|
|
|
More "Oasis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... court in all its glory, scattered along the shady Castle Avenue—in carriages, in traps, in motors and in the saddle. His brain whirled and his heart leaped under the pressure of a new-found interest in life. The unexpected oasis loomed up before his eyes just as he was abandoning all hope in the unprofitable desert of Romance. He saw green trees and sparkling rivulets, and he sighed with a new, strange content. No, on second thoughts, he would not go to ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... nothing but the eternal "sowbelly," beans, and coffee; while at Sunk Creek the omelet and the custard were frequent. The passing traveller was glad to tie his horse to the fence here, and sit down to the Judge's table. For its fame was as wide as Wyoming. It was an oasis in the ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... crests to enormous heights out of the dead level of the prairie. A tumbled sea of Nature's wreckage lay strewn about unaccountably, for a distance of something like two miles, east and west, and double that distance from north to south. It was an oasis of natural splendor in the heart of a ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... without, and all soft and cool and luxurious within. He was so charmed with this comparison—he had a knack of being easily pleased with his own thoughts—that he commenced to turn a fresh sentence for the Bishop, and to sketch out an elegant description of the oasis in his desert of a vineyard. While at this occupation, he was disturbed by the sound of voices in the garden, and it appeared to him that someone near at hand was sobbing and crying. Softly stepping on the broad verandah, he saw, on the grass-plot, two persons, an old man ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... passed over Clara as a desert wind passes over an oasis, bringing no pleasant songs of birds, and sowing no fruitful seed. She had her born ideas as to men and women, and she was seemingly incapable of receiving any others. In her mind men were strong and brave, and women weak and timorous; she believed that the first were good to hold ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... refusal of intimacy with the one visible symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outer edge of the oasis. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Navy Club, and for him the swishing of the palm branches had been transformed into the long-drawn hum of Pall Mall. So the spirits went their several ways, wandering back along the strange, un-traced tracks of the memory, while the weary, grimy bodies lay senseless under the palm-trees in the Oasis of ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... horse was yet riderless; and the pastoral had therefore, to some extent, superseded the pure hunting stage. But what inroad could the stone hatchet make unaided upon the virgin forests of those remote days? The neolithic clearing must have been a mere stray oasis in a desert of woodland, like the villages of the New Guinea savages at the present day, lying few and far between among vast stretches ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... and Cara came upon a small grove, like an oasis in the stretching acres of stubble. Under a scarlet maple that reared itself skyward all aflame, and shielded by a festooning profusion of wild-grape, a fallen beech-trunk offered an inviting seat. The girl halted ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... another hill piled on the summit of the first. An additional mile of plateau followed, from which could be discerned two light-houses on the coast they were nearing, reposing on the horizon with a calm lustre of benignity. Another oasis was reached; a little dell lay like a nest at their feet, towards which the driver pulled the horse at a sharp angle, and descended a steep slope which dived under the trees like a rabbit's burrow. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... its oases he beheld a young Arab asleep. He awoke, and, leaving behind him a bag of pearls, sprang into the saddle and rapidly disappeared from the horizon. Another Arab came to the oasis; he discovered the pearls, took them, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... his dressing-gown about his long legs, took up a stand in front of the fireplace. From this position he surveyed the room, his shoulders against the mantelpiece, his calves pressing the club-fender. It was a cheerful oasis in a chill and foggy world, a typical London bachelor's breakfast-room. The walls were a restful gray, and the table, set for two, a comfortable arrangement in white ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... desert travel—if I remember right, it was exactly a fortnight after the dog Pharaoh, of which I shall soon have plenty to say, had come into Orme's possession—we reached an oasis called Zeu, where I had halted upon my road down to Egypt. In this oasis, which, although not large in extent, possesses springs of beautiful water and groves of date-trees, we were, as it chanced, very welcome, since when I was there before, ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Boulevard des Italiens for the timid bistrop of Monsieur Delmas in the scrawny Rue Huygens, with its soupe aux legumes at twenty centimes the bowl, its cotelette de veau at fifty the plate. A queer oasis, this, with old Delmas's dog suffering from the St. Vitus and quivering against the tables as you eat; with its marked napkins in a rack, like the shaving cups in a rural barber shop, one napkin a week to each regular ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... their surroundings. At distances varying from a mile to a mile and a half a few dilapidated dwellings peeped out of a fringe of woods. Everything else was pine-swamp, with the exception of the one small field of potatoes in which they were encamped, and which stood out as an oasis in the wilderness. Through the midst of the landscape straggled a muddy road, hopelessly impassable for foot-travellers. Certainly the ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... that flank, without appearing to do so heavily, the north and northwest. Even a barberry hedge on two sides of a garden, wedge point to north, like the wild-goose squadrons of springtime, will make that spot an oasis in the ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... certain natural advantages, I grant." Sir Richard spoke rather dubiously. "We went over it one day, in a spirit of curiosity; and I have a pretty clear recollection of the place. To begin with, as I told you the Bedouin encampment is a sort of oasis in a valley at the foot of some quite respectably high rocks. You know the desert is not, as some people imagine, merely a flat expanse of sand. Here and there are ranges of hills, limestone, and so on—and now and then one comes across quite a chain of rocky places which in another ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... M'alme," the Mussulman replied. "But if the camel hath not drunk of the waters of the oasis, how can he know that they be sweet? These Nasara (Christian) makers of maps, what can they know of my ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... breeze; then, in the midst of the songs of his sailors,—songs so clear and sonorous, that they would have made a divine harmony had their notes been taken down,—he saw the Island of Monte Cristo, no longer as a threatening rock in the midst of the waves, but as an oasis in the desert; then, as his boat drew nearer, the songs became louder, for an enchanting and mysterious harmony rose to heaven, as if some Loreley had decreed to attract a soul thither, or Amphion, the enchanter, intended there to ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... one, but a dozen, horizons—a dozen heavens—seemed there, whilst the thunder that reached us from below seemed too remote to threaten. But at last the clouds gathered in form and volume, hiding the little firmaments of violet and amber; the bright blue sky, bending over the green oasis—all vanished as if by magic. We could see no more, and nothing remained but to go back, and the quicker the better. The storm, our guide said, was too far off to reach us yet, and we might reach the chlet without being drenched ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... adjacent territory of Khorassan, to the land of the Tekke Turcomans, and to Merv, thus penetrating the mysteries of Central Asia as no European traveller had ever done so perfectly before. In 1881 he returned to England, and published his book, "The Merv Oasis," and afterwards read a paper before the Royal Geographical Society on "Merv ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... isolated example, ahead of its time, unless, as is the case with the Castilian epic, more poems are lost than extant. The often quoted Cantica de la Virgen of Gonzalo de Berceo (first half of thirteenth century), with its popular refrain Eya velar, is an oasis in the long religious epics of the amiable monk of S. Millan de la Cogolla. One must pass into the succeeding century to find the next examples of the true lyric. Juan RUIZ, the mischievous Archpriest ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... and home-like your room always looks!" he exclaimed, taking the cup of tea which Mrs. O'Reilly handed to him. "I am horribly lonely at Ivy Cottage. This house is a sort of oasis in ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... conditions. The cloth upon the plain deal table was of fine linen, the decanter and glasses were beautifully cut; there were walnuts and, in a far Corner, cigars of a well-known brand and cigarettes from a famous tobacconist. Beyond that little oasis, however, were all the evidences of a hired abode. A hole in the closely drawn curtains was fastened together by a safety pin. The horsehair easy-chairs bore disfiguring antimacassars, the photographs which adorned the walls were grotesque but typical of village ideals, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mother's husband as his father only in name. This belief was always common in Egypt, and even Alexander the Great found it expedient to adopt it, for he made a journey to the sanctuary of Amen (Ammon) in the Oasis of Siwah in order to be officially acknowledged by the god. Having obtained this recognition, he became ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... day—it's worth you scarce could tell From other days; but in my life 'twill dwell An oasis with palm trees ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... most excellent fish and innumerable turtles sport in the lagoons, while curlews, snipe, ducks and other aquatic fowls flock on their shores; and not the least of the gifts with which the munificent hand of nature has so bountifully endowed this delicious oasis of the ocean is its delightful and soft, yet invigorating, climate, that makes well nigh useless the ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... repose, with her large hands, reddened by the day's work, lying idle in her lap, sat opposite to him in silence; for once she listened to him, whereas all day he had listened to her; and the moment made a daily oasis in the life of a man who, in his own dull, peasant way, knew that he was a failure, and knew also that no one was so well aware ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... drew closer to the clump of trees standing so oddly isolated amid the waste of alkali, they noted with surprise that they were not to be the only persons to share the hospitality of the oasis. From amid the foliage a column of blue smoke was rising, betokening the presence of other wayfarers. Instantly speculation became rife among the young folks. Who could be the sharers of their excursion into the untraveled wastes? They were ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... first time the doctor began to take an intelligent interest in his surroundings, and saw that the tree, the white stoop and the small white building were situated in a little, quiet oasis separated by a low fence from the desert of a large yard containing the red pump. On the other side ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... law. Conquest had brought landed property into the hands of Assyrians in other parts of the Eastern world, and it could be put up to auction at Nineveh, where the proprietors lived. About 660 B.C., for instance, a considerable estate was thus sold in the oasis of Singara, in the centre of Mesopotamia. It lay within the precincts of the temple of Istar, and contained a grove of 1,000 young palms. It included, moreover, a field of 2 homers planted with terebinths, house-property extending over 6 homers, a house ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... to Suez, and is nearly one hundred miles in length; it is artificial, with the exception of a channel through Bitter Lakes and Lake Tinsuh. All along the way, we were virtually traversing the desert, Isma'iliya presenting a small oasis, fifty miles from Port Said. From the deck we watched the monotonous scene, hour after hour, the landscape being old and colorless, with great billows of sand in the foreground, and here and there occasional hillocks. Once we saw mountains ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... she moved amongst her uncouth surroundings. Her beautiful face and graceful figure was like to an oasis of stately flora in a desert of trailing, vicious brambles, and he marveled at the familiarity with which she came among these people. Moreover, he became beset with misgivings as he remembered the old stories which linked this girl's name ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... six weeks my husband returned from the west, and with many pleasant recollections of Battleford, we left for our own home, which I had pictured in my mind with joyous anticipation, as the place of our continued happiness: a beautiful oasis, in that land of prairie and sparse settlement, and with a buoyancy of spirit which true happiness alone can bring, I looked forward with anticipated pleasure, which made that little log house appear to me, a palace, and ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... miles and many days' journey toward the rising sun, over seas and mountains and deserts,—farther to the east than Rome, or Constantinople, or even Jerusalem and old Damascus,—stand the ruins of a once mighty city, scattered over a mountain-walled oasis of the great Syrian desert, thirteen hundred feet above the sea, and just across the northern border of Arabia. Look for it in your geographies. It is known as Palmyra. To-day the jackal prowls through its deserted streets and the lizard suns ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... garden-girt towns and smiling villages of the "Rouge-River" Valley, perhaps the most picturesque and fertile in the world, a day was passed at Shasta Springs, the summer resort of fashionable Californians, where the sun-baked traveller may rest awhile in a little oasis of coolness and gaiety, cascades and flowers, set in a desert of dark pines. A week with old friends in cosmopolitan, ever delightful San Francisco, a rapid and luxurious journey across the American continent, land on August ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... horsemen of the desert. A battle was fought, a victory was won; but it was difficult to say what had been gained by the victory. The king had vanished out of sight in the distance. In the interior of the modern beylik of Tunis, close on the edge of the great desert, there lay on an oasis provided with springs the strong place Thala;(14) thither Jugurtha had retired with his children, his treasures, and the flower of his troops, there to await better times. Metellus ventured to follow the king through a desert, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in courage and intelligence, finished his work of devotion by carrying him across the hot, slippery, scarcely discernible track on the granite. Behind him lay the hell of burning sand, before him the earthly paradise of the most beautiful oasis ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... itself is at a height of 7853 feet. The cultivation is of the same description as that in Baltistan. The aspect of the country is bleak till the Indus is crossed, and Gilgit (4890 feet) is reached. Here there is a fertile well-watered oasis from which on every side great mountain peaks are visible. The lands are heavily manured. Rice, maize, millet, buckwheat, cotton, wheat, barley, rape, and lucerne are grown. There is a second and easier road to Gilgit from India over the ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... is figurative, but figures are sometimes useful. Murray's Dictionary defines an oasis as "a fertile spot in the midst of a desert"; and no combination of words could better describe the ideal which I wish to set ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... But, independently of the Robinson Crusoes of the class, many such slaves of conventionalism achieve their freedom while intending only to better their condition. They emigrate to a new country, and find themselves actually in a desert island—an oasis in the wilderness—where it is necessary to work at whatever employment offers the means of subsistence—to resort to all sorts of shifts and expedients, and to submit cheerfully to the deprivation of things they had in former times reckoned necessaries of life. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... such pictures as the high-priests, for a bribe, showed to Alexander in the innermost shrine of the white temple in the Libyan oasis: such pictures as the pontiff of the sun strove to hide from Cortez, when, sword in hand, he burst open the sanctorum of the pyramid-fane at Cholula: such pictures as you may still see, perhaps, in the central alcove of the excavated ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... of rigid mechanistic automatism in the regular routine of living with rioting individual license in recreational pleasure. The Free Level seemed some ancient Bagdad, some Bourbon Court, some Monte Carlo set here, an oasis of flourishing vice in a desert of sterile law-made, machine-executed efficiency and puritanically ordered life. Aided by a hundred ingenious wheels and games of chance, men and women gambled with the coin and credit of the level. These games ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... line, but this, we were told, did not matter. We were here, we were informed, "for a special purpose" and for action against distant targets only. There was an orchard on the flat just behind our guns, a little oasis of fertility in that barren land, and wooden crosses marking the graves of some of the Italian Trench Mortar ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... armed caravan was scarcely out of sight before Rob discovered he was approaching a rich, wooded oasis of the desert, in the midst of which was built the walled city of Yarkand. Not that he had ever heard of the place, or knew its name; for few Europeans and only one American traveler had ever visited it. But he guessed it was a city of some ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... violins and violin structure naturally bored the jury almost to extinction, and even the bitter personal encounters of counsel did not serve to relieve the dreariness of the trial. One oasis of humor in this desert of dry evidence gave them passing refreshment, when a picturesque witness for the defense, an instrument maker named Franz Bruckner, from South Germany, having been asked if the violin shown him was a Strad., replied, with a grunt of disgust: "Ach Himmel, nein!" ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... period has swept over the land, since those cities breathed their last, as the mounds of shifting sand, and the sterile and now dead soil of the immense central plains of the basin of Tarim testify.... In the oasis of Cherchen some 300 human beings represent the relics of about a hundred extinct nations and races—the very names of which are now unknown to our ethnologists." (Vol. I, page xxxii et seq.) See also Col. Prjevalsky's Travels. Why should it not be so? The above was written in 1888, ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... the early days of colonisation, either proves herculean strength or the triumph of mind over matter, but to those of less heroic mould the unwonted amenities of a more familiar civilisation are welcome as a green oasis in a sandy desert. A cool and healthy mountain climate gives unwonted zest for the lovely excursions of which Garoet is the centre. From the little lake Setoe Bajendit, a covered raft plies to a cupola-crowned hill, facing a noble panorama of volcanic peaks the Soendanese desa of basket-work huts, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the other dog, whose name was Brenda, 'and be sure you stop at a really first-class oasis for the night. But I know we can ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... fourth daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in 1858, and here, too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields and trees that still maintain a green though besmutted oasis in the busy heart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soon engulf them, there were kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians. She died a few years ago, mourned and missed by her own people—those lifelong neighbors who know truly ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was like an oasis to Prof. Seabrook, or, as he afterwards expressed it, "it shone in his memory like a pure, ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... have made a rich selection of examples from the works of living English and American authors. From the inextensive volumes of an eminent and fastidious critic I have culled a dear phrase about an oasis of style in "a desert of literary limpness." But it were hardly courteous, and might be dangerous, to publish ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... going farther and farther away to a bit of an oasis where the Sheikh's people are gathered with their flocks. They find pasture there at this time of year, and a little employment with the travellers who come to Cairo. In the summer time, when the city is pretty ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... suddenly twisted downwards, they would have found no water that night nor ever after, and the Sahara would have taken them as she has taken so many and shall take so many more. All that night they followed their new course: at dawn they found an oasis and the ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... encamp for some time. For many miles on either side the river was fringed with dense groves of the green nabbuk, but upon the east bank an island had been formed of about three hundred acres. This was a perfect oasis of verdure, covered with large nabbuk trees, about thirty feet high, and forming a mixture of the densest coverts, with small open glades of rich but low herbage. To reach this island, upon which we were to encamp, it was necessary to cross the arm of the river, ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... sanctuary both for Roman Catholic Croats and for Orthodox Serbs, and sometimes acted as intermediary on behalf of its co-religionists with the Turkish authorities, with whom it wielded great influence. Intellectually also it was a sort of Serb oasis, and the only place during the Middle Ages where Serbian ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... woman wrung her hands and groaned. How I hated her! And in my madness I accused her of putting it there to ruin me. And some one (a man) said slowly, 'She is impossible!—quite impossible!' That one memory stands out like a little oasis in a desert of mirage and shifting sand, and thirst. I should know the room again if I saw it. There was a window opening into a little paved courtyard with a fountain in it, and doves drinking. ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... the land grew more and more barren and utterly devoid of inhabitants, till at last it merged into desert. At the edge of this desert which rolled away without apparent limit we came, however, to a kind of oasis where there was a strong and beautiful spring of water that formed a stream which soon lost itself in the surrounding sand. As we could go no farther, for even if we had wished to do so, and were able to find water there, the Mazitu refused to ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... never meant to be an oasis of liberty and abundance in a worldwide desert of disappointed dreams. Our Nation was created to help strike away the chains of ignorance and misery and tyranny wherever they keep man less than God ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... travel, conspiracy, scheming, planning, spending, with its invariable ending of disappointment and weariness of heart, brought forth a longing for the peace of rest, routine, satisfied aspirations; and from a dream the convent became a passion, longed for as the oasis by ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... the proprietor of this roadside ranch, this artificial oasis in a land of desolation, strolled into the big bare room where half a dozen troopers were dozing or gambling, it was with an air of confidential joviality that he whispered to the ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... Oak kverko. Oakum stupo. Oar remilo. Oasis oazo. Oath (legal) jxuro. Oath (curse) blasfemo. Oatmeal grio. Obduracy obstineco. Obdurate obstina. Obedience obeo. Obedient obea. Obeisance riverenco. Obelisk obelisko. Obese grasega. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... motive. It demands social hope, confidence, enthusiasm and sacrifice, and all the while it cuts their nerves. It tells men that the universe is fundamentally a moral desert, that it never was intended even to have an oasis of civilization in it, that if we make one grow it will be by dint of our own effort against the deadset of the universe's apathy, that if, by our toil, an oasis is achieved, it will have precarious tenure in such alien and inhospitable soil, and that in the end it will ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... but the way was far, and it was hours before, from a high dune, he had seen a large pan in the distance, to which all the birds were converging. "A big pan, master," he said, "with thick bush and big trees an oasis or perhaps who knows? a river bed." And frantic with thirst as he was, he had not gone on, but turned back hoping ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... that she may inscribe marks in a grade book or on report cards, then the child will never know the sea as her father knows it, unless this knowledge comes to her from sources outside the school. Instead of becoming a living thing and the source of life, her sea will be a desert without oasis, or grass, or tree, or bird, or bubbling spring to refresh and inspire. It would seem a sad commentary upon our teaching if the child is compelled to gain a right conception of the sea outside the school and in spite of the ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... treaty, of that Dacia which Trajan had united with so much ostentation to the empire. Europe was now again in repose; and Aurelian found himself at liberty to apply his powers as a reorganizer and restorer to the East. In that quarter of the world a marvellous revolution had occurred. The little oasis of Palmyra, from a Roman colony, had grown into the leading province of a great empire. This island of the desert, together with Syria and Egypt, formed an independent monarchy under the sceptre of Zenobia. [Footnote: Zenobia is complimented by ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... degrees, or 4 degrees hotter than that of the Yeumtong hot-springs, though 4000 feet higher, and of precisely the same character. A Barbarea and some other plants make the neighbourhood of the hot-springs a little oasis, and the large marmot is common, uttering its ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... oppressed by their proximity. Shelley was at work on the Triumph of Life, one of his grandest poems; but Mary was always apprehensive except when with her husband, least so when lying in a boat with her head on his knees. If Shelley were absent, she feared for Percy, her son, so that, in spite of the oasis of peace and rest and beauty around them, she was weak and nervous; and Shelley, for fear of hurting her, had to conceal such matters as might trouble her, especially the again critical state of the affairs of her father, who was in want of four ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... am a Mormon too," returned Cole, "but my hands are stained with blood. Soon yours will be if you keep your water-holes and your cattle. Yes, I know. You're strong, stronger than any of us, far off in your desert oasis, hemmed in by walls, cut off by canyons, guarded by your Navajo friends. But Holderness is creeping slowly on you. He'll ignore your water rights and drive your stock. Soon Dene will steal cattle under your very eyes. Don't make ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... Friars' Holm, usually a coolly green oasis in the midst of the surrounding streets, seemed as airless as any back court or alley, and Coppertop, who had been romping ever more and more flaggingly with a fox-terrier puppy he had recently acquired, finally gave up the effort and flung ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... feeble attention of savage man and taught him facts of nature, through his eagerness to get signs of coming plenty or suggestions as to his own plans and efforts. Attention has been called to a very interesting fact about the fructification of the domesticated date palm wherever oasis cultivation prevailed in western Asia.[1887] The fructification must be artificial. Men carry the pollen to the female plant and adopt devices to distribute it on the wind or by artificial contact. At the present time this is done by attaching ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... and from its wide stone chimneys the pearly smoke rose upward in the still air through the poplar branches. Beyond it a setting sun gilded the corn-fields, and horses and cattle dotted the pastures. We stood for a while staring at this oasis in the wilderness, and to my boyish fancy it was a fitting introduction to a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... must introduce myself; I knew your dear mother so well when we were both girls. I am so delighted to find such a church—quite an oasis; and I want to ascertain the best hour for calling on her. Quite an invalid—I was so shocked to hear it. Will the afternoon suit her? I am only here for three days to deposit these two girls, while I take the other on a round of visits. ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... east, which affords to the curious mind a pretty large latitude to locate it in. Others still place it between Namur Nur and the Kuen-Lun Mountains, but one and all firmly believe in Scham-bha-la, and speak of it as a fertile fairy-like land once an island, now an oasis of incomparable beauty, the place of meeting of the inheritors of the esoteric wisdom of the god-like inhabitants of the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... these there was a picture album. Alice at the Red Sands. Alice at the Phobos Oasis. Alice at the Darnella Ruins. He turned the pages of the album with numb fingers. Alice in a dozen Martian settings. Some of them were dated. About two years ago. They had gone together, Alice had said, but there was no evidence of Mel's ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... his home in the meadows of the Yosemite Valley, where the clear waters of the Merced preserve the verdure of the fields the whole summer through. In midsummer, the floor of the Yosemite Valley is like an oasis in the desert. On all sides are rough, dry mountains; and if you follow the river down to the San Joaquin Valley it becomes lost in a vast parched plain. But between its mountain walls, where Mamie lived and where Mat pursued ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... dreary desert, it is pleasant to arrive at one little oasis: Louisiana has enacted that slaves brought into that State for sale, shall forthwith be set free; but they must be sent out of ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... been made and carry her off for a day up the river, where a quiet little lunch, in the tranquil shade of overhanging trees, and the cosy, intimate talk that was its invariable concomitant, seemed like an oasis of familiar, homely pleasantness in the midst of the gay ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... natural share, because to him as a bondman laziness was great gain, for he had no pecuniary interest in his own labor. Hence, holidays were more to be desired than whole labor days, and he learned to do as little as he might, be excused as often as he could, and hail Saturday as the oasis in a desert week. He hails it yet. The labor efficiency of the Negro has greatly increased since the emancipation, for self-interest is a factor now. In 1865, each Negro produced two-thirds of a bale of cotton; now he produces an ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... city of Asia situated in an oasis of the Syrian desert, supposed to be the Tadmor built by Solomon in the wilderness (II. Chr., ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in the bottom of his heart, a presentiment that it was to her alone he would hereafter be able to look for countenance and comfort? And would he avail himself of the refuge? When those whom their friends—whether justly or not—have abandoned, chance to stumble upon some oasis of unconditional affection, they are not squeamish about its source or orthodoxy; if the sentiment be sincere and hearty, that is enough. In the present case, moreover, Cornelia, as a last resort, was by no means so uninviting an object as she might ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... life, and we have all sorts of sensations. We hunger and are fed. We are thirsty, and reach an oasis. We are homeless, and find shelter. We are ill, and again walk the streets. We dig and delve and strain every nerve and tissue, and the triumph comes at last, and with it often riches and honor. All these things send shivers of delight through us, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of September, 1798, the traveller left Cairo with a caravan, and visited the famous oasis of Jupiter Ammon or Siwah, situated in the desert on the east of Egypt. It is a small independent state, which acknowledges the Sultan, but is exempt from paying tribute. The town of Siwah is surrounded by several villages, at distances of a mile or two. It is built upon a rock in which the inhabitants ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... slope extending along its eastern edge, Helen made a discovery. All these latter days she had thought of the desert as behind her, lying all to the westward. Now she understood how the ranch was aptly named Desert Valley; it was a freak, an oasis, a fertile valley with desert lands to east as well as west, and to north and south. When they had ridden down the far slope of the hills they were once more upon the edges of the solitudes of sand-sweep and sand-ridge and cactus and mesquite and utter drought. Every step their ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... fertile and productive, being well watered by the Sefid Roud (White River). Rice is largely grown, but to-day not a trace of vegetation is visible; nothing but the vast white plain, smooth and unbroken, save where, here and there, a brown village blurrs its smooth surface, an oasis of mud huts in this ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... sighing and sobbing about. He lives, you know, very many miles from here. His home is beyond a great sea; in the midst of a vast desert there is an oasis, and it is among the palm-trees and the flowers of this oasis that the south wind abides. When spring calls from the North, "O south wind, where are you? Come hither, my sunny friend!" the south wind leaps from ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... feel like one who has long wandered through the desert, his feet burnt with the sand, his hair scorched with the sun, and, exhausted with hunger and thirst, feels death approaching. Suddenly he discovers a green oasis, and a being with outstretched arms calling to him with a soft, angel-like voice: 'Come, save thyself in my arms; feel that thou art not alone in the desert, for I am with thee, and ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... From above, meanwhile, a perennial shower descended. The moisture-laden sirocco, tearing itself to shreds against the riven summits of the high southern cliffs, dripped ceaselessly upon this verdant oasis in clouds of invisible dew. You could often enjoy the luxury of a shiver, at night-time, in the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... are not isolated from the world upon this Great Plateau so much as might appear at first glance. There is a puff of smoke upon the horizon, and the whistle of a locomotive strikes upon the ear. The railway which links this great oasis of cultivated fields with others similar, and with the world beyond, runs near at hand, and will bear us, do we wish it, away to the confines of the Republic in the north, to the United States, and in five days to New York. Southwards it winds away to the great capital City ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... take the liberty, here, of citing an instance of this. In 1861, when I found myself on the West Coast of Mexico, a dozen backwoods families determined upon settling in Sonora (forming an oasis in the desert); a plan which was frustrated by the invasion at that time of the European powers. Many native farmers awaited the arrival of these immigrants in order to take them under their protection. The value of land in consequence of the announcement ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... he said, "the most wonderful gift of your sex. You are providing an oasis—more than that, a paradise—for a disheartened toiler. It seems that I have enemies whose very existence I ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in a green niche of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... die, and if I went could do no worse. I spent thirty days at your Invalids' Hotel and Surgical Institute, and came away like a new man, comparatively speaking. I found the Institution all it had been represented, and I may truthfully say, that the time spent there was to me as an oasis in a desert to a weary and thirsty traveler; for those were among the happiest days of my life. No pains were spared to make each patient comfortable and at home. I cannot recommend your Institution too highly, for I feel ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... opportunity of telling what she had been during her years at Albertstown, what a wonderful power among the natives, though not without disappointment, and she had been still more effective among the settlers and their daughters. Carrigaboola, Fulbert's farm, had been an oasis of hope and rest to the few clergy of his scanty staff, and Fulbert himself had been a tower of strength for influence over the settlers who had fallen in his way, by his unswerving uprightness and honour, with ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of the twenty miles one comes to a small and unpretentious village and an equally small and unpretentious wayside tchai-khan, both owing their existence to a stream of fresh water as small and unpretentious as themselves. Beyond this cheerless oasis stretches again the still more cheerless desert, the rivulets of undrinkable salt water, the glaring white salt-flats to the south, and the salt-encrusted mountains to the north. The shameless old party ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... for a time—but only for a time. Western civilisation had there obtruded too glaringly, and he had admitted frankly to himself that it was not Japan but O Hara San that kept him in Yokohama. The dark courtyard and the faintly lighted windows faded. He saw instead a tiny well-remembered oasis in Southern Algeria, heard the ceaseless chatter of Arabs, the shrill squeal of a stallion, the peevish grunt of a camel, and, rising above all other sounds, the whine of the tackling above the well. And the smell—the cloying smell that goes with camel ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... could follow the same occupation as her father, and with better success. Neither he nor his men get the best results from horses. They don't understand them, especially the breeds they are attempting to handle. Most Arab horsemen are tent dwellers. They travel from one oasis to another with their stock. At night their herds are gathered around them as children. As children they love them, pet them, feed them. Each is named for a divinity, a planet or a famous ruler, and the understanding between ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... the drawing-room floor is as high as a chapel it can afford but three floors. The spaciousness of some of those ancient drawing-rooms is that of a Russian steppe. The "family circle," gathered anywhere within speaking distance, must resemble a group of pilgrims encamped in the desert on a little oasis of carpet. Madame Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house in that dusky, tortuous old Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening most good- naturedly, lamp in hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her apartment. Such quarters seem a translation ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... by which they had ascended, and, for a considerable distance, they wound their way between the trunks of a closely-planted cypress grove; after passing which they emerged upon a rocky plain of small extent, at the further extremity of which a green oasis indicated the ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... following one of the familiar cart-tracks, and came out into the peaceful little colony of Beechdale, where it was a chance if the noonday traveller saw anything alive except a youthful family of pigs enjoying an oasis of mud in a dry land, or an intrusive dog rushing out of a cottage to salute the wayfarer with an inquiring bark. The children were still in school. The hum or their voices was wafted from the open windows. The church door stood open. The ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... week that was! Life may be somewhat desert-like, but there is many a sweet little oasis where we can rest in the shade by the rippling water, with the flowers and the birds ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... find that the jury returned a verdict of 'self-defence.' But then Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Dr. Johnson, and David Garrick gave evidence to character, representing Baretti as 'a man of benevolence, sobriety, modesty, and learning.' This trial is an oasis of mercy in a desert of drastic punishment. Borrow carries on his 'trials' to the very year before the date of publication, and the last trial in the book is that of 'Henry Fauntleroy, Esquire,' for forgery. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... once or twice at her blue-clad figure standing very still. He had left her against a little oasis of piled-up empty milk-cans, far down the platform where a few civilians in similar case were scattered. The trainway was empty as yet. In the grey immensity of the station and the turmoil of its noise, she felt neither lonely nor conscious ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... travellers with general rations for both man and beast. The place was clean in comparison with what we had been accustomed to, and we seemed to sigh a mutual sigh of content at our good luck in reaching this "oasis." We rested all afternoon, and got to bed early, and, although there were rats about, I slept "like a log," I was so ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... 'the valley which inclines towards Egypt.' The length of this valley extends from south to north as far as the Mediterranean, and in the upper part it separates the immense desert in the west from the oasis in the east, which is considered as a part of Egypt. The easternmost country in Africa on the Mediterranean was Cyrenaica. It is therefore quite clear that Sallust does not include Egypt in Africa. [124] Sallust wants to give a short account of the original ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... joy does the traveller in the desert, after a day of scorching glow and a night of breathless heat, descry the distant trees which mark the longed-for well-spring in the emerald oasis, which seems to beckon with its branching palms to the converging caravans, to come and slake their fever-thirst, and escape from ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... again making their hair stand on end with horror, though from the strange pronunciation of the speaker and the flowing rapidity of his words the half was scarcely understood. The end of all this at length was that Zelinda dwelt on that oasis, in the midst of the pathless sand-plains of the desert, surrounded by magic horrors; and also, as the Dervish knew for certain, that she had left about half an hour ago on her way thither. The almost contemptuous words ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... and neither of them had the faintest idea of ever deviating from the rules laid down. It was better than nothing, spending a few hours with her each week was refreshing as an oasis in a desert; he eagerly looked forward to those days on which he was permitted to call, and before long these visits became chiefly the event of his life—he thought ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... is but a little green oasis in the desert. In a day or two we shall separate, probably forever; but both, I doubt not, will be happier through life for this brief reunion. His plan is to make his future ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... of an attitude which is detached from practical effects and from the practical life of outer success. The dance is an action by which nothing is produced and nothing in the surroundings changed. It is an oasis in the desert of our materialistic behaviour. From morning till night we are striving to do things, to manufacture something in the mill of the nation: but he who dances is satisfied in expressing himself. He becomes detached from the cares of the hour, he acquires ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... be treated as minors and children. —Besides, these universities, even of age, are to remain as they are, so many dispensaries of diplomas. They are no longer to serve as an intellectual refuge, an oasis at the end of secondary instruction, a station for three or four years for free curiosity and disinterested self-culture. Since the abolition of the volontariat for one year, a young Frenchman no longer enjoys ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Columbus was entertained by Diego de Deza—prior of the great Dominican convent of San Esteban and professor of theology at Salamanca—while the Junta [committee] of Spanish ecclesiastics considered his prospects. His residence there was a peaceful oasis in the stormy life of the great discoverer. The little grange still stands at a distance of about three miles west of Salamanca, and the country people have a tradition that on the crest of a small hill near the house, now called ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... a half back and a bit off the road lay the narrow, sheltered flat between two forbiddingly barren ridges which Hu Dra, the gardener, had converted into an oasis. Thin-leaved tea-trees fringed the little dam whence the industrious fellow hauled water for his vegetables. Drought-stricken, broad, blue-leaved, scented ironbarks stood in envious array on the steep sides of the ridges, and grass-trees, blackened at ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the place she was bound for, he had moments of dreadful sinking, as it occurred to him to wonder if he hadn't made a mistake in the nature of his own destination. Suppose, after all, he should find himself castaway in some oasis of determined sprightliness with Wally Whitaker in whose pocket pretenses of tips and margins he began to discern a poorer sort of substitute for the House. He was as much bored by the permanently young shoe-salesman after this ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... the vast Nieuweveld range which shuts in the Karroo on the west lies the little township of Matjesfontein, a veritable oasis in the desert. Here lies the body of the gallant Wauchope who perished in the disastrous attack on the Magersfontein trenches. The whole line north of this point was patrolled by colonial volunteers, amongst whom I noticed especially the Duke ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... heard the mill stream babble by. In that village of Sutton Poyntz she had herself been born, and to it she had returned, caught back again for a little while by her own country and her youth, that Sylvia might be born there too. These months had made a kind of green oasis in her life. She had rested there in a farm-house, after a time of much turbulence, with the music of running water night and day in her ears, a high-walled garden of flowers and grass about her, and the downs with the shadow-filled hollows, and brown treeless slopes rising up from her ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... crack and slit and crannie. These were reminders of possession and ownership. And every passing wind that lifted eddies of dust at the street corners were messages from the quiet, powerful Thing that permitted Helouan to lie and dream so peacefully in the sunshine. Mere artificial oasis, its existence was temporary, held on lease, just for ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... which contains the tomb of Tamerlane and the famous palace where the blue stone is kept on which each new khan must seat himself on his accession, is defended by a very strong citadel. Karschi, with its triple cordon, situated in an oasis, surrounded by a marsh peopled with tortoises and lizards, is almost impregnable, Is-chardjoui is defended by a population of twenty thousand souls. Protected by its mountains, and isolated by its steppes, the khanat of Bokhara is a most formidable state; ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... story of its discovery teems with the strangest romance of natural history. To those who could appreciate the facts of the case it was just as curious and just as interesting as though we were now to discover somewhere in an unknown island or an African oasis some surviving mammoth, some belated megatherium, or some gigantic and misshapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct animals of the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in a tropical ramble, and you can faintly ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... happily, given up much of the joy of living to serve, has learned to keep self under and love even the unlovable, has put to the test the promises of the Bible and found them hold true in time of need, and has found the Sabbath day an oasis in the desert of an otherwise dreary life, even an old theologian wouldn't have much more to go on in beginning a discussion ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... always be sure!" But first he would escort her to the hotel. She declined—she did not know why, for he was her sole point of moral support in all France. He insisted. She yielded. So she turned her back, with regret, on that little English oasis in the Sahara of Paris, and ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the sands stretch level and far, Around this little oasis of Tamarind trees. A curious, Eastern fragrance fills the breeze From the ruinous Temple garden where ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... leading part in originating local exhibitions and the like, are attached to his private residence, a handsome mansion flanked by a large and charming garden in the Boulevard du Temple. The laying out of this sylvan oasis is due to M. Vadr, the head gardener of the city of Paris, who contributed so largely to the picturesque embellishment of the Bois de Boulogne. M. Irroy's establishment, which comprises a considerable range of buildings grouped around two courtyards, is immediately adjacent, although its principal ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... An oasis in Mesopotamia. Close at hand the end of a log house abuts on a kitchen garden. Adam is digging in the middle of the garden. On his right, Eve sits on a stool in the shadow of a tree by the doorway, spinning ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... here and there by beautiful Christian lives, which are to the world's weary wastes what the oasis ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... palm tree, in an oasis of the Arabian desert, sat the Phoenix, glowering moodily upon the world below. He was alone, quite alone, in his old age, as he had been alone in his youth, and in his middle years; for the Phoenix has neither mate nor children, and there is never but one ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... and of the wonderful pictures he had seen in the desert sky that men called "mirages." They were of shady groves and flowing rivers, and many a time had Aleppo seen them as he pressed on through the sands, with head held high, so that he might scan the horizon for the longed-for oasis. He turned to speak of these to Phil; but his little companion, he saw, had meantime ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... to find it, she sat up wearily, raising herself on one elbow and pushing her hair back from her forehead—not as you have seen a leading lady pass a lily hand across her alabaster brow, but as a heart-sick woman does it. Her tears and sniffles had formed a little oasis of moisture on the pillow's white bosom so that the ugly stripe of the ticking showed through. She gazed down at the damp circle with smarting, swollen eyes, and another lump came up into ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... which this cavern occurs is a small green oasis on the undulating steppe, lying on a vast bed of rock-salt, which extends over an area of two versts in length, and a mile in breadth, with a thickness of more than 100 feet. When the thin cover of red sand and marl is removed, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... liberty—"Italy," he said, "must make herself by means of liberty, or we must give up trying to make her"—and he was at the same time one of the ablest and most practical statesmen who have ever guided the destinies of a nation. In ten years he made the State of the north-west an oasis of freedom and good government which attracted the best intellects of Italy to its service, and henceforth Piedmont became the centre of Italian aspirations. A new propaganda movement was set on foot, called the National Society, which rejected both federalism and republicanism and declared in favour ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... detain from scenes of festivity—a trait of affection by no means uncommon among our thoughtful people—dignifies those social meetings where it is manifested, and sheds a ray of sunshine on our common nature. It is "an oasis in the desert,"—to use the striking expression of the last year's "Valedictorian" of the Apollinean Institute. In the midst of so much that is purely selfish, it is delightful to meet such disinterested care for others. When a large family of children are expecting a parent's return ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... mines—indeed, was brought to the Southwest by the mines. There was little to attract him in the desert plains through which ran intermittent stream flows, and he lacked the vision that showed the desert developed into the oasis. The Mormon, however, came usually from an agricultural environment. Rarely ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... out in due time. Just you pray for an oasis in this swamp, because that is what we want, and we ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of their surroundings. At distances varying from a mile to a mile and a half a few dilapidated dwellings peeped out of a fringe of woods. Everything else was pine-swamp, with the exception of the one small field of potatoes in which they were encamped, and which stood out as an oasis in the wilderness. Through the midst of the landscape straggled a muddy road, hopelessly impassable for foot-travellers. Certainly ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... graceful clematis mixed with streamers of Virginia creeper, and white muslin curtains, and above all two shelves of admirably-chosen books, gave the room almost an air of elegance. Why do I write almost? It was an oasis. It was barely three weeks since I had left "the communion of educated men," and the first tones of the voices of my host and hostess made me feel as if I had been out of it for a year. Mrs. C. stayed an hour and a half, and then went home to the cows, when we launched upon a sea of congenial talk. ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... passes through the tunnel of Mussaguet, and, if a slow train, halts at the next station, Cassis, apleasant fishing village in an oasis at the head of a small bay, between Mont Gardiole (to the west), culminating point 1800 ft., and Mont de Canaille (to the east), culminating point 1365 ft. Inn: Hotel and Pension Liautaud. An omnibus awaits passengers at the station, 30 ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... and they could not understand how such an one could learn so quickly. The manual skill of playing and the quick eye in reading music had probably much to do with it. The weeks at the convent were like a charming oasis in the dry and dusty plain of her public life and she came out of the school blooming with health ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... Mormon too," returned Cole, "but my hands are stained with blood. Soon yours will be if you keep your water-holes and your cattle. Yes, I know. You're strong, stronger than any of us, far off in your desert oasis, hemmed in by walls, cut off by canyons, guarded by your Navajo friends. But Holderness is creeping slowly on you. He'll ignore your water rights and drive your stock. Soon Dene will steal cattle under your very eyes. Don't ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... been worked out in experience; and when one has patiently, even happily, given up much of the joy of living to serve, has learned to keep self under and love even the unlovable, has put to the test the promises of the Bible and found them hold true in time of need, and has found the Sabbath day an oasis in the desert of an otherwise dreary life, even an old theologian wouldn't have much more to go on in beginning a discussion ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... again enveloped them and seemed to cut them off from the observation of passers-by. It was as if their tenderness for each other had found an oasis in the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... silver-pink froth upon an ocean of warm brown. But the colouring was restful, the air here on the dry gravel soil light and eager, and the sense of height and space exhilarating. A fringe of harebells, of orange hawkweed and dwarf red sorrel bordered the road. Every small oasis of turf, amongst the heath and by the wayside, carried its pretty crop of centaury and wild thyme, of bed-straw, milkwort, and birdsfoot trefoil. Furzechats tipped about the gorse bushes, uttering a sharp, gay, warning note. A big flight of rooks, blue-black against ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the dead level of the prairie. A tumbled sea of Nature's wreckage lay strewn about unaccountably, for a distance of something like two miles, east and west, and double that distance from north to south. It was an oasis of natural splendor in the heart of a calm sea of ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... coffee; while at Sunk Creek the omelet and the custard were frequent. The passing traveller was glad to tie his horse to the fence here, and sit down to the Judge's table. For its fame was as wide as Wyoming. It was an oasis in the ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... evening, Keith. Glad to see you. Come in out of the wet." He could not even go to Duggan, his old river friend. He realized now that his old friends were the very ones he must avoid most carefully to escape self-betrayal. Friendship no longer existed for him; the town was a desert without an oasis where he might reclaim some of the things he had lost. Memories he had treasured gave place to bitter ones. His own townfolk, of all people, were his readiest enemies, and his loneliness clutched him tighter, until the air ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... deal table was of fine linen, the decanter and glasses were beautifully cut; there were walnuts and, in a far Corner, cigars of a well-known brand and cigarettes from a famous tobacconist. Beyond that little oasis, however, were all the evidences of a hired abode. A hole in the closely drawn curtains was fastened together by a safety pin. The horsehair easy-chairs bore disfiguring antimacassars, the photographs which adorned the walls were grotesque but typical of village ideals, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... then he felt his heart thump against his ribs. A tragedy had come into the room! The woman at his side sat as though turned to stone. There was a look in her face as of one who sees Death. The small patch of rouge, invisible before, was now a staring daub of color in an oasis of ashen white. Her eyes were as hard as stones; her lips were twitching as though, indeed, she had been stricken with some disease. No longer was he sitting with this most beautiful lady at whose coming all heads were turned in admiration. ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to the virtues of the old servant, the innkeeper, but altogether alive to the fact that she keeps an inn. "What a blessed oasis in our wilderness! And it can't be more than half a mile away. Why," recovering his usual delightful manner, "we shall find ourselves housed in no time. I do hope, my dear girl, you are comfortable! Wrapped up to the chin, eh? Quite right—quite right. After ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... be exact and absolutely sincere. I may avail myself of that privilege - old while I write, and dead when I shall be read. I am of a very amorous nature and the thought of friend or sweetheart was always an oasis in the desert of my thoughts. Even amidst the most important cares and duties such thoughts were ever of unspeakably greater interest and importance to me. They were never dull or tedious, never bored me, and were my consolation in times of gloom and discouragement. The pain they brought was ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the wind-swept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herd gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... station at which Hamel alighted was like an oasis in the middle of a flat stretch of sand and marsh. It consisted only of a few raised planks and a rude shelter—built, indeed, for the convenience of St. David's Hall alone, for the nearest village was two miles away. The station-master, on his return from escorting ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... bringing his thoughts back to their surroundings, he waited for her to speak; but for the moment they seemed fixed in a little oasis of silence, embodying but them alone. It was the girl ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... know its horrors and get its fill of them. But we will not attempt the description. Already others have done that. Suffice it to say that the baggage camp, in which were the chaplains and some of the doctors, seemed an oasis in the ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... not, thou whelp of darkness and father of disordered livers," cried the Fogy, "that water will cause grass to spring up here, and trees, and possibly even flowers? Knowest thou not, that thou art, in truth, producing an oasis?" ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... Haydn'ish, simple, naive, fresh and clear as crystal, and it forms an oasis of repose and pure enjoyment to modern ears, accustomed to and tired of the astonishing oddities ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... constantly penetrating into more remote regions, stopping at all manner of hotels, travelling in every species of conveyance, and exhibiting their ability, or lack of it, upon every makeshift of a stage. Sometimes this was a bare hall; again it was an armory, with an occasional opera house—like an oasis in the vast desert—to yield them fresh professional courage. Small cities, straggling towns, boisterous mining camps welcomed and speeded them on, until sameness became routine, and names grew meaningless. ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... Christian settlement was truly an oasis in the wilderness. We were closely beset by heathens, and frequently we could see them assembling on the hill side, performing their savage dances, or threatening our destruction with fierce gestures—shaking ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... moment later the proprietor of this roadside ranch, this artificial oasis in a land of desolation, strolled into the big bare room where half a dozen troopers were dozing or gambling, it was with an air of confidential joviality that he whispered to the corporal ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... are no rivers. In some places in the Sahara there is water coming up through a crack in the rocks. This water is called a "spring," and wherever one is found, trees and grass and food will grow. Such a place is called an "oasis." In the big oases there are villages and towns. But the sun is so hot that before the water from the spring has flowed very far it is dried up, and beyond that nothing will grow. So when we think of the Sahara we have to try and picture to ourselves a very big country, full of hills ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How
... condition that they be subject to its narrow tutelage and be treated as minors and children. —Besides, these universities, even of age, are to remain as they are, so many dispensaries of diplomas. They are no longer to serve as an intellectual refuge, an oasis at the end of secondary instruction, a station for three or four years for free curiosity and disinterested self-culture. Since the abolition of the volontariat for one year, a young Frenchman no longer enjoys the leisure to cultivate himself in this way; free curiosity is interdicted; ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... days; an oasis of Tuat larger than Timmemoun. Between Timmemoun, and Ourara, date-palms ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... also very fascinating to me. The Gate of Aladdin, a veritable fairy portal, with its bewildering wealth of arabesques and flowing traceries in white marble inlaid upon red stone; the Tomb of Altamsh; the Mosque of Koutab,—all these, lying in a singular oasis of trees and greenery that forms a unique spot in the arid and stony ruin-plain of Delhi, drew me with great power. I declared to Bhima Gandharva that it was not often in a lifetime that we could get so many centuries together to talk with at once, and wrought upon him ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... hopes, and fears of these young lovers could not be judged by common rules. Theirs was a love which could not hope for happiness or continuance; for which there was no perfumed oasis, no blooming myrtle-wreath to crown its dark and stormy path. They might be sure that the farther they advanced, the more trackless and arid would be the desert opening before them. Tears and robes of mourning ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... sonorous sound of the cattle-bells is heard, as they slowly emerge from the steep hill-path that leads to Maxwell and Louis Perron's little clearing; the dark shadows are lengthening that those wood-crowned hills cast over that sunny spot, an oasis in the vast forest desert that man, adventurous, courageous man, has hewed for himself in the wilderness. The little flock are feeding among the blackened stumps of the uncleared chopping: those timbers have lain thus ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... been placed in a sort of sarcophagus, in which it was to be conveyed to its long home. Alexander, it will be remembered, had given directions that it should be taken to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, in the Egyptian oasis, where he had been pronounced the son of a god. It would seem incredible that such a mind as his could really admit such an absurd superstition as the story of his divine origin, and we must therefore suppose that he gave this direction in order that the place of his interment might confirm ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... rest of Iran only by the caravan roads. On leaving the argillaceous plateaus, the rocks and the sandhills, the town and the villages around seem to emerge from a veritable oasis of mulberry trees; the desert begins at the very foot of the walls, where the sand driven by the tempests is heaped up. A line of ruins surrounds it and testifies to its ancient extent. Yezd is, however, prosperous. It contains a population of from seventy ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... lower places until, by means of ditches made in the sides of the raised highroad, men conducted water from the canals to it. In fact, hidden oases between naked hills along that highway drank in the divine water. In these oases grew wheat, barley, grapes, palms, and tamarinds. The whole of such an oasis was sometimes occupied by one family, which when it met another like itself at the market in Pi-Bailos might not even know that they were neighbors ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... Gregory reached the top of the hill his strength was quite exhausted, and, panting, he sat down on the sunny side of a thicket of cedars, for the late afternoon was growing chilly. Beneath him lay the one oasis in ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... round this beautiful Establishment, or Oasis of Purity, intended for the Devil's regiments of the line, lay continents of dingy poor and dirty dwellings, where the unfortunate not yet enlisted into that Force were struggling manifoldly,—in their workshops, in their marble-yards ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... line of trees that marked the serpentine course of the brook which zigzagged its way toward the southwest. Every man, woman and child of our company expressed in some way the declaration, "We must get into that beautiful oasis." It looked like field, park and orchard, in one landscape; all fenced off from the desolate surroundings by this wall of stone. Like Moses viewing Canaan from Nebo's top, we looked down and yearned ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... not isolated from the world upon this Great Plateau so much as might appear at first glance. There is a puff of smoke upon the horizon, and the whistle of a locomotive strikes upon the ear. The railway which links this great oasis of cultivated fields with others similar, and with the world beyond, runs near at hand, and will bear us, do we wish it, away to the confines of the Republic in the north, to the United States, and in five days to New York. Southwards it ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... compared to herself. He had not seen her for a long time. Gazing at her, he breathed relief; all his features indicated the sudden, unexpected assuaging of eternal and intense desires. He might have been travelling through the desert for many days and she might have been the oasis—the pool of living water ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the day was rather overpowering; that period he usually spent dozing or reading in the court of the house, which was occupied by a cool flashing fountain in the centre of an oasis of marble pavement, streaked and veined. About seven it became cooler, and then in the light native costume he used to ride leisurely about the picturesque city or among the delightful houses scattered about in ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a desert, as you say," said Lavinia, gently, "but we mean at least to make it an oasis for our friends who are weary of ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... twenty miles one comes to a small and unpretentious village and an equally small and unpretentious wayside tchai-khan, both owing their existence to a stream of fresh water as small and unpretentious as themselves. Beyond this cheerless oasis stretches again the still more cheerless desert, the rivulets of undrinkable salt water, the glaring white salt-flats to the south, and the salt-encrusted mountains to the north. The shameless old party presiding at the tchai-khan evidently ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... tradition, in our neighbourhood, of a church, not far from Old Bolingbroke, being called "St. Luke's in the Forest," now known as Stickney; this name itself probably meaning a "sticken," or staked, island; a kind of preserved oasis, or clearing, in a wilderness of wood and morass. Architectural Society's Journal, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... do it—with the aid of a volume of printed forms devised in the days of Jeremy Bentham. In fact, like a camel who smells water afar off, he could in a desert of verbal sand unerringly find an oasis of meaning. Therefore was Caput Magnus held in high honor among the pack of human hounds who bayed at the call of Huntsman Peckham's horn. Others might lose the scent of what it was all about in the tropical jungle of an indictment eleven pages long, but not he. Like ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... staff and a swarm of officers. The place had been the frontier station before the war and was well laid out as an up-to-date cantonment, although owing to the thaw the mud was indescribable. The environs constituted almost an oasis in the bleak Armenian uplands owing to the hills being clothed in pine-woods, and Sarikamish had the reputation of making a pleasant summer resort, people coming out from Tiflis to spend a few weeks so as to escape the heat. We were treated with almost effusive cordiality, dined ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... some time, but now they were approaching the Cardew's Friendship plant. The furnaces had covered the fields with a thin deposit of reddish ore dust. Such blighted grass as grew had already lost its fresh green, and the trees showed stunted blossoms. The one oasis of freshness was the polo field itself, carefully irrigated by underground pipes. The field, with its stables and grandstand, had been the gift of Anthony Cardew, thereby promoting much discussion with his son. For Howard ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a splendid spot to look at. Mosquitoes at times makes it far from pleasant to live in. The blue-tiled dome surrounded by palms, one of which is bending down in a manner strange to such a straight-growing tree, is an oasis in a vast ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... in a secluded lane that led from behind the Farm Hospital barns to a little patch of woodland through which a clear stream sparkled, a silent, intimate, leafy oasis amid an army-ridden desert, where there was only a cow to stare at them, knee deep in young mint, only a shy cardinal bird to interrupt them ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... "want ads" for "trained" men, in all walks of life. "Trained" men? Hateful word! How often had he encountered it! Ah, here was one advertisement without the "trained"; he devoured it eagerly. The item, like an oasis in the desert of his general incapacity and uselessness, exercised an odd fascination for him in spite of the absolute impossibility of his professing to possess a fractional part of those moral attributes demanded by the fair advertiser. She—a Miss Van Rolsen—was ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... their wake, but the way was far, and it was hours before, from a high dune, he had seen a large pan in the distance, to which all the birds were converging. "A big pan, master," he said, "with thick bush and big trees an oasis or perhaps who knows? a river bed." And frantic with thirst as he was, he had not gone on, but turned back ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... experiments have been made there. They are oases in the desert of the buildings and pavements of brick, with their grime and monotony, and if the people of the desert will camp for an hour and drink of the spring, those who have planted the oasis will be well pleased. To attract them the settlement workers have organized clubs and classes for united study and activity in matters that naturally interest the people of the neighborhood; they have ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... two world races may give each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack. Already we come not altogether empty-handed: there is to-day no true American music but the sweet wild melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales are Indian and African; we are the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal, dyspeptic blundering with the light-hearted but determined Negro humility; or her coarse, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... Montreal Transcript, which declared that the fertile spots in the territory were small and separated by immense distances, and described the Red River region as an oasis in the midst of a desert, "a vast treeless prairie on which scarcely a shrub is to be seen." The climate was unfavourable to the growth of grain. The summer, though warm enough, was too short in duration, so that even the few fertile spots could "with difficulty mature a small ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... misery for the past two years, that this gloomy stay in a hospital was for me like an oasis in the desert. The good sisters were very kind to me; and, when I was able, I helped them with their lighter work, or went to the chapel with them. I shuddered at the thought that I must leave them as soon as I was entirely well; and then what would ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... memory of those four months with Amy Kelly remained with the boy, an oasis in the trackless Sahara of his school life. In this dreary expanse now and then a shadow of hope arose, as if to lure him on, as some new teacher came up over his horizon, but in the main these all proved delusions, mirages that glittered at phantom distances, but faded away into empty ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... the national overthrow. Lady Shalem, after a decent interval of patriotic mourning, began to look around her and take stock of her chances and opportunities under the new regime. It was easier to achieve distinction as a titled oasis in the social desert that London had become than it had been to obtain recognition as a new growth in a rather overcrowded field. The observant eyes and agile brain quickly noted this circumstance, and her ladyship ...
— When William Came • Saki
... camped at Andrews Creek an incident occurred which revealed Roosevelt's influence over the cowpunchers, not alone of his own "outfit." Andrews Creek was not more than a mile from Medora, and after the day's work was done, the cowboys naturally adjourned with much enthusiasm to that oasis for the thirsty. As the evening wore on, the men, as "Dutch Wannigan" remarked long afterward, "were getting kinda noisy." Roosevelt, who had also ridden to town, possibly to keep an eye on "the boys," heard the commotion, and, ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... as a chapel it can afford but three floors. The spaciousness of some of those ancient drawing-rooms is that of a Russian steppe. The "family circle," gathered anywhere within speaking distance, must resemble a group of pilgrims encamped in the desert on a little oasis of carpet. Madame Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house in that dusky, tortuous old Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening most good- naturedly, lamp in hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... chimed in Miss Ludolph, "this table pleases me greatly. It is a little oasis in this great desert of a store. Mr. Berder, I compliment you on your taste. You shall help me rearrange, artistically, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... and superficialities of Chopin's social intercourse, Delacroix's friendship—we have already seen that the musician reciprocated the painter's sentiments—stands out like a green oasis in a barren desert. When, on October 28, 1849, a few days after Chopin's death, Delacroix sent a friend a ticket for the funeral service of the deceased, he speaks of him as "my poor and dear Chopin." But the sincerity of Delacroix's esteem and the tenderness ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Avenue a safe street! Having forsworn his barber at the Plaza he went around the corner one morning to be shaved, and while waiting his turn he took off coat and vest, and with his soft collar open at the neck stood near the front of the shop. The day was an oasis in the cold desert of March and the sidewalk was cheerful with a population of strolling sun-worshippers. A stout woman upholstered in velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle straining at its leash—the effect being given of a tug bringing ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... business card (die-bumped and gold-dusted, of course) was one of those enshrined, under glass as it were, in the foyer. His advice concerning California land speculation was sought by the maitre d', a worthy who had sold his own posh oasis in Escondido in order to preside at H. H., as the communications fraternity affectionately styled the restaurant. Today, however, Cam was aware of Michel's subtle disapproval as they glided into the ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... communion, that a man can learn what beauty is, and where to look for it. Out in the world beauty is held to be a sporadic thing. It is like a flower growing where no one expected a blossom. It is an unrelated and unexplained surprise. It is a green oasis in the desert of unlovely and unpromising things. But for the dweller in the house of the Lord beauty is not on this wise. Said one such dweller, 'The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.' He looked across the leagues of burning sand and saw the loveliness of Carmel by the ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... cataracts and drank of the Nile. Above the cataracts they pushed their arms into Ethiopia, and left there the monuments of their dominion. To the west they were at once defended and confined by a desert impassable to armies, but which the oasis rendered passable to the caravan. On the north was an almost harborless sea. On the east was another desert, through which roads led to the ports of the Red Sea and the mines of Sinai. On the north-east ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the day we ourselves had performed the role of spectators. With the exception of the contretemps already mentioned not a single shot came near us; we occupied an oasis of calm in the midst of a hell of fire—and looked on. At certain intervals we walked or trotted, and once we galloped madly for half a mile, expecting at the end of it to hear the order: "Halt—action front!" It was a false alarm. We halted for two hours—till ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... back and a bit off the road lay the narrow, sheltered flat between two forbiddingly barren ridges which Hu Dra, the gardener, had converted into an oasis. Thin-leaved tea-trees fringed the little dam whence the industrious fellow hauled water for his vegetables. Drought-stricken, broad, blue-leaved, scented ironbarks stood in envious array on the steep sides of the ridges, and grass-trees, blackened at the butts, struggled with loose ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... accorded with his disposition toward the Christian faith—by a thorough respect for it, by seeing its practical value as worked out in the useful busy life of one who made his chapel a fruitful oasis in what would otherwise have been a moral desert. In his genuine humanity and downright honesty, in his care of people's bodies as well as souls, and temporal as well as spiritual interests, the minister was a tower of strength, and his influence for good over the ambitious youth, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... rolling sound of passionless one-armed bandits drowned out all other noise in Okie's Oasis Bar. As a result, Toryl and Sartan drew little attention when they entered. Except for their blue-metallic space suits they looked like and were ...
— Jubilation, U.S.A. • G. L. Vandenburg
... from a bubbling parent spring, wound their white forms within the bright green turf. From the grove arose the softening song of doves, and showers of gay and sparkling butterflies, borne on their tinted wings of shifting light, danced without danger in the liquid air. A fair and fresh Oasis! ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... hundred miles in length; it is artificial, with the exception of a channel through Bitter Lakes and Lake Tinsuh. All along the way, we were virtually traversing the desert, Isma'iliya presenting a small oasis, fifty miles from Port Said. From the deck we watched the monotonous scene, hour after hour, the landscape being old and colorless, with great billows of sand in the foreground, and here and there occasional hillocks. ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... Egyptian Apion gives us concerning the Jews' departure out of Egypt, and is no better than a contrivance of his own. But why should we wonder at the lies he tells about our forefathers, when he affirms them to be of Egyptian original, when he lies also about himself? for although he was born at Oasis in Egypt, he pretends to be, as a man may say, the top man of all the Egyptians; yet does he forswear his real country and progenitors, and by falsely pretending to be born at Alexandria, cannot deny the [4] pravity of his family; for you see how justly he calls those Egyptians whom he hates, ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and below the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it is called, is an oasis a mile and a quarter in circumference. As you see, it is covered with date-palms, tamarisks, and acacias, and everything grows luxuriantly," the Frenchman began. "The Arabs who live in the mud hovels you see, raise fine vegetables ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... by the white, not the yellow patrons of Chinese houses of ill-fame. Baker alley has probably been the scene of more terrible brutality of this sort than any other part of San Francisco. Before the rubbish was cleared away, in the oasis of a broad desert of ashes in the burned city, we visited this region, and found carpenters busy at the work of reconstructing brothels. The slave pen was existent again, and we entered the gateway leading to it and gazed upon the rapidly growing structures within. Two white men of a class ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... there are some women who have given their hands to their husbands, but never their hearts. I see faces, now and then, which make me think of what I have read descriptive of deserts where there is no water to quench the thirst, no oasis with its green palms giving grateful shade from the summer heat,—faces that tell of hunger and thirst for the bread and water ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... outlines of the water, for the trees partially hid it from our view, but we saw that the smoke that had at first attracted us rose up somewhere from the western shore of the lake.' In this strange oasis they found what appeared to be a snug farm-house, with stables and outhouses, garden and fields, horses and cattle. Here they were hospitably entertained by the proprietor, his wife, and two sons, and served by ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... Greek at Paris and Poitiers; at Florence he studied the secrets of the Cabala with Mirandula; and he perfected his Hebrew at Rome, where he acted as an envoy from the Elector Palatine. Reuchlin for many years led a peaceful life at Tuebingen, an oasis of freedom, in which he could print or read what he pleased. But in 1509 he was forced into a quarrel, which involved the whole question of the liberty of the press, and incidentally associated the cause of the Reformation with the maintenance of ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... innumerable turtles sport in the lagoons, while curlews, snipe, ducks and other aquatic fowls flock on their shores; and not the least of the gifts with which the munificent hand of nature has so bountifully endowed this delicious oasis of the ocean is its delightful and soft, yet invigorating, climate, that makes well nigh useless the art ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... him as from a great distance; but as one dying in the desert turns his face toward the distant oasis, Deacon turned weakly to the speaker. She placed one fair arm behind his head, pillowing him, and with a peacock fan which had lain amid the cushions fanned his face. The strange scene became wholly unreal to him; he thought himself ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... although sedulously cloaked, was lost on Sim Roxby; and he was aware, too, in some subtle way, of the relief his guest experienced when they plunged into the darkening forest and left the forlorn place behind them. The clearing in which it was situated seemed an oasis of light in the desert of night in which the rest of the world lay. From the obscurity of the forest Dundas saw, through the vistas of the giant trees, the clustering cottages, the great hotel, gables and chimneys ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... day. The grass was green. The ancient trees were heavy with leaves. Younger and more graceful trees drooped from the terrace above a high wall in the rear. The sky was blue. The officers, the soldiers, looked happy, the nuns placid. It was an oasis ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... together in time or place, is that between the greenery of the tropics, or of a northern summer, and the snowy pall of leafless winter. Next to this in startling novelty of effect, we must rank the sudden transition from the shady and verdant oasis of the desert to the bare and burning party-colored ocean of sand and rock which surrounds it. [Footnote: The variety of hues and tones in the local color of the desert is, I think, one of the phenomena which most surprise and interest a stranger to those regions. In England and the United States, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... appreciated by any one who has passed through the Pamir Region, in the direction of the valleys W. and N. of Muztagh Ata. After leaving Tashkurghan and Tagharma, where there is some precarious cultivation, there is no local produce to be obtained until the oasis of Tashmalik is reached in the open Kashgar plains. In the narrow valley of the Yamanyar River (Gez Defile) there is scarcely any grazing; its appearance is far more desolate than that of the elevated Pamirs."—"Marco Polo's praise (p. 181) of the gardens and vine-yards of Kashgar is well ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... seen pieces of the most delicate and choicest meat, roasting en appolas, on sticks around the fire, and the guard were never without company. With pleasant weather and no enemy to fear, and abundance of the most excellent meat, and no scarcity of bread or tobacco, they were enjoying the oasis of a voyageur's life. Three cows were killed today. Kit Carson had shot one, and was continuing the chase in the midst of another herd, when his horse fell headlong, but sprang up and joined the flying band. Though considerably ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... have we followed the southern shore that stretches from the strait to the Gulf of Cabes. It is the old coast, and not the new, that we have been tracing; as yet, we cannot say positively that there is no outlet to the south; as yet, we cannot assert that no oasis of the African desert has escaped the catastrophe. Perhaps, even here in the north, we may find that Italy and Sicily and the larger islands of the Mediterranean may ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... and hubbub of the city broke like a restless sea only a block or so away. On every side, this square of dark, silent houses seemed to be assailed by the clamour of the encroaching city. For some reason or other, however, it remained a little oasis of old-fashioned buildings, residences, most of them, of a generation passed away. Sanford Quest entered the house with a latch-key. He glanced into two of the rooms on the ground-floor, in which telegraph and telephone operators sat at their instruments. Then, by means ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... space may be compared, specimens of it stand at wider distances than the trophies of Sesostris. Here we return again to the Inferno of Dante, who overcame the difficulty. In this vast desert are its greater and its less oasis; Ugolino and Francesca di Rimini. The peopled region is peopled chiefly with monsters and moschitoes: the rest for the most part is ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... breakfast under a favourite fig tree, where were shade, water, and grass. We then ambled for three and a half hours over the barren plain, until at last we arrived on the borders of the green groves around Damascus. We entered our own oasis. Oh how grateful were the shade, the cool water, and the aromatic smells! One hour more and we entered our own little paradise again, and met with a cordial greeting from all. It was a happy day. I did not know it then, but our happy days at ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... needs no compass, and ever alert for sky-line watchers, Yasmini and the headman took turns in giving direction, he yielding to her whenever their judgment differed. And whether she was right or not in every instance, she brought them at last to a little desert oasis, where there was brackish water deep down in a sand-hole, and a great rock offered shadow to ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... as all thy fathers were, Thou pacest painfully the barren sand, How o'er thy path watches a Comforter, And scatters manna daily for thy food, And bids the smitten rocks that barrier The arid track, well out with gurgling flood, And oft to shade of green oasis leads, And, from pursuer thirsting for thy blood, Such scanty shelter as is thine provides: And though full oft that shelter fails, and though Its torn defence demoniac glee derides, Yet not for this the ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... to be an artist, had set up in this remote and peaceful oasis his household gods, adding on this, his own domain, a few studios with living ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... about, Tim would coolly throw over any engagement that chanced to have been made and carry her off for a day up the river, where a quiet little lunch, in the tranquil shade of overhanging trees, and the cosy, intimate talk that was its invariable concomitant, seemed like an oasis of familiar, homely pleasantness in the midst of the gay turmoil ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... her collection of clocks she was impervious; it was unique, and she did not require you to tell her so, but exhibit admiration for the clock with the little trumpeter, and she melted. It was the one oasis of sentiment in the Sahara of her mental outlook, the grain of radium in the pitchblende. Years ago it had stood in a little New England farmhouse, and a child had clapped her hands and shouted, even as ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... has some of its fields and buttercups; the playing fields are a pleasant oasis which is the last vision of sunlight and grass for the traveller on the Chatham and Dover railway before plunging into the murk of the Penge tunnel. Of its neighbours to the west, Streatham clusters about a tangle of railways; Streatham, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... different points in Morocco and Algeria to Timbuktu; from Tripoli to Timbuktu, Kano and other great marts of the western and central Sudan; from Bengazi to Wadai; and from Assiut on the Nile through the Great Oasis and the Libyan desert to Darfur. South of the equator the principal long-established routes are those from Loanda to the Lunda and Baluba countries; from Benguella via Bihe to Urua and the upper Zambezi; from Mossamedes across the Kunene to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... listening, quite submerged Applehead's remarks upon the subject of his wellknown prowess when he was "shurf." The Happy Family were sprawled in unwonted luxury on the shady side of an outcropping of rock from under which a little spring seeped and made a small oasis in the general barrenness. They had shade, they Had water and food, and through the thin aromatic smoke of their cigarettes they could watch their horses cropping avidly the green grass that meant so much to them. The knowledge that an hour later they would be traveling again in the blazing heat ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... the horse was yet riderless; and the pastoral had therefore, to some extent, superseded the pure hunting stage. But what inroad could the stone hatchet make unaided upon the virgin forests of those remote days? The neolithic clearing must have been a mere stray oasis in a desert of woodland, like the villages of the New Guinea savages at the present day, lying few and far between among vast ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the spires of the city, Hasty's spirit was released, and she was free. Fanny gave herself up to a child's grief, and refused to be comforted. To the slave, the affections are the bright spots in his wilderness of sorrow and care; and as an Arab loves the oasis the better that it is in the midst of the desert, so the slave centers the whole strength of his nature in his loved ones, the more so that he is shut out from the hopes of wealth, the longings of ambition, and the excitements of ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various
... said, "the most wonderful gift of your sex. You are providing an oasis—more than that, a paradise—for a disheartened toiler. It seems that I have enemies whose very ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... place she was bound for, he had moments of dreadful sinking, as it occurred to him to wonder if he hadn't made a mistake in the nature of his own destination. Suppose, after all, he should find himself castaway in some oasis of determined sprightliness with Wally Whitaker in whose pocket pretenses of tips and margins he began to discern a poorer sort of substitute for the House. He was as much bored by the permanently young shoe-salesman ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... scattered along the river; and the old house, having grown slowly and somewhat irregularly for twenty years, came out, just before the time of which I write, in a modest coat of paint and a broad-brimmed piazza. But Virgil himself, the creator of the oasis—well known of hunters and fishermen, dreaded of lazy guides and quarrelsome lumbermen,—"Virge," the irascible, kind-hearted, indefatigable, was there no longer. He had made his last clearing, and fought his last fight; done his last ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... of them had the faintest idea of ever deviating from the rules laid down. It was better than nothing, spending a few hours with her each week was refreshing as an oasis in a desert; he eagerly looked forward to those days on which he was permitted to call, and before long these visits became chiefly the event of his life—he thought of ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... alders, oaks, and the largest beech trees to be found in Europe. It is more than a French league in circumference, and is situated to the east of the city, only a few steps from the last houses. It is a really delightful oasis in the midst of the depressing Dutch plains. When one has entered the wood and passed beyond the fringe of pavilions, little Swiss cottages, and summer houses dotted about among the first trees, one seems to have lost one's self in a lonely interminable forest. The trees ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... approach is south-westerly from the neighborhood of the Oxus. On this line, partly from displeasure at the English occupation of Egypt, and in pursuance of the policy, adopted especially since the Berlin Conference (1878), to advance towards Herat, the Russians suddenly seized Merv, an oasis extremely important from a military point of view, over which Persia claimed a certain suzerainty. The Russians occupied it in force, under Gen. Komaroff (March 16, 1884). Subsequently England and Russia agreed to ascertain and fix the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Conquest had brought landed property into the hands of Assyrians in other parts of the Eastern world, and it could be put up to auction at Nineveh, where the proprietors lived. About 660 B.C., for instance, a considerable estate was thus sold in the oasis of Singara, in the centre of Mesopotamia. It lay within the precincts of the temple of Istar, and contained a grove of 1,000 young palms. It included, moreover, a field of 2 homers planted with terebinths, house-property extending over 6 homers, a house with a corn-field attached to it, and another ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... pink-footed goose (Anser brachyrhynchus, Baillon). These geese are much larger than both the eider and the barnacle goose, and appear to be sufficiently strong to defend themselves against the fox. They commonly breed high up on some mossy or grassy oasis, among the stone mounds of the coast mountains, or on the summit of a steep strand escarpment in the interior of the fjords. During the moulting season the grey geese collect in flocks at the small fresh-water ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... The oasis of the Otradnoe covert came in sight a few hundred yards off, the huntsmen were already nearing it. Rostov, having finally settled with "Uncle" where they should set on the hounds, and having shown Natasha where she was to stand—a spot where ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... blessings, but should see our sisters groaning in bitterness, saying, 'Not one ray from the divine sun rises on us in our misery.' If we turn to the south, there we see the daughters of Arabia lamenting, 'In all this desert, not one oasis yields the waters of life to quench our burning thirst.' Eternity alone will suffice to praise Him who sent you, the only heralds of ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... hailed with gratitude, his memory honored and cherished as the second founder of the liberties of the people, and the period of his administration will be looked back to as one of the happiest and brightest epochs of American history; an oasis in the midst of a sandy desert. But I beg the gentleman's pardon; he has already secured to himself a more imperishable fame than I had supposed; I think it was about four years that he submitted to the House of Representatives ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... life- giving air, the opal sands, the plaintive evening sky, the eager morning breeze, the desolated villages, and now and then in the vast expanse, stretching hundreds and hundreds of miles south, an oasis as a gem set in a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and held her in higher estimation, than the whole rising generation of the other sex. I shall resume the thread of my narrative by relating, that, some two or three years before Miss Cornelia Bugbee, in her journey across the sands of time, came to the thirtieth mile-stone, she arrived at an oasis in the desert of her existence; or, to be more explicit, she had the rare good-fortune to find a heart throbbing in unison with her own,—a tender bosom in whose fidelity she could safely confide even her most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... loomed the great marble library, still incomplete and gloomily fenced from the sidewalk. Beyond it, furnishing its setting, rose the trees of Bryant Park, a green oasis in the tumult and unloveliness about it. Garrison knew the benches there were crowded; nevertheless, he made his way the length of the ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... misdemeanor, and by means of this knowledge he gained an ascendency over the Syrian, and compelled him to accuse his benefactor, Timasius, of a treasonable conspiracy, supporting the charge by forgeries. The accused was tried, condemned, and banished to the Lybian oasis, a punishment equivalent to death; he was never heard of more. Eutropius, foreseeing that the continued existence of Bargus might at some time compromise himself, suborned his wife to lodge very serious charges against her husband, in consequence of which he was put to death. Whether ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... sedimentary matter which it brings down to the month, forming shifting sands and banks, renders it difficult to navigate. A great portion of the volume of the stream is absorbed in the irrigation of the Khivan Oasis. The tendency of the Oxus, like that of the great Siberian rivers, is to press continually on its right or east bank, and twice within historic times it has oscillated between the Caspian and Aral ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... you that I have made a promise of my own in this case. I haven't meant to be presumptuous. I don't want you to feel that I've got a swelled head. I'm merely trying to keep my word and carry out a contract on a business oasis. It's only a matter of starting right; then everything can be ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... personality was dying within him. He could no longer recover his former way of life; all his disquietudes had vanished. He felt that he was balanced, lacking those alternations of courage and cowardice which had previously formed the characteristic thing in him. It was the oasis after the desert; the calm ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... sweetest hours is this; (Of all I think we like it best); A little restful oasis, Between the breakfast and the post. Just south of coffee and of toast, Just north of daily task and duty; Just west of dreams, this island gleams, A fertile spot of ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of unattractiveness has its oasis. Near the outer end of the Hackney Road is a park of 217 acres, fenced in, not by railings, but by a wooden paling, and containing plenty of greensward, trees, a lake for bathers, flower beds with the flowers arranged carefully in patterns by the admired cockney art ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... Dolores Street, a broad parked avenue where automobiles rushed by one another, shrieking a warning to the pedestrian. Suddenly I found myself alone. My companion had darted across the crowded street to a little oasis of grass where a mission bell hung suspended ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... misapprehension. "The bool wasn't in the duckpong. The bool was in Farmer Jones's field, and the field was in the duckpong on the other side. And the dusk was in the pong where there wasn't no green." Evidently an oasis of black juice in the weed, which ducks enjoy. Dave thought no explanation necessary, and went on:—"Then Farmer Jones he was a horseback, and he rodid acrost the field, he did. And he undooed the gate with his whip to go froo, and it stumbled and let the bool froo, and Farmer Jones he rodid ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... of men upon the poet's mouth. You shall read Chenier through to me from beginning to end; he is the lover's poet. You shall not be unhappy any longer; I will not have it. Yes, dear angel, I will make an oasis for you, there you shall live your poet's life, sometimes busy, sometimes languid; indolent, full of work, and musing by turns; but never forget that you owe your laurels to me, let that thought be ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... one of those cities which may be regarded as indispensable. At the edge of the Great Gobi and the converging point of the Nan-lu and Pe-lu—that is, the southern and northern routes to the western world—this oasis is a necessary resting-place. During our stop of two days, to make necessary repairs and recuperate our strength for the hardships of the desert, the usual calls were exchanged with the leading officials. In the matter of social politeness the Chinese, ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... therefore resolved to go thither; as from it he could either proceed into Abyssinia by Kordofan, or traverse Africa from east to west. He therefore left Assiou in Egypt with the Soudan caravan in 1793, passed through the greater Oasis, and arrived at Sircini in Darfur: here he resided a considerable time, but he found insurmountable obstacles opposed to his grand and ulterior plan. He ascertained, however, the source and progress of the real Nile or White River. The geography of Darfur and Kordofan is illustrated by ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... unwearied efforts to see that they received what was due to them. Pleasant also are the evidences of warm family affection in those simple words of brotherly love, and the affecting advice to Diego that he should love his brother Ferdinand as Christopher loved Bartholomew. It is a pleasant oasis in this dreary, sordid wailing after thirds and tenths and eighths. Good Diego Mendez, that honourable gentleman, was evidently also at Court at this time, honestly striving, we may be sure, to say a good word ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... an inscrutable stranger meet and love in an oasis of the Sahara. Staged this season with magnificent ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... of colonisation, either proves herculean strength or the triumph of mind over matter, but to those of less heroic mould the unwonted amenities of a more familiar civilisation are welcome as a green oasis in a sandy desert. A cool and healthy mountain climate gives unwonted zest for the lovely excursions of which Garoet is the centre. From the little lake Setoe Bajendit, a covered raft plies to a cupola-crowned hill, facing a noble panorama ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... miles. About twenty miles from the mouth of the Thompson they came to a field of potatoes planted by some rancher of Kamloops. The starving Overlanders could scarcely credit their eyes. No one occupied the windowless log cabin; but there was the potato patch—an oasis of food in a desert of starvation. They paused long enough at the cabin to boil a great kettleful and to feast ravenously. This gave them strength to tramp on to Kamloops. We saw that the Irish mother, Mrs Shubert, with her two children, accompanied ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... at night instead of in the day time. This wilderness is about sixty miles wide and it took them five days to cross it. Whenever a wind rose on this desert the mouth, eyes, ears and nose were filled with dust, making life miserable. At Durands, a solitary farmhouse stood like an oasis. They got a fresh supply of water there. After leaving the Caroo they entered a desert called Kope. In crossing this waste, they stumbled on many and many a skeleton of poor fellows, who had no doubt succumbed ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
