to dry in the sun. There came a starving Cigale to beg from them. She begged for a few grains. The greedy misers replied: 'You sang in the summer, now dance in the winter.'" This, although somewhat more arid, is precisely La Fontaine's story, and ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... growth of their vegetation, and the lean lie bare; as witness the territory of Pupinia (in Latium), where all the foliage is meagre and the vines look starved, where the scant straw never stools, nor the fig tree blooms, while for the most part the trees are as covered with moss as are the arid pastures. On the other hand, a rich soil like that of Etruria reveals itself heavy with grain and forage crops and its umbrageous trees are clean of moss. Soil of medium strength, like that near Tibur, which one might say is rather hungry than starved, repays ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... seasoning certainly," like the marchioness's orange-peel and water; yet how strong must have been the passion for literature when money was expended and pains taken with these hopeless ventures. The change in popular taste, moreover, must not mislead us into supposing that writings which are arid to us now were necessarily devoid of interest to contemporary readers. We take down from the shelf the solitary volume which contains the "American Magazine," and its reading-matter looks as faded to our eyes as the leather upon the covers, but it was once ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... some of them had eaten the leaves of the plant which had contained the dew in the morning, and had found them, although acid, full of watery sap and grateful to the palate. The plant in question is the one provided by bounteous Providence for the support of the camel and other beasts in the arid desert, only to be found there, and devoured by all ruminating animals with avidity. By the advice of Philip they collected a quantity of this plant and put it into the ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... So long as there is appetite, there is food: and of that plain substantial nature which, Johnson says, suits the stomach of middle life. Burke, for instance, is a sufficiently poetical politician to interest one just when one's sonneteering age is departing, but before one has come down quite to arid fact. Do you know anything of poor Sir Egerton Brydges?—this, in talking of sonnets—poor fellow, he wrote them for seventy years, fully convinced of their goodness, and only lamenting that the public were unjust and stupid enough not to admire them also. He lived in haughty seclusion, and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... passed the night on the deck of the boat. Notwithstanding the joy which I felt at my arrival, I could not help indulging in a certain degree of melancholy, inspired, perhaps, by the silence of the night, and the aspect of the arid and gloomy mountains which surrounded me. Ah, how vain is human grandeur! thought I. The air of that sterile islet is breathed by that incomprehensible man who lately felt that he had not breathing room in Europe. It is in that humble hovel that he now dwells with his scanty train of faithful followers; ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... thought the spiritual life was less arid and less complex. I imagined that by leading a pure life, praying one's best, and communicating, one would attain without much trouble, not indeed to taste the infinite joys reserved for the saints, but at last to ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... intellectual interest of the Count's 'Monks of the West' rests mainly on this, that it is the work of a brilliant and accomplished layman and man of the world, dealing with a class of characters who have generally been left to the arid professional handling of ecclesiastical writers. Montalembert sees their life as a whole, and a human whole; and, with all his zeal as an amateur hagiographer, he cannot but view them with some of the independence of a mind trained to ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... him so thoughtful and quiet, even melancholy, that he went outdoors to try to throw off the mood. The sun was yet high, and a dazzling white light enveloped valleys and peaks. He felt that the wonderful sunshine was the dominant feature of that arid region. It was like white gold. It had burned its color in a face he knew. It was going to warm his blood and brown his skin. A hot, languid breeze, so dry that he felt his lips shrink with its contact, came from the desert; and it seemed to smell of wide-open, untainted places where sand ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... have nearly reached their limit in food production. They are 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 ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... on the Opequon were too agreeable to last. The old hall was a sort of oasis in the desert of war only. We paused for an instant; rested under the green trees; heard the murmur of the waters—then the caravan moved, breasting the arid wastes once ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the conservation 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, but out of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... white blossom of pure affection bloomed in the arid desert of Tommy's existence for all that. In the preceding fall a new family had come to Arundel and moved into the tiny house next to the Puffers'. It was a small, dingy house, just like the others, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of a were-wolf, I suppose you refer to the Emperor Napoleon?" asked the emperor, smiling. "I must tell you, however, that, in your warlike enthusiasm, you do him injustice. It seems to me he is brave not alone where he has to deal with lambs, arid not alone the feeble and disarmed have reason to fear him. I think I did not march lambs against him at Austerlitz, but brave men, who were not feeble and disarmed, but strong and well-armed. Nevertheless, Bonaparte overpowered ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... shimmering folds, and tenderly covers very deep in rose leaves, the clay feet of our idols. That wonderful light shines only once full upon us, but the memory of it streams all along the succeeding journey; follows us up the arid heights, throws its mellow afterglow on the darkening road, as we go swiftly down the slippery hill of life. It comes to all, as hope's happy prophecy, this sparkling prologue, and we never dream that it is the sweetest and best of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... beneath 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 a ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... fortunate for them that they took this precaution. For two days or more they travelled on without meeting with a drop of water, but existed as before on water melons, which prevented them suffering from thirst—as valuable to them as the plant of a similar species which exists on the arid sands of Africa is to many a weary traveller, as well as to the wild beasts who roam over those ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... are fond of the flesh of Gopherus agassizii, the turtle that by feeding on buds, going without drink, and burrowing in the sand through the winter, contrives to live a known period of twenty-five years. It seems that most seeds are foodful in the arid regions, most berries edible, and many shrubs good for firewood with the sap in them. The mesquite bean, whether the screw or straight pod, pounded to a meal, boiled to a kind of mush, and dried in cakes, sulphur-colored and needing an axe to cut it, is an excellent food for long journeys. ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... had listened with an immovable attention, the grey eyebrows twitching now and then, the arid face betraying a grim enjoyment. When Philip had finished, he still sat looking at him with steady slow- blinking eyes, as though unwilling to break the spell the tale had thrown round him. But an inquisition in the look, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... their voices in clamor to the sky. Jupiter, disturbed by the noise of their croaking, inquired the cause of their complaint. One of them said, "The Sun, now while he is single, parches up the marsh, and compels us to die miserably in our arid homes. What will be our future condition if he ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... rivers and lakes in the desert" is not an absurdity in certain parts of Western United States. In Professor Ordahl's tests at Reno, Nevada, many children whose intelligence was altogether above suspicion gave this reply. The statement is, indeed, perfectly true for the semi-arid region in the vicinity of Reno known as "the desert." On the other hand, such sentences as "The desert is full of rivers and lakes," or "There are forty rivers and lakes in the desert," can hardly be considered satisfactory. Similar difficulties are presented by (c), though not so frequently. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... here I was doomed, on the whole, to disappointment. We could make out he was an orderly man, for all his bills were docketed and preserved. That he was convivial, and inclined to be frugal even in conviviality, several documents proclaimed. Such letters as we found were, with one exception, arid notes from tradesmen. The exception, signed Hannah Trent, was a somewhat fervid appeal for a loan. "You know what misfortunes I have had to bear," wrote Hannah, "and how much I am disappointed in George. The landlady appeared a true friend when I first came here, and ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... When the young plants are two or three inches high, thin them to ten or twelve inches apart, and cultivate in the usual manner. Orach is sometimes transplanted, but generally succeeds best when sown where the plants are to remain. In dry, arid ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... is the sodium salt of tetraboric acid, having the formula Na{2}B{4}O{7}.10 H{2}O. It is found in some arid countries, as southern California and Tibet, but is now made commercially from the mineral colemanite, which is the calcium salt of a complex boric acid. When this is treated with a solution of sodium carbonate, calcium carbonate is ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... building, a couple of hundred feet long. One entered into a main hall, perhaps fifty feet wide, with a great fireplace arid staircase of marble and bronze, and furniture of gilded wood and crimson velvet, and a huge painting, covering three of the walls, representing the Conquest of Peru. Each of the rooms was furnished in the style of a different period—one Louis Quatorze, one Louis Quinze, one Marie ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... wapiti, covers practically the same territory as the tragedy of the American bison—one-third of the mainland of North America. The former range of the elk covered absolutely the garden ground of our continent, omitting the arid region. Its boundary extended from central Massachusetts to northern Georgia, southern Illinois, northern Texas and central New Mexico, central Arizona, the whole Rocky Mountain region up to the Peace River, and Manitoba. It skipped the arid country west of ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... 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 edifices, that had a dry, uncomfortable, earth-quaky ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... provisions for a meal. 'You were expected, you perceive,' he said. A delightful sense of well-being came into my mind. I sat down in the sweetness of ease after fatigue, of refreshment after weariness, of pleasant sounds and sights after the arid way. I said to myself that my past experiences had been a mistake, that this was where I ought to have come from the first, that life here would be happy, and that all intruding thoughts must soon vanish and ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... do. Under ordinary circumstances, water, like light, is plentiful; its utility to man is not due to man's labor, and it has, therefore, no economic value. But in exceptional circumstances, as in an arid desert or in a besieged fortress, a millionaire might be willing to give all his wealth for a little water, thus making the value of what is ordinarily valueless almost infinite. What may be called natural use-values have no economic ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... 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 real ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... a rapid pulse, should lead one to suspect pulsus alternans when such a condition occurs in a person over 50 with cardiovascular-renal disease, arid with signs of decompensation, and also when such a condition occurs with a patient who has a ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... miles of painful travel, without a drop of water, until they arrived at a small running stream. Here they eagerly slaked their thirst; but, this being allayed, the calls of hunger became equally importunate. Ever since they had got among these barren and arid hills where there was a deficiency of grass, they had met with no buffaloes; those animals keeping in the grassy meadows near the streams. They were obliged, therefore, to have recourse to their corn meal, which they reserved for such emergencies. Some, however, were lucky enough to ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... traditional emigrant wagon. It was a weary, lonely journey, life was endangered among hostile Indians, and happy were those who at last were strong enough to toil in the mines. Alas, too many fell by the way and left their bones to bleach in arid regions. It is the experience of life. We have our object of desire. We often come short of it. Ere we reach the goal we perish and the coveted prize is forever lost. Not so is it to him who seeks the Gold of ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... her dream With grey lips arid and cold; She saw not the face as a beam Burn on her, but only a gleam Through her sleep ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... forget the beauty and the brightness of the world we live in. What we need is, as Matthew Arnold says of life, "to see Australia steadily and see it whole." It is not wise to allow the "deadbeat"—the remittance man, the gaunt shepherd with his starving flocks and herds, the free selector on an arid patch, the drink shanty where the rouseabouts and shearers knock down their cheques, the race meeting where high and low, rich and poor, are filled with the gambler's ill luck—fill the foreground of the picture of Australian life. These ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... interest in this form of sport, and gave their favour to packs of hounds, and followed with equal interest the hunt for deer, wolves, boars, foxes and hares as they were tracked through forests and over arid wastes. ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... for some days carried him hither and thither, if not with patience, at any rate with perseverance. He went to spots which he was told had a world-wide celebrity, of the names of which he had but a bare distant remembrance, and which he found to be arid, comfortless, and uninteresting. Gibeon he did endure, and Shiloh, and Sichem; Gilgal, also, and Carmel. But there he broke down: he could not, he said, justify it to himself to be absent longer from his ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... 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 when it should ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... travelled northward they reached a region of greater cultivation and in their route passed some of the big fruit farms that were becoming more and more a feature of the country. Spots of beauty in the wilderness, carved out of arid desert by patience and perseverance and threatened always by the devastating locust, though no longer subjected to the Arab raids that had been a daily menace twenty or thirty years before. The motley gangs of European and native workers toiling more or less diligently in the vineyards and ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... quickly. "We're going to start the ship, arid then we have some news for you. Tom, you take the steering wheel, and I'll start the gas machine. We'll rise to some distance before starting the propellers, and then we won't ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... guides, instead of conducting them out of the mountains, led them deeper into their fatal recesses. The morning dawned upon them in a narrow rambla, its bottom formed of broken rocks, where once had raved along the mountain-torrent, while above there beetled great arid cliffs, over the brows of which they beheld the turbaned heads of their fierce and exulting foes. What a different appearance did the unfortunate cavaliers present from that of the gallant band that marched so vauntingly out of Antiquera! Covered with dust and blood and wounds, ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... Kansuh is comparatively barren. Its boundaries extend far out into regions peopled by Mongol tribes; and the neighbourhood of great deserts gives it an arid climate unfavourable to agriculture. Many of its inhabitants are immigrants from Central Asia and profess the Mohammedan faith. It is almost surrounded by the Yellow River, like a picture set in a gilded frame, reminding one of that river ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... from the little village below us the bells of the church are ringing for rain! Priests and peasants in long procession come forth and kneel on the arid plain. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... he had his homestead going. Wallie's knowledge of Wyoming was gathered chiefly from an atlas he had borrowed from Mr. Cone. The atlas stated briefly that it contained 97,890 square miles, mostly arid, and a population of 92,531. It gave the impression that the editors themselves were hazy on Wyoming, which very likely was the truth, since it had been published in Mr. Cone's childhood when ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... a deep gorge, cleft between lofty walls over which many a waterfall foams from reservoirs of snow above. Agassiz observed two old glacier beds on the western side of the pass—two shallow depressions, lying arid and scored between swelling wooded ridges. He had not met in all the journey a better locality for the study of glacial effects than here. The sides of the channel show these traces throughout their whole length. In this same neighborhood, as a conspicuous foreground on the shore of Indian Reach, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... visions, the enraptured solitude by mountain or shore, or what they feel when they lie close pressed to the bosom of the earth, mad with the longing for old joys, the fiery communion of spirit with spirit, which was once the privilege of man. These some voice, not proclaiming an arid political propaganda, may recall into the actual: some ideal of heroic life may bring them to the service of their kind, and none can serve the world better than those who from mighty dreams turn exultant to their realisation: ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Keeler family, from the greatest to the least, partake of this arid and rasping substance unblinkingly, and I partook also. The brine rose to my eyes and coursed its way down my cheeks, and Grandma Keeler said ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... (or, speaking more exactly, of W.S.W. to N.E.E.) reaching from the Atlantic on the one hand nearly to the Yellow Sea on the other, is interrupted about its centre by a strip of rich vegetation, which at once breaks the continuity of the arid region, and serves also to mark the point where the desert changes its character from that of a plain at a low level to that of an elevated plateau or table-land. West of the favoured district, the Arabian and African wastes are seas of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... they plant trees to overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines up against their walls,—and thus live for the future in another sense than we Americans do. And the climate helps them out, and makes everything moist and green, and full of tender life, instead of dry and arid, as human life and vegetable life are so apt to be with us. Certainly, England can present a more attractive face than we can, even in its humbler modes of life,—to say nothing of the beautiful lives that might be led, one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... varies so widely in different parts of the island, and from year to year, that exact information is difficult. Taken as a whole, it is little if at all greater than it is in most places in the United States. We have our arid spots, like El Paso, Fresno, Boise, Phoenix, and Winnemucca, where only a few inches fall in a year, just as Cuba has a few places where the fall may reach sixty-five or seventy inches in a year. But the average fall ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... the hieroglyphic, to the learned and the curious. The town consists of small, low huts, the greater part of which are built of stakes and mud, whitewashed over, and thatched with palm leaves. I saw a spot of parched, arid ground which was designated a botanical garden. If it did not contain many exotics, it did a most savage tiger, which was enclosed ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... comes upon traces of the old communist village institutions, by which flocks and mills and bakeries and often land were held in common. As in all arid countries, where everything depends upon irrigation, ditches are everywhere built and repaired in common. And the idea of private property is of necessity feeble where there is no rain; for what good is land to a man without ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... 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 ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... there die easily of thirst. Notwithstanding the gigantic work accomplished, water, except on the river, is scarce. Often for months the soil of the valleys and plains never feels rain; even dew is unknown. In this arid region much of the vegetation is set with thorns, and some of the animals are made to match the vegetation. A knowledge of this forbidding area, now robbed of some of its old terrors by the facilities in transportation, has been finally gained only by a long ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... nerve-stimulant. Enhances perception. It's made from a weed that grows only in dry, arid places—comes from Epsilon Eridani IV originally, but the galaxy's biggest plantation is in ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... grew less intense. Then it was comparatively cool, and a soft moist air fanned our heated cheeks. The roar of the falls grew louder, and at any moment we felt that we might come upon the sight, but we had to travel on nearly half a mile along what seemed to be a steep slope. It was no longer arid and barren here, for every shelf and crevice was full of growth of the most vivid green. For a long time we had not seen a tree, but here tall forest trees had wedged their roots in the cracks and crevices, curved out, and then shot straight ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... plaintive, sing-song rhythm accompanied by a tom-tom, which encourages the rowers to bend at their oars, while away still further behind across the river, lays the desolate ruins of the once-powerful Thebes, and that weird, arid wilderness which is so impressive—the Valley of the Tombs ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... 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
... given to this plant by Ruiz and Pavon, indicates that in its native arid home it is affected in some manner by the dryness or dampness of the atmosphere.* In the Botanic Garden at Wrzburg, there was a plant in a pot out of doors which was daily watered, and another in the open ground which was never watered. After some hot and dry weather there was a great ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... "What a fearfully arid country this is," I observed to Charley, "I hope the part we are going to is not ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... improvement he expected, but the nightly perspirations began to diminish; and the extraordinary fatigue he experienced proceeded evidently from his travelling in a post-chaise, where he could not indulge in a recumbent position. The weather at Bristol had been hot, and the earth arid and dusty. At Matlock, during the month of June 1784, there was almost a perpetual drizzle, the soil was wet, and the air moist and cold. Here, however, the patient's cough began to abate, and at intervals he found an opportunity of riding more or less on horseback. From two or three hundred yards ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... surest, deadliest foe," has been quoted from the poet as most applicable to the moral and social state of Africa. It may truly be said to be our case, for hitherto we have suffered little in this town except from men. Looking also around us, the people suffer less from the arid country which they inhabit than from the violence which they inflict one ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... hands as any other. The Marquis, giving all the praise 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 more than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... was flat. All the way to the eastern horizon there wasn't even a minor hillock rising above the plain. It was bare, arid, sun-scorched desert. It was featureless save for sage and mesquite and tall thin stalks of yucca. But it was flat. It could be a runway. It was a perfect place for the Platform to start from. The ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... returned to his grandmother, and established his lodge in the far east, on the borders of the great ocean, whence the sun comes. In time he became the father of mankind, and special guardian of the Iroquois. The earth was at first arid and sterile, but he destroyed the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, and guided the torrents into smooth streams and lakes.[171-1] The woods he stocked with game; and having learned from the great tortoise, who supports the world, how to ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... precipitated in rain. In the southern hemisphere there is, as you know, a larger proportion of sea than in that of the north; and thus it serves as a reservoir to supply those spots which would otherwise be arid deserts, with an abundant supply of the chief necessary of life. The whole of nature is full of similar beautiful arrangements for making the globe a convenient habitation for man, clearly to be perceived if men would but open their ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... are chaste, Like the snows which envelop the bleak arid waste Of the desert; once melted, alas! what remains But the poor, unproductive, dry soil of the plains? The flora of Cupid will never be found, However he toil there, to ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the heroine of this strange love-story?" he asked with a touch of bitterness in his voice. "Does it not strike you that even in this arid world of much deception, there may be after all such a thing as innocence?—such a treasure as true and trusting love? Were not the eyes of this girl Gloria, when lifted to your face, something like the eyes of a child who has just said ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... coaches, filmed with the arid dust of the desert, rolled into Yuma, the little town at the junction of the Gila and Colorado River, popularly supposed to be the hottest place in America. The boys, glad that their long journey had come to an end, felt that it was living ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... beginning at Cape Blanco, and extending to the arm of the river Senegal, called the Marigot of the Maringouins; is so very arid, that it is not fit for any kind of cultivation; but from that Marigot, to the mouth of the river Gambia, a space, which may be about a hundred leagues, in length, with a depth of about two hundred, we meet with a vast country, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... out into a region of the Sun, warm, 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, but they, also, are trees of the Sun, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Nevada seems one vast desert, all sage and sand, hopelessly irredeemable now and forever. And this, under present conditions, is severely true. For notwithstanding it has gardens, grainfields, and hayfields generously productive, these compared with the arid stretches of valley and plain, as beheld in general views from the mountain tops, are mere specks lying inconspicuously here and there, in out-of-the-way places, often thirty or forty ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... erroneously, from angina pectoris, or some mysterious chest pain, may have induced a belief that he was not robust, but this seems to have been baseless, because throughout his life, whether in the trenches of Sebastopol, the marshes of the Yangtse delta, or the arid plains of the Soudan, he appears to ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
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