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Desert   Listen
verb
Desert  v. t.  (past & past part. deserted; pres. part. deserting)  
1.
To leave (especially something which one should stay by and support); to leave in the lurch; to abandon; to forsake; implying blame, except sometimes when used of localities; as, to desert a friend, a principle, a cause, one's country. "The deserted fortress."
2.
(Mil.) To abandon (the service) without leave; to forsake in violation of duty; to abscond from; as, to desert the army; to desert one's colors.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Desert" Quotes from Famous Books



... begins, come on up with your men without asking leave. Report every half-hour. I'll be on the bridge, of course. If I can pick up a steamship I'll call her and desert ship; if not—well, we're somewhere outside the Winter Quarter light-ship. I'll need about five hours of the speed we're making to pick up the light vessel and beach the yacht in the lee of Assateague; maybe not quite five ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry

... could pull a long face in presence of a bobolink. The intense Americanism of the poet appears in nearly all his verse; and occasionally his patriotism rises to a prophetic strain, as in "The Prairie," for example, written when he first saw what was then called "the great American desert." It is said that the honeybee crossed the Mississippi with the first settlers, and Bryant looks with kindled imagination on this ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... like that, I don't think I love you, Manuel. I don't think poetry about you, and I don't dream about you. Life isn't a desert when you are away, though I like having you here. I don't believe I care for you that way, not if love is what the poets and my cousin Manuel say ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... he belonged to them as he did to no other of his subjects. He might go to distant Koenigsberg to assume the crown, but his home was amongst them; other provinces might be gained or lost with the chances of war, but while a single Hohenzollern lived he could not desert his subjects of the Mark. They had the intense local patriotism so characteristic of the German nation, which is the surest foundation for political greatness; but while in other parts the Particularists, as the Germans called them, aimed only at ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... much avail; for what was not eaten by the front ranks must have been trodden under foot at once, and rendered useless to those that followed. After they "encamped by the Red Sea," on the third day, there was no vegetation at all. The journey was over a desert, the surface of which was composed of hard gravel intermixed with pebbles. After crossing the Red Sea, their road lay over a desert region, covered with sand, gravel, and stone, for about nine miles; after which they entered a boundless desert plain, called El Ati ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote

... not engaged; far from it," he says; "yet never would I desert her to walk such ties as the Barlow Suburban, more cruel than the ties which bind us together." So he makes out a time card. "In the morning she goes to work, and back at evening; and some day she may be minded to ride at noon for the sake of the exercise which is to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... day old Geoffrey watched his workmen on the knoll. The well increased in size till it was large enough to have watered a whole caravan,—but the desert of Sahara itself was not drier. Geoffrey fumed, raved, and swore; and when two of the men were killed by the falling of the earth, and the rest absolutely refused to work any longer, he bade them go, a pack of ungrateful scoundrels ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... upon the plains Buffalo Jones ranged slowly westward; and to-day an isolated desert-bound plateau on the north rim of the Grand Canyon of Arizona is his home. There his buffalo browse with the mustang and deer, and are as free as ever they were on the ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey

... a little oasis in the dismal desert of their silent scrutiny of the car. Except for an occasional stamp of the foot they never moved. They just doggedly and indifferently stood, blown upon by all the nipping draughts of the square, and as it might be sinking deeper and deeper into ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... gentle touch was as a cool, refreshing draught to parched lips, a sweet morsel to the tongue, for human hearts ever hunger and thirst for affection. How utterly unendurable would be this life, with its desert wastes and hot siroccos, but for the sweet, verdant spots dotting the sandy sea, whence spring the "fountains of perpetual peace" and issue ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms

... husband, my darling, it cannot be! It is a madness—a delusion. God is trying you, and me! You cannot be planning so to desert Him, so to deny Christ—you cannot, my husband. Come away with me, away from books and work, into some quiet place where He can make Himself heard. You are overdone, overdriven. Do nothing now—say nothing—except ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... desert Six months' confinement at hard labor and forfeiture of $10 per month for the same period; for noncommissioned officer, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison

... last: The Moral of the Story—and that moral is: "That no man should desert that [Catholic] civilisation. It can cure itself but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius, nor Mahomet, nor Calvin, nor Lenin have cured, nor will cure the real evils of Christendom; for the severed hand does ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... purpose the big-horns are great pioneers and explorers. They always want to see what is on the other side of the range. They will sight a range of far distant desert mountains, and to see what is there will travel by night across ten or twenty miles of level ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... those who will hear. Why should you doubt it? He changeth not. When God talked with Enoch, and Abraham spoke with God, no one was astonished. When Hagar wandered in the desert, and saw an angel descend from heaven with succor, she was not surprised. In those days, Elizabeth, men whose feet were in the dust breathed the air of eternity. They spoke to God, and ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr

... the credit of the reports in this Treatise contained can little be furthered by the testimony of one as my selfe, through affection iudged partiall, though without desert; neuerthelesse, forasmuch as I haue bene requested by some my particular friends, who conceiue more rightly of me, to deliuer freely my knowledge of the same, not onely for the satisfying of them, but also for the true information of any other whosoeuer, that comes not with a preiudicate minde ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt

... added that some of those posts will be keys to the trade with the Indian nations. Can any man think it would be wise to leave such posts in a situation to be at any instant seized by one or the other of two neighboring and formidable powers? To act this part would be to desert all the usual maxims of ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... which the remains have been of late years excavated, deciphered, and confronted with the historical texts which we have inherited, and had only partly believed. And studying these new aspects of history, we are saddened, thinking that the sunrise comes to us from shining over desert sands or the mounds of empty cities, where the lion and the jackal "reassert their primeval possession," or where the European and the Tartar, from the West and from the East, dispute their rights to suzerainty. We are dazzled and confused when we look back to ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... outside the low- roofed coffee-houses; lazily worked the makers of ornaments in the bazaars; yawningly pounded the tinkers; greedily ate the children; the city was cloyed with ease. Warham, Blithelygo and myself sat in the evening sun surrounded by gold-and-scarlet bedizened gentry of the desert, and drank strong coffee and smoked until we too were satisfied, if not surfeited; animals like the rest. Silence fell on us. This was a new life to two of us; to Warham it was familiar, therefore comfortable and soporific. I leaned back and languidly scanned the scene; eyes halfshut, senses half-awake. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... not be afraid of myself in a desert cave; I am afraid of myself here. In the desert I should be alone with myself, undisturbed; here man has a thousand wants which drag him down. You go out walking, absorbed in dreams; the voice of the beggar asking an alms brings you back to this world of hunger and thirst. ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... section of the Anglican party, comprising nearly all the clergy, joined in this cry, but it became so evident that the bulk of the population was determined not to return to the old system, that they are beginning to desert the Catholics, and are now more wisely and with better chance of success attempting to amalgamate with the other Protestant bodies to obtain the admission into the State schools of religious teaching on a broad Protestant basis; ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... night a week he could always be found at the Lodge, and once a day he covered each way the half-mile separating his generous, rambling home on Quality Hill and Doctor Will's office. His only real recreation was funerals. He would desert his shady seat and drive miles to help lay away friend or foe—if foes he had. On such occasions only, would he pass the threshold of a church. He contributed generously to each of the town's five denominations and showed considerable restraint in the presence of the cloth in his choice of reminiscences, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... we arrived at a large, desert, dark cavern, which the Lazzeroni assured us was the Sibyl's Cave. We were sufficiently disappointed—Yet we examined it with care, as if its blank, rocky walls could still bear trace of celestial visitant. On one side was a small opening. Whither ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... except color. The brilliant red of the Echo cliffs is wanting. The towers and walls of Castle Caon are yellowish-gray. But their forms are incomparably various and grotesque—in some instances sublime. The valley of Green River at this point is a cheerless sage-brush desert, as it is further north. To be sure, this uninviting stream, a couple of hundred miles further south, having united with the Grande, and formed the Rio Colorado, does indeed, by dint of burrowing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various

... to one's native country, frequent in long voyages, in which the patients become so insane as to throw themselves into the sea, mistaking it for green fields or meadows. The Swiss are said to be particularly liable to this disease, and when taken into foreign service frequently to desert from this cause, and especially after hearing or singing a particular tune, which was used in their village dances, in their native country, on which account the playing or singing this tune was forbid by the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... See lofty Lebanon his head advance, See nodding forests on the mountains dance: See spicy clouds from lowly Saron rise, And Carmel's flowery top perfumes the skies! Hark! a glad voice the lonely desert cheers; 'Prepare the way! a God, a God appears:' 30 'A God, a God!' the vocal hills reply, The rocks proclaim the approaching Deity. Lo, Earth receives him from the bending skies! Sink down, ye mountains, and ye valleys, rise; With heads declined, ye ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... removal will be more pleased than myself; indeed far less so. Nothing induces me now to retain my office but the sense of duty, which constrains me to remain as long as I have the confidence of the Emperor and the majority of the delegations. A soldier with any sense of decency does not desert. But no Minister for Foreign Affairs could conduct negotiations of this importance unless he knows, and all the world as well, that he is endowed with the confidence of the majority among the constitutional representative bodies. There can be no half measures here. You have ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... walk along the streets in conversation, he could hardly bear his own friendlessness; the interests of all these people seemed so fixed and circumscribed, their lives were already so full, that they could only look upon a new-comer with hostility. He would have felt less lonely on a desert island than in the multitudinous city, surrounded by hurrying strangers. He scarcely knew how he managed to drag through the day, tired of the eternal smoking-room, tired of wandering about. The lodgings which ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... his voice. "I am a Deserter; I'm liable to be branded on the back. And it's in Mart Tinman's power to have me marched away to-morrow morning in the sight of Crikswich, and all I can say for myself, as a man and a Briton, is, I did not desert before the enemy. That I swear I never would have done. Death, if death's in front; but your poor mother was a handsome woman, my child, and there—I could not go on living in barracks and leaving her unprotected. I can't tell a young woman the tale. A hundred ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... emotions only when they are keeping still, not when they're being hurled about the country. The proper place for primitive emotions is in small fishing villages, or, better still, on Devonshire moors, or, best of all, in the illimitable desert. So you see the men I have in my mind wouldn't go down with the critics, because unfortunately they happen to be ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... mother of beauty, the unveiler of color, the elusive and radiant mystery of the world, and his speech about it was reverent and grateful. At the gates of the morning he stood with uplifted hands, and the sun sinking in the desert at eventide made him wistful in prayer, half fear and half hope, lest the beauty return no more. His religion, when he emerged from the night of animalism, was a worship of the Light—his temple hung with stars, his altar a glowing flame, his ritual a woven hymn of night and day. No poet of our ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... the mountains. The ichneumon is confined to the Deshtistan. The antelope, the wild boar, the wolf, the fox, the jackal, the porcupine, and the jerboa are common. Wild asses are found only on the northern side of the mountains, towards the salt desert. In this tract they are frequently seen, both singly and in herds, and are hunted by the natives, who regard their flesh ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson

... led the rest of America astray, Cincinnati would be a hamlet yet as it was in Jacob Wetzel's time; and Ohio, instead of being a first-rate star in the constellation of your Republic, would be an appendage of neighbouring Eastern States—a not yet explored desert, marked in the map of America only by lines of northern latitude ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth

... speedily answered. God put it into the hearts of the people of that region to build a sanctuary in the desert. They have now the stated means of grace. That pioneer is one of the officers of the church. The membership is near eighty. The cause of religion seems to be flourishing among them. Not long since it ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson

... Dissolve a desert spoonful of soda in a cup of boiling water, add to it a cup of rich molasses, along with three tablespoonfuls of melted butter. Mix well through two and and one half cups sifted flour, add ground ginger and alspice to taste, and bake in a ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams

... of Living high? The Weather! What makes the Libyan Desert dry? The Weather! What is it men in ev'ry clime, Will talk about till end of time? What drove our honest ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... the Corinthians had chased the Corcyraeans to the land, they turned to the wrecks and their dead, most of whom they succeeded in getting hold of and conveying to Sybota, the rendezvous of the land forces furnished by their barbarian allies. Sybota, it must be known, is a desert harbour of Thesprotis. This task over, they mustered anew, and sailed against the Corcyraeans, who on their part advanced to meet them with all their ships that were fit for service and remaining to them, accompanied by the Athenian vessels, fearing that they might ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides

... principally desert; northeast monsoon (December to February), moderate temperatures in north and hot in south; southwest monsoon (May to October), torrid in the north and hot in the south, irregular rainfall, hot and humid ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... always known there were a few people like that in the world, people whose sympathy and understanding you could take for granted. There was a fearlessness in such people which made them stand out from the crowd, stone-markers in a desert waste to lend assurance to a tired wayfarer by its sturdy permanence, ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long

... and pastures—land permanently used for herbaceous forage crops; forest and woodland—land under dense or open stands of trees; and other—any land type not specifically mentioned above (urban areas, roads, desert). The percentage figure for irrigated refers to the portion of the entire amount of land area that is artificially supplied ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... converts were by his means added to the church; the proud became broken-hearted, and the lowly were raised, and blessings abounded; the drunkards were made sober; thieves and covetous were reclaimed; the blasphemers were made to sing the praises of God; the desert bid fair to blossom and bring forth fruit as a garden. But, alas! his early labours were contrary to acts of parliament; the spirit of intolerance and persecution soon troubled, and eventually consigned him to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... in this province a sunken desert surrounded by naked hills. The pharaoh Amenhemat first conceived the daring plan of changing this place into a fruitful region, three thousand five hundred years before ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... have always done my duty,—I have sacrificed myself for the children. Why do they desert me, why do they desert me?" And then came a low moaning cry, terrible to hear. The sisters were by the bedside, in a moment. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... many dangers and maintain purity, it is better to leave the world. Often a Brahman when he has attained to a considerable age withdraws to the desert, fasts, watches, refrains from speech, exposes himself naked to the rain, holds himself erect between four fires under the burning sun. After some years, the solitary becomes "penitent"; then his only subsistence is from almsgiving; for whole days he lifts an arm in the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... has been one of the main trade arteries through the province, and with the total lack of conservation ideas so characteristic of the Chinese, every available bit of natural forest has been cut away. As a result the mountains are desert wastes of sandstone alternating with grass-covered hills sometimes clothed with groves of pines or spruces. These trees have all been planted, and ere they have reached a height of fifteen or twenty feet will ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews

... upon my bed and burst into tears. These remarks of my father and aunt were straws, but they showed me how the wind was likely to blow. Those upon whom I had a right to rely for sympathy were ready to desert me first of all. It was cruel and unkind. Had I asked to be allowed to marry Mr. Dale? Had either of us ever hinted at the subject? Never! And yet my father was the first to cast suspicions and make insinuations, for I understood his unjust taunt. Sheep's ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... up, and I was growing hungry again. I made a good meal on what was left in the second tin of beans that I had opened for my breakfast; and when I was done I tried to get a light for my pipe by rubbing bits of wood together, but made nothing of it at all. I had read about castaways on desert islands getting fire that way—but they went at it with dry wood, I fancy, and in my mist-sodden desert all the wood was ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier

... Ethiopian north-south trending highlands, descending on the east to a coastal desert plain, on the northwest to hilly terrain and on the southwest ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... and not merely a female, when she has a rich soul and an abounding vitality, she is made for so many things which she cannot accomplish alone and with none to help her!... A man is much less lonely, even when he is most alone: he can people the desert with his own thoughts: and when he is lonely in married life he can more easily put up with it, for he notices it less, and can always live in the soliloquy of his own thoughts. And it never occurs to him that the sound of his voice ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... glaring, stuffy cubbyhole ventilated by means of the hall door and a tiny window opening from the lavatory at the rear. Along the sides ran mirrors, beneath which was fixed a wide make-up shelf. From the ceiling depended several unshaded incandescent globes which flooded the place with a desert heat and radiance. An attempt had been made to give the room at least a semblance of coolness by hanging an attractively figured cretonne over the entrance and over the wardrobe hooks fixed in the rear wall; but the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... to these Indian visions, opening widely her blue eyes and falling into deep reveries. For Orso never spoke of going alone to the desert; she was always with him, and it was very good for them there. Every day they saw something new; they possessed all they needed, and it seemed right to make all ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... deep again. However, I swear to you over again, sir, by the living God, on my faith, my honor, and my salvation, that I will be to you, all my life long, loyal subject and faithful servant; I will never fail you nor desert you; I will have while I live no desires or designs of importance which are not suggested by your Majesty himself; nor will I ever be cognizant of them in the case of others, though they were my own children, without expressly opposing them and giving you notice ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... human affection—all that makes the past delightful, the present lovely, and the future coveted, were dried up within me. My heart was like the sands of the desert, parched and barren. No living stream of hope, of gladness, or of desire, quickened it with human sympathies. It was a bleak and withered region, the fit abode of ever-during sorrow and comfortless despair. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various

... slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. It was only a child's gift, a tiny Paris toy; but it had been brought to him in a tender compassion, and he did keep it; kept it through dark days and wild nights, through the scorch of the desert and the shadows of death, till the young eyes that questioned him now with such innocent wonder had gained the grander luster of their womanhood and had brought him a grief wider ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... Preble's recall, another New-England man, William Eaton, led an army of nine Americans from Egypt to Derne, the easternmost province of Tripoli,—a march of five hundred miles over the Desert. He took the capital town by storm, and would have conquered the whole Regency, if he had been supplied with men and money from our fleet. "Certainly," says Pascal Paoli Peek, a non-commissioned officer of marines, one of the nine, "certainly it was one of the most extraordinary expeditions ever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... Bedouin: a camel-driver of the Libyan Desert. From the black horsehair circlet on his temples a turban-scarf fell to his shoulders. He was wrapped in a brown cashmere cloak which dropped domino-like to his ankles. Shaggy brows ran in an unbroken line from temple to temple, ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... his charge, the bard preserved her long In honour's limits; such the power of song. But when the gods these objects of their hate Dragg'd to the destruction by the links of fate; The bard they banish'd from his native soil, And left all helpless in a desert isle; There he, the sweetest of the sacred train, Sung dying to the rocks, but sung in vain. Then virtue was no more; her guard away, She fell, to lust a voluntary prey. Even to the temple stalk'd the adulterous spouse, With impious thanks, and mockery of the ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... and don't let them quite desert my mother. Bad as she is, I am worse, and I have ruined her; a worse thing that than getting a little money out of those turf-dupes and idiots, though hers was ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale

... Friends, Followers, Fauourers of my Right: If euer Bassianus, Csars Sonne, Were gracious in the eyes of Royall Rome, Keepe then this passage to the Capitoll: And suffer not Dishonour to approach Th' Imperiall Seate to Vertue: consecrate To Iustice, Continence, and Nobility: But let Desert in pure Election shine; And Romanes, fight for Freedome in your Choice. Enter Marcus Andronicus aloft with ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... although she lowered her fine head to no one else. But female virtue, as they expressed it in the eighteenth century, stood higher in her estimation than all the gifts of mind and soul which had been lavished upon Rachael Levine, and she was the first to desert her when the final step was taken. But on this evening there was no barrier, and she talked of her future with the man she was to marry. She was happy and somewhat sentimental. Rachael sighed and set her lips. All her girlhood friends were either married or about to be—except ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... whispers of collusion between the Duke and the English commissioners at Bourbourg. There were hints that Alexander was playing his own game, that he meant to divide the sovereignty of the Netherlands with the heretic Elizabeth, to desert his great trust, and to effect, if possible, the destruction of his master's Armada, and the downfall of his master's sovereignty in the north. Men told each other, too, of a vague rumour, concerning which Alexander might have received information, and in which many believed, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... of Babylon was given by Seleucus when he laid the foundation of his new capital on the banks of the Tigris (B.C. 322). Already Patrocles, his general, had compelled a large number of the inhabitants to abandon their homes, and to take refuge in the desert, and in the province of Susiana. The city, exhausted by the neighborhood of Seleucia, returned to its ancient solitude. According to some authors, neither the walls nor the temple of Belus existed any longer, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... Jimmy that it never even occurred to him to desert the fallen one, and depart alone. Spike was his brother-in-arms. He would as soon have thought of deserting him as a sea-captain would of ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse

... describing his attack as a "rush of blood to the head from a heart that had been squeezed too severely by old Father Time." Braden was not to be found. What annoyed Mr. Thorpe most was the young man's unaccountable disposition to desert him in his hour of need. In his querulous tirade, he described his grandson over and over again as an ingrate, a traitor, a good-for-nothing without the slightest notion of what ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... altogether satisfied with them. I intended to take a French guide, or dragoman, who had been with me for some days, and to put myself under the peculiar guardianship of two Bedouin Arabs, who were to accompany me as long as I should remain east of Jerusalem. This travelling through the desert under the protection of Bedouins was, in idea, pleasant enough; and I must here declare that I did not at all begrudge the forty shillings which I was told by our British consul that I must pay them for their trouble, in accordance with the established ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope

... morning. Our route during the day, was over as melancholy a tract as ever was travelled. The plains to the N. and N.W. bounded the horizon; not a tree of any kind was visible upon them. It was equally open to the S., and it appeared as if the river was decoying us into a desert, there to leave us in difficulty and in distress. The very mirage had the effect of boundlessness in it, by blending objects in one general hue; or, playing on the ground, it cheated us with an appearance of water, and on ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt

... Pouf! you men are stupid creatures. I must be cunning with you, my good husband who would leave me to starve—who would divorce me, and marry this woman, and cut the hated Cora out of your life. But no, my poor child, it shall not be. So long as we live, we two, Cora will never desert you. It is my only consolation, that I shall be able to follow every step of your existence as I followed you to-night, without your knowing where I am, or at what moment ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... a Scotch mariner, Alexander Selkirk by name, who in consequence of a quarrel with the captain of his ship, had been left on this desert island four years and a half before. The fire which had attracted notice had been ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... by a gun at Austerlitz, being at that time attached to a regiment of dragoons. He had no master. He was in the habit of attaching himself to a corps, and continuing faithful so long as they fed him well and did not beat him. A kick or a blow with the flat of a sword would cause him to desert this regiment, and pass on to another. He was unusually intelligent; and whatever position of the corps in which he might be the was serving, he did not abandon it, or confound it with any other, and in the thickest of the fight was always near the banner he had chosen; and ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... advanced, the armed guards ran from it, shouting, one now and then falling, overcome. For the moment none of us knew what to do. Should we run and desert the train for which we had dared so ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... reaching its decisive moment during the American Civil War, had finally gone against Conservatism when Lee surrendered at Appomatox. Russell's Reform Bill of 1866 was defeated by Tory opposition in combination with a small Whig faction which refused to desert the "principle" of aristocratic government—the "government by the wise," but the Tories who came into power under Derby were forced by the popular demand voiced even to the point of rioting, themselves to present a Reform Bill. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... Southern Baal, and to his fellow members of the Convention, after the nomination of General Taylor dared to say: "You have put one ounce too much on the strong back of Northern endurance. You have even presumed that the State which led on the first Revolution for Liberty will now desert that cause for the miserable boon of the vice-presidency. Sir, Massachusetts spurns the bribe," referring thus to the proposed nomination of Abbott Lawrence. It was a brother of Charles Allen our late esteemed friend, ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe

... it is served, comes between the roasts and the game, thus preparing the palate for the new flavor. Cheese follows the salad sometimes, and sometimes accompanies it. Then the ices and sweets. When the ices are removed, the desert plates, overlaid with a dainty doily, upon which is set a finger-bowl, are passed, and the fruits appear. Confections are then served, to be followed with black coffee in tiny after-dinner coffee-cups, which are passed on a salver, together with lump sugar, ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... about men should look also at earthly things as if he viewed them from some higher place; should look at them in their assemblies, armies, agricultural labors, marriages, treaties, births, deaths, noise of the courts of justice, desert places, various nations of barbarians, feasts, lamentations, markets, a mixture of all things and ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius

... paralyzing, perfectly paralyzing! Dink, struggling for a word in the vast desert of his brain, was overwhelmed with the ease with which his companion ran on. He stole a glance under the floating azure veil and decided, from the way the brilliant blue parasol swung from her hand, that she must be a woman of the ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson

... me, that in the time of the Pretender there were always in London alone, a dozen of fellows connected with these brigades, with the view of seducing the king's soldiers from their allegiance, and persuading them to desert to France to join the honest Irish, as they were called. One of these traitors once accosted him and proposed the matter to him, offering handfuls of gold if he could induce any of his comrades to go over. Meredith appeared to consent, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... fifteen hundred francs, the fruit of her labour, as well as the produce of rent from her small patrimony. From time to time this worthy servant was offered other situations, but to all such offers she replied by the inquiry, "Who will take care of this family if I desert them?" At length the widow Migeon, overcome with grief, became seriously ill. La Blonde passed her days in comforting her dying mistress, and at night went to take care of the sick, in order to have the means of relieving her wants. The widow Migeon died on the 28th of April, ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... most faithful servants, who had closely attended him in all his difficulties, were ill rewarded.'—King's MEMOIRS.] We must receive, however, with some degree of jealousy what is said by Dr. King on this subject, recollecting that he had left at least, if he did not desert, the standard of the unfortunate prince, and was not therefore a person who was likely to form the fairest estimate of his virtues and faults. We must also remember that if the exiled prince gave little, he had but little ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... the logical and necessary outcome of the labors of Philip Augustus, Philip the Fair, of Louis XI, of Henry IV, and Richelieu. They had reared the monarchy like a solitary obelisk in the midst of a desert; but it had to stand or fall alone; no one was there to help it, as no one was there to pull it down. This consideration enables us to pass into a higher and more reposing order of reflection, to leave the sterile impeachment of individual ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... the then knowen world, so that he was affraid to lose all his footing hear, he by his oracles and responses encouraged thesse Barbarians (in this Gods ape[566] who called Abram to the land of promise) to desert their native countrie and promised them better habitations in another part (which he might soon do) wheir he might be out of the dread of the gospell and might securly triumph over them as ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... mountain wilderness, miles from any trail. The country was strange to her, but she knew that they were making their way, far above the canyon rim, on the side of the San Bernardino range, toward the distant Cold Water country that opened into the great desert beyond. ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... attend this state of the atmosphere, known as the Fata Morgana of Sicily, the Mirage of the Desert, the Spectre of the Brocken, and the more common exhibitions of halos, coronae, and mock suns. The Mountain House at Catskill has repeatedly been seen brightly pictured on the clouds below. Rainbows are also due to this ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... character of the more degraded portions of the community; and it brings home to us all the great lesson of sympathy for the bad as well as the afflicted—both victims alike of circumstances, over which they in many cases have nearly as little control as the wild children of the desert. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various

... left an orphan under the care of his uncle Abu Talib. In his youth he tended sheep, and gathered wild berries in the desert. In his twenty-fifth year he became the commercial agent of a wealthy widow, Khadija, made journeys for her into Palestine and Syria,—where he may have received religious knowledge and impressions from Christian monks and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... of our ultimate aims?" Selingman rejoined. "Her politicians to-day choose to play the part of the ostrich in the desert. They take no account, or profess to take no account of European happenings. They have no Secret Service. Their country is governed from within for herself only. As for the rest, the bogey of a German invasion has been flaunted so long in England that few people ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... gloomy meditation. The whole town was a desert. The camp meeting of the unhoused Aquilani was held somewhere in the distance: its confused murmur reached me not. Only my neighbors, the Ursuline nuns, were up and awake. With shrinking delicacy, dreading the look ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... release you from the oath. Make the best of your way into the 'nation'—ay, go yet farther; and, hear me, Dillon, go where you are unknown—go where you can enter society; seek for the fireside, where you can have those who, in the dark hour, will have no wish to desert you. I have no claim now upon you, and the sooner you 'take the range' ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... he pursued his way through the valley, and after three or four windings it took him out upon a sandy desert. He had no sooner set foot upon the desert than he heard behind him a crashing sound louder than thunder. He looked around, and he saw that the walls of mountain through which he had just passed had fallen into the valley, and filled it up so that he could no longer tell ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy

... worldly things in these words: 'Thou must also as from some higher place look down, as it were, upon the things of this world, as flocks, armies, husbandmen's labours, marriages, divorces, generations, deaths: the tumults of courts and places of judicatures; desert places; the several nations of barbarians, public festivals, mournings, fairs, markets.' How all things upon earth are pell-mell; and how miraculously things contrary one to another, concur to the beauty and ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... exception, had received a good education, and many of them were known in Europe for their talents and their acquirements. The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them the best elements of order and morality; they landed in the desert, accompanied by their wives and children. But what most especially distinguished them was the aim of their undertaking. They had not been obliged by necessity to leave their country; the social position they abandoned was one to be regretted, and their means of subsistence ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... you back out when you parted with your wife?" "You may well say 'back out,'" said he. "I was taken slap aback—it came over me like a clap of thunder. I was half inclined to play the shy cock and desert, and had it not been for the advice of the good old man, I should have been mad enough to have destroyed my prospects in the Service for ever. Now," said he, "how do you feel?" "A little qualmish," said I, "and I'll take a good stiff glass of grog to wash it ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman

... eyes desert the naked skull, The mold'ring flesh the bone, Till Helen's lily arms entwine A ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... attendant Moons, thou wilt descry, Communicating male and female light— Which two great sexes animate the World, Stored in each orb perhaps with some that live. For such vast room in Nature unpossessed By living soul, desert and desolate, Only to shine, yet scarce to contribute Each orb a glimpse of light, conveyed so far Down to this habitable, which returns Light back to them, is obvious to ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... summon up a thousand varied pictures. Strange landscapes glimmer through the familiar walls of the room, and outlandish figures thrust themselves almost within the sacred precincts of the hearth. Small as my chamber is, it has space enough to contain the ocean-like circumference of an Arabian desert, its parched sands tracked by the long line of a caravan, with the camels patiently journeying through the heavy sunshine. Though my ceiling be not lofty, yet I can pile up the mountains of Central Asia beneath it, till ...
— Beneath An Umbrella (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Another specimen of the desert-born, the Western Indian, forms an exhibit as little suited as the improved Arab horse to discussion and award at a session fraught with that "calm contemplation and poetic ease" which ought to mark the deliberations of the judges. How are the representatives ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... me, Master Arnold—and that I never desert my friends! I shall accept the full responsibility of this deed before Sir William and the magistrates. And they cannot order any punishment ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson

... conscience in excellent working order, as befitted a potential convert to Catholicism. She could rely on a spiritual adviser who had instilled into her mind a lofty sense of obedience and resignation. Don Francesco would never desert her. He would arrive in due course, explaining why God had allowed the volcano to behave in this unseemly fashion, and brimming over with words of consolation for his daughter-to-be. God, if so disposed, could ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... the white desert behind us has become broken by many thin streaks of water which intersect it in all directions. Our latitude to-day was 80 degrees 52' N., which shows that there is a strong southerly drift upon the pack. Should the wind continue favourable it will break up as rapidly ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Patience self with me impatient wax; * Patient for ever till the Lord fulfil my destiny: Patient I'll bide without complaint, a wronged and vanquish" man; * Patient as sunparcht wight that spans the desert's sandy sea: Patient I'll be till Aloe's[FN254] self unwittingly allow * I'm patient under bitterer things than bitterest aloe: No bitterer things than aloes or than patience for mankind, * Yet bitterer than the twain to me were Patience' treachery: My sere and seamed and seared brow ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... was that they could never stand six years of such a life as they were living! They were lost, they were going down—and there was no deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it gave them the vast city in which they lived might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness, a desert, a tomb. So often this mood would come to Ona, in the nighttime, when something wakened her; she would lie, afraid of the beating of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the old primeval terror of life. Once she cried aloud, and woke Jurgis, who was tired and cross. After ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... something One good work to have effected 'Mid so many that were bad.) May God rest his soul in heaven!— Far I fled into the country, And asylum found and shelter In a convent of religious, Which was founded in that desert, Where I lived retired and hidden, Well taken care of and attended. For a lady there, a nun, Was my cousin, which connection Gave to her the special burden Of this care. My heart already Being a basilisk which turned All the honey into venom, Passing swiftly from mere liking ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts— Is its own origin of ill and end, And its own place and time: its innate sense, When stripped of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without: But is absorbed in sufferance of joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley

... Considine, gloomily. "I'm off. I'm about to desert and go back to my cabbages. New York won't let you work. She won't help you. She won't protect you. She mocks you. She laughs in your face. I'd rather die than ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell

... interchange ideas. In seeking the wilderness you enter the abode of solitude, and are naturally and voluntarily alone. On visiting a city, on the contrary, you enter the residence of man, and if you are forced into isolation there, to you it is worse than a desert. ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... of Fine Arts in New York was because there were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go through the list. I suppose the Academy was bacon and beans in the Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen courses. One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen frighten away his appetite and give him ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... down there is good soil. Really fertile land costs as much as it does in France and is bought by wealthy Parisians. The real colonists, the poor, are generally cast out into the desert, where nothing grows for lack ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... Kim was thinking hard in English. 'This is dam'-tight place, but I think it is self-defence.' He felt in his bosom for Mahbub's gift, and uncertainly—save for a few practice shots in the Bikanir desert, he had never used the ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... with emphasis on the wrong words'). 'In conclusion, we most heartily congratulate the Hon. Ernest Woolley. This book of his, regarding the adventures of himself and his brave companions on a desert isle, stirs ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie

... broke an irruption of riot. A group of men poured through the swinging doors of a saloon into the open arcade in front. Their noisy disputation shattered the sunny stillness like a fusillade in the desert. Plainly they were much the ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... army pressed Across the dangerous desert of the West, To rescue fair white captives from the hands Of brutal Cheyenne and Comanche bands, On Washita's bleak banks. Nine hundred strong It moved its slow determined way along, Past frontier homes left dark and desolate By the wild Indians' ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... harpers sang the song we sing to-day, And the drowsy folk of Bethlehem may have listened as they lay! But eager shepherds left their flocks, and o'er the desert wild The kingly sages journeyed to adore the Holy Child! Has any man a quarrel? Has another used you ill? The friendly word you meant to say, Is that unspoken still?— Then, remember, 'twas the Angels Brought glad tidings ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various

... made the seven great seas like unto the vapor of the desert, beneath our glorious and conquering footsteps and those of our faithful and victorious heroes. He has made in our royal mind the thrones of kings and the deep ocean of earthly glory more despicable than the light bubble that floats upon the surface of the wave; and no doubt his extraordinary ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... sir!" cried Samson, indignantly. "Do I look the sort o' man likely to desert, colonel, unless it was to get a good draught ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... it, sir"; and the man's bold look reassured me on one point—viz. that, happen what might, he would not desert me. ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... desert plateau in east, highland area in west; Great Rift Valley separates East and West Banks ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... its turbidity is caused by soil that this river is continually bringing from the places it passes; which soil never returns in the sea which receives it, unless it throws it on its shores. You see the sandy desert beyond Mount Atlas where formerly it was ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... here beside you—I cannot look into your eyes. It was very naughty of me, Julius! Can you ever forgive me, darling? You will not desert me, will you? ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... of Living Alone, yet no real lover of that house and of that state would ever exchange one of those haunted and desert nights for a night spent watched, in ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson

... this thing and that. Once I started a book-shop of my own—but I did no good here. Finally I turned it up altogether, and went to Australia. That was in 1882. I've been in almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known what it was to be shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've lain down in a desert not expecting to get up again, with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger—but I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic Muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream. He who woos her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... we had made a home out of what seemed a desert. Books had been unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made to burn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned into something more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that we were, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... desert, spring in New England, black-green oaks lying on tawny hills in Marin County, fields of cotton on red soil in Georgia, surf on the rocks of Maine, moonlight on Mobile Bay, and the way the fog comes upon San Francisco on ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... at that map and nugget and hear that wonderful story of yours and then, if it doesn't look as if it might pan out true, back you will start for home at sun-up to-morrow morning. What do you say, Rad?" and he turned to Mr. Randolph. "The boys must be made to understand that they can't desert a trust like that at ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil

... would mean returning to England, and Owen felt that his business in the desert was not yet completed; as well travel from one oasis to another in quest of eagles as anything else, and three days afterwards he rode at the head of his caravan, anxious to reach Ain Mahdy, trying to believe he had ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... a common product of the age, the sort of girl that insists on "having a good time" and "living her life" and "being herself" (how well one knows the jargon!). Less common, let us hope, is the woman who would desert her husband, as Jean did, because the injuries he had received in the War prevented him from giving her the kind of life for which she craved. Foolish rather than vicious, she drifts into a relationship which could have had only one conclusion, if her lover, tiring of platonics, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various

... Stanovoi-Chebret, where a single Tungus family constitutes the sole population along a river of 300 versts; in the west on the desolate heights of the Viluj, near the great Zeresej Lake; in the north at the mysterious outlets of the Quabrera, the desert places of the Olensk, Indigirika, and Kolyma, life becomes like a Danteesque hell, consisting in nothing but ice, snow and gales, and lighted up by the lurid blood-red rays of the ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... are wiping out all the timber and never thinking of the future. They are in such a hurry to get rich that they'll leave their grandchildren only a desert. They cut and slash in every direction, and then fires come and the country is ruined. Our rivers depend upon the forests for water. The trees draw the rain; the leaves break it up and let it fall in mists and drippings; it seeps into the ground, and is ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey

... of the ground, to be pocketed by the first finders! In spite of the fact that California had been a part of the United States only two years, or since the war with Mexico, and was distant 2000 miles across uninhabited desert and mountains, as soon as the word about gold was guaranteed to be really the truth a tremendous number of people here in the "States" set about dropping everything else and starting right away, to seek ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin

... there being twenty merchant ships in sight, the officers united in beseeching him to go into one of them, but this he positively refused to do, deeming it, as he declared, unpardonable in a commander in chief to desert his garrison in distress; that his living a few years longer was of very little consequence, but that, by leaving his ship at such a time, he should discourage and slacken the exertions of the people, by setting a very bad example. ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous

... forgotten. Would you believe it? Bo fell fast asleep with his head in her lap. Then Yulee felt less badly; before she had been troubled about Bo, but now that he was asleep, leaning so upon her, she felt a courage at having one depending upon her whom she must never desert, no, not even if a hippopotamus, as she said, ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder

... have no memory—but they left A record in the desert—columns strown On the waste sands, and statues fallen and cleft, Heaped like a host in battle overthrown; Vast ruins, where the mountain's ribs of stone Were hewn into a city; streets that spread In the dark earth, where never breath has blown Of heaven's sweet air, nor foot ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... the river was blocked with ice. I traveled on foot, without purse or scrip, like the apostles of old, carrying out the motto of the Church, the bee of the desert, "Leave the hive empty-handed and return laden." In this way I, as well as many other elders, brought in money - thousands of dollars yearly - to the Church; and I might say hundreds of thousands, as the people among whom I traveled were mostly wealthy, and when ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee

... before the rickety gate, took out the basket of provisions which Hannibal had secured, paid the driver, who splashed away through the mud as a boat might that had landed and left two people on a desert island. They walked up the oozy path with hearts about as chill and empty as the ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... you are! Yes, and I love you for it! You think that I should desert you, as most women would do!" She laughed again. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... kind folks here as everywhere; they don't desert me. Yes, they see to me a little. As to food, I eat nothing to speak of; but water is here, in the pitcher; it's always kept full of pure spring water. I can reach to the pitcher myself: I've one arm still of use. There's a little girl here, an orphan; now and ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... the masquerade ball we each wore special clothing. The mariner who had swum from the wreck to the desert shore had not a shred ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... with exquisite light. To the southward lay Arizona, land of painted mesas and storied canyon walls, of thundering streams and wild pine forests, of purple-saged valleys and grassy parks, set like mosaics between the stark desert mountains. ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... and are looked upon with much respect by the Moors, who call them Santons. Their patron saint is Hamed au Muza, and from him they derive their name. Their country is on the confines of the Sahara, or great desert, and their language is the Shilhah, or a dialect thereof. They speak but little Arabic. When I saw them for the first time, I believed them to be of the Gypsy caste, but was soon undeceived. A more wandering race does not exist than the children of Sidi ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... Climate: mostly desert; hot and humid along west coast; temperate in western mountains affected by seasonal monsoon; extraordinarily hot, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... society he has kept on his travels. Still I prophesy he will be considered as a fashionable "lion," and perhaps the very uncouthness which jars against my sense of refinement, may even become admired in a scientific traveller, who has been into more desert places, and eaten more extraordinary food, than any other Englishman of the day. I suppose he has given up all chance of inheriting the estate, for I hear he talks of returning to Africa, and becoming a regular wanderer. Your name was not mentioned, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... whom I address, at once, my instruction and my justification, at the time when you shall live, the science of truth no doubt will have advanced a step. Think, then, of all your fathers have suffered, as, bending beneath the weight of their ignorance and uncertainty, they have traversed the desert across which, with so much pain, they have conducted thee! And if the pride of thy young learning shall make thee contemplate the petty strifes in which our life has been consumed, pause and tremble, as you think of that which is still unknown to yourself, and of the judgment that your descendants ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... it then in the honour of a knight to desert a lonely lady? I am learning strange doctrine, strange chivalry! Farewell, sir. You are young. Maybe you will learn with years that when a lady stoops to beg it is ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... killed. That's why all of our stock goes to Hoytville, and small country places. Oh, those big cities are awful places, Laura. It seems to me that it makes people wicked to huddle them together. I'd rather live in a desert than a city. There's Ch o. Every night since I've been there I pray to the Lord either to change the hearts of some of the wicked people in it, or to destroy them off the face of the earth. You know three years ago I got run down, and your uncle ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders

... expression of authority and of alertness. There were some jovial faces amongst them, but the older officers, with their deep-lined cheeks and their masterful noses, were, for the most part, as austere as so many weather-beaten ascetics from the desert. Lonely watches, and a discipline which cut them off from all companionship, had left their mark upon those Red Indian faces. For my part, I could hardly eat my supper for watching them. Young as I was, I knew that if there were any freedom left in Europe it was to these men that we owed it; ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the arm of a yohng woman full of red blood and tingling all over with swift nerve-currents. Life had never looked to her as it did that evening. It was the swan's first breasting the water,—bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of lake and river, and strange longings as the mirage came and dissolved, and at length afloat upon the sparkling wave. She felt as if she had for the first time found her destiny. It was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... by the destruction of the forests. Cultivation is diminishing, vineyards are being washed away, the towns are threatened, the population is dwindling, and unless something is done the country will be reduced to a desert; until, when it has been released from the destructive presence of man, Nature reproduces a covering of vegetable soil, restores the vegetation, creates the forests anew, and once again fits these regions for the habitation ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... the only time in her life his daughter protests. 'Mr. Ogle is extremely offended; nothing but your immediate return can ever excuse you to him! I IMPLORE you to return, I call upon Mamma's sense of propriety to send you here directly. Little did I suspect that my father, my beloved father, would desert me at this distance from home! Every one is surprised.' Dr. Mitford was finally persuaded to travel back to Northumberland to fetch ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... that I should desert you; I said that I had no more sacrifices to make." The Countess rose. "For your sake, Madame, because you have always been kind to me, and because it is impossible not to love you, I have degraded ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... Continent; I am poor; most of my available money I have distributed among the unhappy people, until I am now nearly as poor as themselves; but, independently of that, I do not think it would be right to abandon the charge which God has entrusted to my keeping. The shepherd should not desert his flock, especially in the moment of danger, when the wolves ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... them with a passion fervent as desert heats. His pages are ablaze with them. Somebody lifting up the face, and facing God in some mood or moment of briefer or longer duration—this is Hugo's method. In "Toilers of the Sea," Galliatt, by almost superhuman effort, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... about to place my honor, my daughter's life, the honor of all my family, in your hands. There is not another living being in whom to trust, and I must trust some one. I must, for my child's sake, have relief, or my reason, too, will desert me. Constance, that sick room holds a terrible secret—Sybil's secret. If you can share it with me, for Sybil's sake, I will try to brave this tempest, as I have braved others; if you refuse"—she paused a moment, and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... party of children once the meaning of the word "desert," and all but one shouted out, "rice pudding and oranges!" having in their minds the dinner which we had just eaten. That one, who was older than the rest, said, rather shyly, "A big piece of land, aunty, isn't it?" but even he didn't know how big,—or ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... between the Desert of Arabia and the Mediterranean Sea on the east and west, it is a narrow strip of territory, for the most part mountainous, rugged, and barren. Northward the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon come to meet it from ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce

... think that if what is spent on the fleet be sent in money, and soldiers, and sailors, by way of Nueva Espana in trading fleets, and by way of India in the ships that sail from Lisboa, it would be more expedient—notwithstanding that it is said that the infantry that come by way of Nueva Espana desert at their arrival there; for with good judgment and care that difficulty would be remedied. Will your Majesty decide ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various

... into the country. I was so excited, and so angry at her for playing such a trick on me at the last moment, that I forgot how time was passing, and that is why I was left behind. But it never entered my mind that any one would think that I intended to desert my baby, and I didn't feel afraid either that he wouldn't be taken care of. I had seen ever so many women on board, and some with babies of their own, and I did not doubt that some of these would take ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton



Words linked to "Desert" :   Gibson Desert, Great Australian Desert, Great Salt Desert, Mojave, Thar Desert, desert pea, Gobi, desert mariposa tulip, Patagonian Desert, Australian Desert, desert tortoise, desert selaginella, Gila Desert, Eastern Desert, Chihuahuan Desert, Kavir Desert, Mohave Desert, Sahara, abandon, desert olive, Sahara Desert, desert sunflower, Negev Desert, Mohave, Great Arabian Desert, oasis, Sinai Desert, take flight, piece of ground, Operation Desert Storm, Great Indian Desert, strand, desert boot, Ar Rimsal, Sonoran Desert, Painted Desert, desert rat, Qizil Qum, Mojave Desert, Lut Desert, protest, go forth, Gobi Desert, Kalahari, deserter, Death Valley, An Nafud, Qara Qum, desert rheumatism, defect, desert holly, ditch, maroon, desert willow, resist, go away, leave, parcel of land, expose, Sturt's desert pea, Namib Desert, desert plant, desert lynx, Dahna, Turkestan Desert, piece of land, desert plume, desert sand verbena, Atacama Desert, Nafud, Black Rock Desert, Kizil Kum, Great Victoria Desert, Libyan Desert, Great Sandy Desert, dissent, flee, Taklimakan Desert, Kalahari Desert, Dasht-e-Kavir, An Nefud, desert soil, desert four o'clock, Taklamakan Desert, desert paintbrush



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