"Powdery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... resolutely exposed my skin to the burning rays of the sun, which were reflected from the glittering frozen surfaces, though the sun itself was hidden by clouds. The fissures in the glacier were few and very narrow, and we employed the ladder but once or twice in the immense plain of powdery snow which, towards eight o'clock, opened before us. It was then that our real sufferings began. The heat was excessive; walking, slow and very difficult, for at each step we sank almost to our ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... the horses seemed to take only delight in dashing through the drifts, so that the powdery crystals flew aloft and dusted me all over. I peered across the field to the left, and a curious sight struck me. There was apparently no steady wind at all, but here and there, and every now and then a little whirl of snow would rise and fall again. Every one of them looked ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... watercourses even as I have heard the carbonic-acid gas that pours from volcanic clefts is wont to do. And where it came upon water some chemical action occurred, and the surface would be instantly covered with a powdery scum that sank slowly and made way for more. The scum was absolutely insoluble, and it is a strange thing, seeing the instant effect of the gas, that one could drink without hurt the water from which it had been strained. The vapour did not diffuse as a true gas would do. It hung together in ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... and where, in default of vegetation under the shade of two trees, papers collect, old rags, potsherds, bits of mortar fallen from the roof; a barren ground, where time has shed on the walls, and on the trunks and branches of the trees, a powdery deposit like cold soot. The two parts of the house, set at a right angle, derive light from this garden-court shut in by two adjoining houses built on wooden piers, decrepit and ready to fall, where on each floor some grotesque evidence is to be seen of the craft pursued ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... There were, too, framed in oak, a large photograph of Tamagno, as Othello, with a scrawled, cordial message; another of a graceful woman in the Page's costume of Les Huguenots, signed "Sempre ... Scalchi"; a water colour drawing by Jan Beers; and a Victorian lithograph in powdery foliage and brick of The Penny Rolling Mills. Jaffa. A black-blue rug, from Myrtle Forge, partly covered the broad, oak boards of the floor; and there was a comfortable variety of chairs—sturdy, painted Dutch, winged Windsors and ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... largely calcium carbonate they are very easily acted upon by acids, and a mere touch with an acid might ruin the surface luster. Being partly organic in nature, pearls are not everlasting, but must eventually decay, as is shown by the powdery condition of very old pearls that have been found with mummies or in ancient ruins. The organic matter has yielded to bacterial attack and decayed, leaving only the powdery mineral matter behind. As heat and moisture are the conditions ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... something caught her eye. She knelt down eagerly, and then, looking up, glanced round surreptitiously like a thief. She could not see the Casa Perucca. She was alone on this solitary mountain-side. Slowly she collected the debris of the broken rock, which was mixed with a red powdery soil. ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... add to the lot. He only looked at her, with his short note of laughter that made her keenly conscious of his right to be proud of her. She was proud of herself, inasmuch as herself was shown in the long trail of daring blue her gown made up the stair, and the powdery blue of the aigrette that shivered in her bright, soft puffs and curls—proud that her daring, as it appeared in these things, was still discriminating ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... slop to the flour-barrel. Flour, she had always heard, was the thing for burns and scalds. The pesky calf should be treated right, if it took the whole barrel. Scooping up an extravagant dishpanful of the white, powdery stuff, and recklessly spilling a lot of it to add to the mixture on the floor, she rushed out into the yard to apply her treatment, and, if possible, ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... flushed. The schoolmaster came up to her and stood silent beside her. He was very full of Naples. His shoes were dustless, though everyone else was covered in the fine, impalpable powdery dust of Naples. His high collar was spotless, his coat incredibly black. He looked irresistibly as if ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... meters high, covered with stellate groups of short yellow hairs. Leaves alternate, petiolate, rhomboid-oval or lanceolate, acuminate, 3-nerved, entire or slightly dentate, upper surface glabrous, lower surface covered with woolly hairs and powdery red glands. Flowers yellowish-green, small, dioecious, apetalous, in spikes. Staminate: By 3's in the axil of each bract; perianth, 3 or 5 deeply cut, lanceolate lobules; stamens 15-25, free, inserted in the center of the flower. Pistillate: In the axil ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... slope was scarcely clogged at all. The firs, waving now and interlocking their branches in that vague joy or trouble of the winter wind, were keeping off the powdery drift. When he got to his house he saw Jerry on the way to the barn, but he did not hail him. Possibly Jerry had paid Tenney for his week, and although Raven's own diplomacy would stick at nothing, he preferred to act in good faith, possibly so that he might ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... second room, and returned with a small enamelled dish, and placed it upon the table. The miners rose and gathered round, and saw lying on the bottom about an ounce and a quarter of fine powdery gold. ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... and powdery snow, as it were a fruit of the season, will come twittering a flock of delicate crimson-tinged birds, lesser redpolls, to sport and feed on the buds just ripe for them on the sunny side of a wood, shaking down the powdery snow there ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... while these sounds were still about us we came to the edge of a great open space, perhaps two hundred yards in diameter, and perfectly level. Save for a few lichens that advanced from its margin this space was bare, and presented a powdery surface of a dusty yellow colour. We were afraid to strike out across this space, but as it presented less obstruction to our crawling than the scrub, we went down upon it and began very circumspectly to ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... throat-splitting screech of rage and hate, Bat twisted to safety between her boots. She pressed with thumb and forefinger, firing at the spacealls. The material turned to powdery flakes of ash—except for certain bits which still flapped from the scorched seat—as if something had protected them from the force of the blast. Bat sprang straight up in the air with a scream that tore ...
— All Cats Are Gray • Andre Alice Norton
... and were busily engaged. Some attended to the grinding machine, the roar and clatter of which made it possible for Tom and the others to talk and move about without being overheard. Into this machine certain ingredients were put, and they were then pulverized, and taken out in powdery form. ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... driven waves, three hundred pines Straggle the marches between sand and soil. Like maps of stone-walled fields their branching roots Hold the silt still so that thin grass grows there, Its blades whitened with travelling powdery drift The besom of the lightest breeze sets stirring. That woman's gaze toils worn from remote years, Yet forward yearns through the bright spacious noon, Beyond the farthest isle, whose filmy shape Floats faint on the sea-line. I, scooping grains up ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... merely, capable of being expelled at ordinary boiling temperature, but it forms what is known as water of composition. In this process of hydration, the mineral loses its lustre and crystalline appearance, crumbles away into a more or less—according to its state of disintegration—powdery mass. A very great change is also effected in its chemical composition; it loses nearly all its base. This is effected in the following way. As water enters into the mineral's composition, it sets free a certain portion of ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... eyes In which that nameless azure lies So like shoal-water in its hue, Though all too crystal clear for blue.) As you would suppose, the miller Was very proud of her, And would never fail to tell some tale As to what her graces were. On the powdery air of his own mill Floated the whispers of her skill; At the village inn the loungers knew All that ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... But now there was the Moonship to go farther than they'd been allowed. It was even clumsier in design than the Platform, though it was smaller. But it wasn't designed to stay in space. It was to rest on the powdery floor of ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... of heavy, leaden-grey sky the heather lies black as if washed in ink. Across from the wild North Sea comes a wind thin and nipping, waxing in strength, and with the gathering storm piping ever more shrilly down the glen, driving before it now a fine, powdery white dust that chokes nostril and mouth, and blinds the eyes of those whom necessity compels to be out-doors. It is "an oncome," a "feeding storm." Thus have begun many of the great snowstorms that from ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... them more yellow yet; for each fruit-stalk and each flower-scale at the base of the nut is veined and tipped with bright orange. It pours down the stems, semi-gray on one side, then yellow, and then, on the opposite side, covered with a powdery lichen varying in colour from orange up to clear vermilion, and spreads itself over a floor of yellow sand and brown fallen nuts, and the only vegetation of which, in general, is a long crawling Echites, with pairs of large cream-white ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... knew well that it would go on falling, not to-day perhaps, nor to-morrow, but as certainly as time would bring the following days, so certainly the snow would fall, covering the frozen surface of the earth and water with foot above foot of powdery whiteness. Far as she now was from the gay, active throng of fellow-creatures which she conceived as existing in the outer world, and with whom she longed to be, the snow would make that distance not only great, but impassable ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... hand-to-hand wrestling with storm-demons. The sun laughed from a sky as blue and deep as her own sky of Maine, and the girl laughed with him as she walked along, the powdery snow flying in a cloud from her snow-shoes at ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... the mountain roe: With many a wanton stroke Her feet disperse the powdery snow, That rises ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... believe it when I wrote it," said Mabel modestly. "She's not mad, only she's always reading novelettes, I read the books in the big library. Oh, it's such a jolly room such a queer smell, like boots, and old leather books sort of powdery at the edges. I'll take you there some day. Now your consciences are all right about my aunt, I'll tell you my great idea. Let's get down to the Temple of Flora. I'm glad you got aunt's permission for the grounds. It would be so awkward ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... growing gooseberries successfully is the powdery mildew—a dirty, whitish fungous growth covering both fruit and leaves. It is especially destructive of the foreign varieties, the culture of which, until the advent of the potassium sulfide spray, was being practically abandoned. Use 1 oz. of potassium sulfide (liver of sulphur) to 2 gals. ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... more sturdy and well set-up men, than the sons of the farmhouse of Drumquhat. Many a morning, ere the eldest son of the house rose from his bed in the black dark to look to the sheep, before lighting his candle he brushed off from the coverlet a full arm-sweep of powdery snow. It was a sign of Walter's emancipation from boyhood when he insisted on leaving his mother's cosy little wall-chamber and climbing up the ladder with the boys to their "laft" under the eaves. Nevertheless, it went with a sudden pang to the mother's heart to think that never more ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... of the learned comb Is finished, and the elegant artist strews With lightly shaken hand a powdery mist To whiten ere their time thy ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the ship to be, and in every other direction, to discover if there was any opening in the thick cloud of snow which dropped around us. I say dropped, for I never before saw snow fall so perpendicularly, and in such minute powdery particles. The peculiar and oppressive gloominess which filled the air, made one feel that something unusual was approaching, otherwise I could scarcely fancy that in so perfect a calm any danger could ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mason-bee, "which rakes the roads for a dry powdery dust and mixes it with saliva to convert it into a hard cement," foresee that this ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... fertility of the soil. What would be a poor soil in Europe may prove to be an excellent one in a tropical country. So the famous "red earth" of Sao Paulo, which in a drier climate would be sterile and unproductive, is there excellent because of its extremely permeable, porous and powdery qualities. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... without end over the soft, unpacked snow. It was hard, monotonous work, with none of the joy and blood-stir that went with flying over hard surface. Now one man to the fore in the snowshoes, and now the other, it was a case of stubborn, unmitigated plod. A yard of powdery snow had to be pressed down, and the wide-webbed shoe, under a man's weight, sank a full dozen inches into the soft surface. Snowshoe work, under such conditions, called for the use of muscles other than those used in ordinary ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Indians whose watch fires winked from the hills. To the cry of "Roll out," and the snap of the long whip, the wagon lurched into motion, the thirst-racked animals straining doggedly as it crunched over sage stalks and dragged through powdery hummocks. The old man walked by the wheel, the long lash of his whip thrown afar, flashing in the upper light and descending in a lick of flame on the mules' gray flanks. With each blow fell a phrase of encouragement, the words of a friend who wounds and wounding himself suffers. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... travelled over was sometimes dry and powdery, and sometimes hard and compact. There were no glaciers, and no glacier-ice, properly so called. It never rains at this elevation; and, though evaporation goes on rapidly with half the pressure taken off the air, and a great increase in the intensity ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Professor Lister, and known as antiseptic. What happens to this meat, and what is going on in the water which surrounds it? How long will it be before all the smell of putrefaction has gone and the water is clear again? For it does in time become clear, and instead of the meat we find a fine powdery substance at the bottom of the test tube. It may take weeks before this process is completed, depending on the rate at which it goes on. Now, if we take a drop of this water and examine it with the microscope, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... of all this there was a battered and weather-beaten aspect about the place which made it look centuries old. Great pillars of dust towered skywards, then dispersing, whirled in mighty wreaths over the shining iron roofs, to fall hissing back into the red-powdery streets whence they arose, choking with pungent particles the throats, eyes, and ears of the eager, busy, speculative, acquisitive crowd, who had flocked hither like wasps to a jar of beer and honey. And to many, indeed, it was destined to prove just ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... powdery snow, Making things lovely wherever you go! Merciful, merciful, merciful snow, Masking the ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... mighty stream of the Thames glittered like polished steel as it flowed seaward. As there were only a few leafless trees dotted about the marshy ground, and as that same ground, lightly sprinkled with powdery snow, revealed every moving object for quite a mile or so, Hope could not conceive how the mummy case, which seemed heavy, could have been brought into the silent garden without its bearers being ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... clean forgot my tobacco. I knowed you wasn't a chawin' man, but yore uncle is, an' he mought have left a piece of a plug lyin' round. My old woman tried to git me to use her snuff as a make-shift, but lawsy me! the blamed powdery truck jest washes down my throat like leaves in a mill-race. I never could see how women kin set an' rub an' rub the'r gums with it like they do. I reckon it's jest a ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic[obs3]; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen|!, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c. (narrow) 203; granular &c. (powdery) 330; shrunk &c. 195; brevipennate[obs3]. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a small ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... is pounded between stones till the fibres separate, and in that powdery state is mixed with hot melted buffalo's fat, and sewed up in bags of skin. They say it is most nutritive—a pound equal to four pounds of ordinary meat. A sort of concentrated ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... threaded its way under the window-curtain, and fell in a spot of fluid gold upon the mirror. He watched it move silently across the powdery surface: suddenly another dimpling pool appeared on the soot of the chimney-back, and his eye followed the tremulous beam to its entrance over the top of the shutter. The birds were shouting now in full voice. How fond Benjamin was of his poor caged creatures. ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... trampled snow of the streets, and from the vapors that swam above the squalid houses. There was coal-smoke and a taste of lucifer matches in the air. In the previous night there had been such a storm as London seldom sees; the powdery, flying snow had been blown for many hours before a tyrannous northeast gale, and had settled down, like dust in a neglected chamber, over every surface of the city. Drifts and "snow-wreathes," as northern folk say, were lying ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... is almost necessary to dress oneself in wind clothes if one ventures outside for the briefest periods—exposed woollen or cloth materials become heavy with powdery crystals in a minute or two, and when brought into the warmth of the hut are soon wringing wet. Where there is no drift it is quicker and easier ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... and stood looking at the manapes in their cages. What could be done with them? There was no hope, no possible way by which they could resume their normal lives, for of their human bodies there remained but heaps of fine powdery ashes. ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... of them strode on through the dry powdery snow. One knew by their walk that these men had covered great distances on their feet. Their knees swung easily to every stride, with a hint of the dip that comes from long use of snow-shoes. For a little while Jan hardly thought ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... showered blue milk in the valleys and by the gray seashore. And, on the morrow, where 5 the red milk had been sprinkled, red and brittle ore of iron flecked the ground; where the white milk had been scattered, powdery ore of a yellow hue abounded; and where the blue milk had been showered, flaky masses of crude iron, tough and dark, lay hidden beneath ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... smoke. At Rome there was sunshine, but twenty miles south hung a misty veil, and twenty-five miles above Naples a zone of semi-obscurity began, blotting out the sun, whose light trickled through with a sickly glare. Everything was whitened with powdery dust; pretty white villas were daubed and dripping with mud, and people were busy shoveling the ashes ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... largely developed head, which was ornamented with a superb crest, its body appeared weak and small. It had long slender legs and large wings, its head being armed with a sharp-pointed hooked bill of prodigious size and strength. The plumage was quite black, and had over it the peculiar powdery white secretion which characterises cockatoos. The cheeks were bare, and of an intense blood-red colour. We had heard its voice the evening before, which, unlike the harsh scream of the white cockatoo, ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... double peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal not unlike the Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by a snowy saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts. Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The green and golden forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the sinuous valley brings their lines together or disparts them. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... expletives that you can bring to bear on the subject. What actually happens is that the warm air melts the surface sufficiently to cause drops of water to trickle down slightly, where, on meeting colder layers of snow, they freeze again, forming a honeycomb of icy nodules instead of the soft, powdery, granular snow that we ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... account of the high winds that, even in the calmest weather, prevail there. Although, out on the plain, there was a scarcely perceptible breeze, we had to literally fight our way against the terrific gusts that swept through this narrow gorge. Fortunately, it was a fine day, but the fine powdery snow whirled up and cut into our eyes and faces, and made travelling ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... diameter, and it is perfectly assimilated to the calcareous matrix. 2. Here is a mass of indurated clay; and a gentle blow has exposed part of two Ammonites, smaller than the former, but their shells are white and powdery like chalk. 3. Another fragment is laid open; and there, quite unmistakably, lie the umbo and greater portion of the Plagiostoma concentricum. 4. Another fragment of a granular gritty structure presents a considerable portion of the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... upturned a huge mass of roots and earth, that had silently cemented itself for half a century beneath the sward. Up and down, between Grandfather Holabird's home-field and ours, fallen locusts and wild cherry-trees made an abatis. Over and through all swept the smiting, powdery, seething storm of waters; the air was like a sea, tossing and foaming; we could only see through it by snatches, to cry out that this and that had happened. Down below us, the roof was lifted from a barn, and crumpled up in a heap half a furlong ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... spread out and back to search the sliding heaps of dust-like powdery rock-slide that lay everywhere along ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... monastery of St. Voltaire, as though pulled forward by a gigantic and irresistible hand, leaned from the window. Further he leaned and further until suddenly one of the stones loosened under his weight, broke from its cement with a soft powdery sound—and, first headlong, then head over heels, finally in a vast and impressive revolution tumbled the Chevalier O'Keefe, bound for the hard earth and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... small sound of protest drowned by the bellowing of the storm and the ringing songs of McTee. Now the smoke rose again and this time the peg kept firm. The smoke grew pungent; there was a spark, then a glow, and it spread and widened among the powdery, rotten wood which Harrigan had heaped around ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... provisions rolled up in his blankets, with a pick and shovel strapped on them, and in either hand a gallon bag of water. No light work this with the thermometer standing at 100 degrees in the shade, and the track inches deep in fine, powdery dust; and yet men start off with a light heart, with perhaps, a two hundred mile journey before them, replenishing their bundles as they pass through camps on ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... he cried, "I can't. I can never kiss you again. I have loved to touch you, always. I have loved your cool, sweet, powdery skin, and your lips,—I have always thought of your lips as a crimson bow in a pale pink cloud,—I—I have loved to touch you. I have always adored your face, the look of it as well as the feel of it. I have loved ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... to rummage through a little condensed chaos of handkerchiefs, gloves, powder-puff, powdery dollar bills, powdery coins, loose bits of paper, samples, thread, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... dried twigs and rubbed them between his palms, thus making a small powdery mass into which, after mixing with it a few grains of powder from the priming, he struck sparks from the flint and steel of his rifle. The smell of the cooking meat made him ravenous and, like an Indian, he ate it half raw. He then ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... the depth of two inches. Nepenthe lay veiled in Cimmerian gloom, darker than starless midnight—a darkness that could be felt; a blanket, as it were, hot and breathless, weighing upon the landscape. All was silent. No footfall could be heard in the streets; the powdery ashes, softer than snow, absorbed every sound. And still they fell. Those few scared natives whom necessity forced to go abroad crept about in fear of their lives. They thought the end of the world ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... less shut up in the hut. Although the temperature was not especially low anyone who went outside for even the briefest moment had to dress in wind clothes, because exposed woolen or cloth materials became so instantaneously covered with powdery crystals, that when they were brought back into the warmth they were soon wringing wet. When, however, there was no drift it was quicker and easier to slip on an overcoat, and for his own garment of this description Scott ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... from that of Middle Minoan II. Polychrome decoration steadily declines, and is superseded by monochrome. The beautiful lustrous black glaze ground of the vases is replaced by a dull purple slip on which the decoration is often laid in a powdery white paint. The best designs are found in this white upon a lilac or mauve ground. In the designs themselves conventionalism and geometric ornament pass away, and are followed by a development of naturalism. Dr. Mackenzie has pointed out that it is to this ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... and Thursdays, the market days. The favourite place was the "Soko de barra," or large bazar, outside the town whose condition is that of Suez and Bayrut half a century ago. It is a foul slope; now slippery with viscous mud, then powdery with fetid dust, dotted with graves and decaying tombs, unclean booths, gargottes and tattered tents, and frequented by women, mere bundles of unclean rags, and by men wearing the haik or burnus, a Franciscan frock, tending ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Inyan Kara,—the Heengha-Kaaga of the Sioux, stands sentinel over the sisterhood slumbering at her feet. These are the Black Hills of Dakota, as we see them from the breaks of the Mini Pusa, a long day's march to the west. Here to our right, southeastward, rolls the powdery flood of the South Cheyenne, when earlier in the season the melting snows go trickling down the hill-sides. But to-day only in dry and waving ripples of sand can we trace its course. If you would see the water, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... a thin, powdery snow was driving about. Had they lost their way in the calendar as well as on the trail, and was it December instead of the 29th of March? The Colonel sat on the packed sled, undoing with stiff fingers the twisted, frozen rope. He knew the axe that he used the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... western Asia. Except in the extreme south, the rainfall is small and the air dry. The heat in summer is intense, while bitterly cold northern blasts sweep the plain in winter. Whirlwinds are not uncommon; and, in the intervals of the periodical inundations, the fine, dry, powdery soil is swept, even by moderate breezes, into stifling clouds, or rather fogs, of dust. Low inequalities, elevations here and depressions there, diversify the surface of the alluvial region. The latter are occupied by enormous marshes, while the former support ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... past us! Ah! with that let me go To the clear, waning hill-side, Unspotted by snow, There to watch, o'er the sunk vale, The frore mountain-wall, Where the niched snow-bed sprays down Its powdery fall. There its dusky blue clusters The aconite spreads; There the pines slope, the cloud-strips Hung soft in their heads. No life but, at moments, The mountain-bee's hum. —I come, O ye mountains! Ye ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... of Chella lie on the farther side of the plateau above the native town of Rabat. The mighty wall enclosing them faces the city wall of Rabat, looking at it across one of those great red powdery wastes which seem, in this strange land, like death and the desert forever creeping up to overwhelm the puny works ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... of resinous dead limbs from the pine trees, and perhaps the heart of a dead pine stub or stump. Then, with infinite patience, you may be able to tease the flame. Sometimes a small dead birch contains in the waterproof envelope of its bark a species of powdery, dry touchwood that takes the flame readily. Still, it is easy enough to start a blaze—a very fine-looking, cheerful, healthy blaze; the difficulty is to prevent its petering out the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom. Little flakes of fire fell and powdery ashes fell softly, alighting on the houses of men. They stirred, waking from sleep, troubled ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... on. Their feet struck up the powdery snow, their breath smoked into the sharp clear air, and they were gone before the air was cleared of snow and vapour. Now and then Christian glanced up to judge, by the rising of the stars, of the coming of ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... fertilization. This is done by cutting away (with scissors) the stamens of the flower to be fertilized, a short time before they arrive at maturity, and taking a flower in which the pollen is ripe, dry, and powdery, from the stalk of the variety wished for the male parent; and holding it in the right hand, and then striking it on the finger of the left, held near the flower, thus scattering the pollen on the stigma of the pistil of the flower to be fertilized. The utmost care should be ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... sack of powdery tobacco, and spilled some grains into a brown cigarette paper, twisting it deftly and bending over the ends. Then he smoked with such enjoyment ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... do hate to be beat," yelled Jim, as he helped me off. I stumbled into the cabin and fell upon a buffalo robe and lay there absolutely spent. Jones and Frank came in a few minutes apart, each anathematizing the gritty, powdery sand. ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... in an open vessel; the water is changed to a vapour which disappears, and a white powdery earth remains in ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... bathtub, and his atmosphere had already filtered away with the wind to wherever it was going. Lljub's pale glow was out for good, and his crystalline heart was as opaque as a dead eye. Only a few pieces of Urdaz's tank were visible, and Urdaz himself had already turned to a powdery food that the wind ate slowly in ...
— Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? • Bryce Walton
... formed about the beginning of June, and then the catkin adjacent to the cone is completely covered with quantities of pale yellow farina. If handled, it covers the fingers as though they had been dipped in sulphur-flour; shake the branch and it flies off, a little cloud of powdery particles. The scaly bark takes a ruddy tinge, when the sunshine falls upon it, and would then, I think, be worthy the attention of an artist as much as the birch bark, whose peculiar mingling of silvery ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... of the grapes, exquisite in their purple bloom, delicate as the dust on the wings of a butterfly. They examined the fruit together; and when Jack raised his eyes, he admired on the cheeks of the young girl the same faint, powdery bloom. Her hair, blown in the wind in a soft halo above her brow, added to this effect. He had never seen a face so changed and brightened as hers. Exercise and the excitement of her pretty toil, the gayety of the vineyard, the laughs and shouts of the laborers, had absolutely ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... It was a cold, powdery afternoon in January, with the snow thick on the ground, save where the little winds had blown the crown of the street bare before Mrs. Falconer's house. A post-chaise with four horses swept wearily round the corner, and pulled ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... puff and waft the powdery snow, As feet unseen did pass; While, waiting in its bed below, Green lies ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... Ankle-deep in the powdery sand, we entered the little town with its business row facing the water front. One glance at the empty levees told you of the town's dead glory. Not a steamboat's stacks, blackening in the gloom, broke ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... to come into collision with the dustpan full of flour which lay near his chair. A second more and the fruits of the sweeping drifted broadcast in a powdery cloud. ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... loses time: but two people, seated opposite, can alternately take up the rubbing, and more easily produce fire. A little of the above-mentioned powdered charcoal is dropped into the notch during the operation. In a very few minutes red-hot powdery ashes commence to work up out of the notch, which falling on a small heap of tow, or of dry tow-like bark, or lint, or cotton stuff, is quickly blown into a flame. The Africans carry the drill-stick, which in shape and size is like an arrow, in a quiver with their arrows, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... pines of the ice-bound wilderness in which Thurston toiled. Helen was not on the veranda, and not knowing where to search further, the young man sank somewhat heavily into a chair. Geoffrey had ridden all night through powdery snow-drifts which rose at times to the stirrup, and at others so high that his horse could scarcely flounder through them. He had made out lists of necessary stores as the jolting train sped on to Vancouver, and had been busy every moment ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss |
