"Arid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the coast beginning at Cape Blanco, and extending to the arm of the river Senegal, called the Marigot of the Maringouins; is so very arid, that it is not fit for any kind of cultivation; but from that Marigot, to the mouth of the river Gambia, a space, which may be about a hundred leagues, in length, with a depth of about two hundred, we meet with a vast country, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... any other. The Marquis, giving all the praise of manners and agreeability to Vienna, sums up all in one prodigious yawn. "The same evenings at Metternich's, the same lounges for making purchases and visits on a morning, the same idleness and fatigue at night, the searching and arid climate, and the clouds of execrable fine dust"—all conspiring to tell the great of the earth that they can escape ennui ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... "This notice of woods easy to ride through, covering the plain of Yezd, is very curious. Now you find it a plain of great extent indeed from N.W. to S.E., but narrow and arid; indeed I saw in it only thirteen inhabited spots, counting two caravanserais. Water for the inhabitants is brought from a great distance by subterraneous conduits, a practice which may have tended to desiccate the soil, for every trace of wood ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Sunday morning, the longest Sunday in that month of longest days, warm, balmy, rose-bearing June. Only a few hours' high is the blazing god of day, but his beams beat fiercely down on a landscape wellnigh as arid as the Arizona our troopers knew so well. Not a breath of air is stirring. Down in the shallow valley to the right, where the cottonwoods are blistering beside the sandy stream-bed, a faint column of smoke rises straight as the stem of a pine-tree until it melts into indistinguishable ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... spirit of economical husbandry which redeemed the rocky sierra from the curse of sterility, they dug below the arid soil of the valleys, and sought for a stratum where some natural moisture might be found. These excavations, called by the Spaniards hoyas, or "pits," were made on a great scale, comprehending frequently more than an acre, sunk to the depth of fifteen or twenty feet, and fenced round within by ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Kudum, where one strikes the Sefid River, we begin to rise and the country gets more hilly and arid. We gradually leave behind the oppressive dampness, which suggests miasma and fever, and begin to breathe air which, though very hot, is drier and purer. We have risen 262 feet at Kudum from 77 feet, the altitude of Resht, and as we travel now in a south-south-west direction, following the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... two old people towards me, poor forsaken girl as I was, although they had never left their home. He spoke about his future, which would be compromised, of the disgrace which would fall on all the family, went into a rage, arid pitied neither my tears nor my prayers, and treated me with the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... bridal day. I had forgotten that. (Looking from the window.) Is this real? Am I here alone? My mother gone? The army gone? brothers and sisters gone, and those woods full of armed Indians? I am awake. This is not the light of dreams,—'tis the sun that's shining there. Not the fresh arid tender morning sun, that looked in on that parting. Hours he has climbed since then, to turn those shadows thus,—hours that to me were nothing.—Alone?—deserted—defenceless? Of my own will too? There was a law in that will, though, was there not? (Turning suddenly from ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... to arid; hot and dry February to June; rainy, humid, and mild June to November; cool and dry ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... scenes of travel conjure themselves up before me, and pass and repass in my imagination all the more vividly, because I lead such a vegetable existence, that a call to travel would fall upon me like a thunderbolt. In the presence of this Cabuliwallah, I was immediately transported to the foot of arid mountain peaks, with narrow little defiles twisting in and out amongst their towering heights. I could see the string of camels bearing the merchandise, and the company of turbaned merchants, carrying some of their queer old firearms, and some of their spears, journeying ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... had ever seen or heard of the 'Goya' lily, which Central African explorers have told me they have occasionally met with and whose wonderful loveliness has filled them with astonishment. This lily, which the natives say blooms only once in ten years, flourishes in the most arid soil. Compared to the size of the bloom, the bulb is small, generally weighing about four pounds. As for the flower itself (which I afterwards saw under circumstances likely to impress its appearance fixedly in my mind), I know not how to describe its beauty and splendour, ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... Colonies, as they are asked of Ireland. And misgovernment increased, and passions rose, and blood flowed, while, in the guise of dispassionate psychologists, a great many narrow, egotistical, and bullying people at home propounded these arid conundrums. Where is our common sense? The Irish phenomena I have described arise in spite of the absence of Home Rule, and the denial of Home Rule sets an absolute and final bar to progress beyond a ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... her the remorse that gnawed at his heart. It was well that the long walk in the open air wound up this evening for him. It sobered him back into grave resolution, that henceforth he would see as little of her as possible,—since the very sight of that face arid form, the very sounds of that voice (like the soft winds of pure melody) had such power to move him from his balance. Well! He had known what love was—a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... over their trip and the anticipated change from this arid region to the verdure of California, until suddenly a long, bloodcurdling howl broke the stillness and caused them one and all to start from their seats. That is, all but Wampus. The chauffeur, sitting apart with his black cigar in his mouth, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... atmosphere with facility, and can achieve magical pictures of the sea and the "mad naked summer night." His early poem, Walt Whitman, is for me his most spontaneous offering. He has at times the primal gift of the poet—ecstasy; but to attain it he often wades through shallow, ill-smelling sewers, scales arid hills, traverses dull drab levels where the slag covers rich ore, or plunges into subterrene pools of nocturnal abominations—veritable regions of the "mother of dead dogs." Probably the sexlessness of Emerson's, Poe's, and Hawthorne's writings sent Whitman ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... been watching a certain dust cloud for half an hour. At first he had thought it only a whirling dervish—one of those restless columns of sand that continually shift over the arid lands. But it was following the course of the trail below him on the desert—rounding each bend and twist ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... once and for all, the arid region of genealogy, it may be worth mentioning that Sir Bysshe Shelley by his second marriage with Miss Elizabeth Jane Sydney Perry, heiress of Penshurst, became the father of five children, the eldest son of whom assumed the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... government in those regions, to the end that Almighty God may be served more faithfully, and the gospel law and the said faith be spread and exalted the more, on this account. After mature deliberation with our brethren on these points, with their advice, arid at the humble solicitation of the aforesaid King Philip, by our apostolic authority, by perpetual tenor of these presents, to the praise and glory of the same Almighty God, as well as to the honor of His most glorious Mother and ever Virgin Mary and of ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... human nature into ridicule. Through these myths, as through a mist, we may discern the bitterness of that great, disenchanted, disappointed soul. The desert in which spirits of the stamp of Machiavelli wander is too arid and too aerial for the gross substantial bugbears of the vulgar conscience to inhabit. Moreover, as Varchi says, 'In his conversation Machiavelli was pleasant, serviceable to his friends, a friend of virtuous men, and, in a word, worthy ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... to have to discuss Tariff Reform and the position of the working classes in Germany with somebody else, especially when the attractive and pretty woman does not give you in any way to understand that she would prefer gossamer to such arid topics. The Princess was as gracious as you please. She made him feel that he was welcome in her cosy boudoir; but there was no further exchange of mutually understanding glances. If a great lady entertaining a penniless young man can be demure, then demure was the Princess ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... of 5306 sq. m. The district is a long narrow strip of country, 198 m. in length, sloping gradually from the hills which form its western boundary to the river Indus on the east. Below the hills the country is high and arid, generally level, but sometimes rolling in sandy undulations, and much intersected by hill torrents, 201 in number. With the exceptions of two, these streams dry up after the rains, and their influence is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... irrigation by artesian wells has been tried, and always with great success. And it is thought that almost the whole continent can be regained for agriculture, or at least for sheep-pasturing, by similar means; for even in the arid and so-called desert parts of the interior, there is very little soil that is not really fertile, for all of it is covered with thick brushwood. Moisture alone is needed to make it bear crops abundantly. And this dryness of the atmosphere which prevails throughout the whole continent is ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... been miserably misused. He may have loved some woman, and married her, and begotten children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering disappointment at not having attained them, will ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... last I may explain why I have troubled myself and you with what may seem an arid controversy about mere words. It is not so. These heresies which would make poetry a compound of two factors—a matter common to it with the merest prose, plus a poetic form, as the one heresy says: a poetical substance plus a negligible ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... young people—fashionable young people, at least—were not for her. Their conversations, interests, shallow mental attitude to life, bored her. That curious brief period of mental rejuvenescence had been due to the novelty and excitement of being in love again, after long and arid years. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... some other kind of vermin is nearly certain to spring the trap before the chetah's arrival. Among the variety of small animals thus caught I have frequently taken the civet cat. This is a very pretty arid curious creature, about forty inches long from nose to tip of tail. The fur is ash-gray, mottled with black spots, and the tail is divided by numerous black rings. It is of the genius Viverra, and is ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... him, except with a sentimental pity which he rejected, despising it; never had he come near to piercing the well of that mysterious comfort and releasing its waters. To him the dust of the great dead yonder in the Beauchamp Chapel—dust of men and women who had died in faith—was dust merely, arid, unbedewed by any promise of a life beyond. They had played their parts, and great tombs and canopies covered their final nothingness. This was the last time he would watch, and to-night he knew there was less chance than ever of any miracle; for ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... knows how they predicted it, but they did. Spotted it coming several years ago, so they've been romping through parallel after parallel trying to find one they can migrate to. They found one, sort of a desperation choice. It's cold and arid and full of impassable mountain chains. With an uphill fight they can make it support ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... Secretary Lane's plan for the "Reclamation of arid, swamp, and cut-over timber lands." The resolution to that ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... dishes which would always be passed over by the English investigator, because he now read, or tried to read, their names for the first time. Few of the Marchesa's pupils had ever wandered away from the arid table d'hote in Milan, or Florence, or Rome, in search of the ristorante at which the better class of townsfolk were wont to take their colazione. Indeed, whenever an Englishman does break fresh ground ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... blocked up the former open promenade facing the muddy Blue Nile. The ruined walls and forts looked picturesque in their deep setting of dark-green palms, mimosa, and tall orange-trees. Compared with treeless, brown, arid Omdurman, Khartoum wore an air of romance and loveliness that well became such historic ground. An odour of blossom and fruit was wafted from the wild and spacious Mission and Government House gardens, which even the dervishes had not been able to ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... In that arid land, where was green vegetation you may be sure there was water also. And presently the nine were distributed along a rod or two of irrigating ditch, thankfully watching the swallows of water go sliding hurriedly down the outstretched gullets of their horses that ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... that arid place, Mrs. Allen's heart, there appeared a little oasis of mother love, as this last and bitterest sorrow pierced its lowest depths. She might cast out from her affection the grown, sinning daughter, but not the baby that ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... retreat!" yelled Tom. He hurried to the engine-room, and turned on the power. The great propellers revolved, and sent the Black Hawk scudding across the level plain. With yells of surprise the red dwarfs scattered arid made ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... victory over France there must have been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no record of itself in the travellers' consciousness. They were aware of gardened squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignified civic edifices, and of a vast arid splendid railroad station, such as the state builds even in minor European cities, but such as our paternal corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They went to the Zoological Garden, where they heard ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... lane, before I had discharged one of my carefully considered sentences. I breathed more easily, and, looking up at our new friend as we stepped out together, remembered that we had been counting on something altogether more arid, scholastic, and severe. A boyish eager face and a petulant pince-nez,—untidy hair,—a head of constant quick turns like a robin's, and a voice that kept breaking into alto,—these were all very strange and new, but not in the ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... set. (Figs. 142-145) Subsequent pruning should keep the top of the tree open and maintain it in more or less symmetrical form. West of the Great Lakes, particularly on the plains and in the semi-arid regions, the top may be ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... at the foot of snowy mountains, and are the happy possessors of a "rain-stone." In consideration of a proper payment, the Wawamba wash the precious stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in a pot full of water. After that the rain cannot fail to come. In the arid wastes of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches sought to make rain by carrying water from a certain spring and throwing it on a particular point high up on a rock; after that they imagined that the clouds would soon gather, and that rain would begin ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... thought the spiritual life was less arid and less complex. I imagined that by leading a pure life, praying one's best, and communicating, one would attain without much trouble, not indeed to taste the infinite joys reserved for the saints, but at last to possess ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... from aloft, if we had any aloft just now. We are to the southward of the mountains, however, and off a part of the country where the Great Desert makes from the coast. And now, gentlemen, I perceive Mr. Monday finds all this sand arid, and I ask permission to give you, one and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... route to Salamanca lies almost entirely over sandy and arid plains, interspersed here and there with thin and scanty groves of pine. No adventure worth relating occurred during this journey. We sold a few Testaments in the villages through which we passed, more especially at Penaranda. About noon ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... If you sit in the silence and ask for a Guide; In the caverns of sorrow your soul gains its sight Of beautiful vistas, ascending and wide. In by-paths of worry and trouble and strife Full many a bloom grows bedewed by a tear, But wretched and arid and void of all life Is ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Mary," said her husband. From all this I trust the reader will understand that the Christmas to which he is introduced is not the Christmas with which he is intimate on this side of the equator—a Christmas of blazing fires in-doors, and of sleet arid snow and frost outside—but the Christmas of Australia, in which happy land the Christmas fires are apt to be lighted—or to light themselves—when they are ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... could he identify those arid, parched, glinting rocks with the Basque landscape, with the humid, green, shaded countryside of Azpeitia? It was easy to see that the anterior image of a landscape existing in the mind of that priest, provided only the general idea of a mountain, and that he was ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... fly pretty well, we started south. After a few days we reached a land where there were broad marshes covered with reeds. There we stopped for a while. But the men of that country hunted us with their fire-sticks. They called us reed birds arid liked us to eat. They shot many of our friends, but for a few days our family all escaped. But one morning we heard a sound like thunder and our mother fell to the ground and we ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... in the room, and an arid look came into her face. The glance and its sequel did not escape Kitty's notice. She knew well—as who would not?—what Mona Crozier was hoping to see, and she was human enough to feel a kind of satisfaction in the wife's chagrin ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as requested, in the parlour, noting, as he had often noted before, its arid asceticism, wondering how any man could stand the life of a priest, respecting the power that could enable a man to dispense with all the things that, in his opinion—which, by the way, he pronounced "oping-en"—made ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... crime against Nature. Look how it violates that landscape. Look how it stands there gaunt and tawdry against these fresh green meadows edged round with billowy white clouds that herald summer. And you are proud of it. Could you not have found some arid waste for this factory? Can't you see how Nature cries out against this outrage? Can't you see that she has dedicated this country to seed-time and harvest,—these verdant fields, deep woods and ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... mainly for the purpose of irrigating the arid land stretching between the Ganges and the Jumna Rivers, originally extended from Hardwar to Cawnpore and Etawah, but has since been greatly enlarged, and at present (including branches) has a total extent of 3700 m., of which 500 ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... more setting foot on terra firma, after our dreary voyage. The day, notwithstanding it was now October, was intensely hot (although a severe frost for two or three days before gave indications of approaching winter), and the streets being unmacadamized, had that arid look we read of in accounts of the plains of Arabia, the dust being quite deep, and exceeding in quantity anything of the kind I had ever seen in European cities: clouds of it impregnated the air, and rendered respiration ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... stick, a piece of copper wire, and some muslin were all that were necessary. One liked the muslin to be green, for there was a feeling that this deceived the butterfly in some way; he thought that Birnam Wood was merely coming to Dunsinane when he saw it approaching, arid that the queer- looking thing behind was some local efflorescence. So he resumed his dalliance with the herbaceous border, and was never more surprised in his life than when it turned out to be a boy and a butterfly-net. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... that I had struck a wet spot in that arid wilderness. Then I saw my horse at a great distance, galloping, and heard the nephew of the owner saying that he must pursue it, while I must mount his horse ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... covered with a granite sand and huge irregular masses of stone, among which a few plants force their growth, and give the appearance of a green field covered with the ruins of a vast edifice. These stones and this sand discover, on examination, a perfect analogy with those which compose the arid and broken summits of the Rocky Mountains. The flood of waters which washed the soil to the bottom of the valley afterwards carried away portions of the rocks themselves; and these, dashed and bruised against the neighboring cliffs, were ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Arab, you see an Englishman who is desirous of serving you. Having heard at Senegal that Frenchmen were thrown ashore upon these deserts, I thought my presence might be of some service to them, as I was acquainted with several of the princes of this arid country." These noble words from the mouth of a man we had at first taken to be a ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... childhood. His paternal home was situated at the foot of Mount Cicada, celebrated for its fruitful soil. From early youth his pleasure was to pass the night out on the mountain, now watching the stars, now contemplating the arid, desolate sides of Vesuvius. He tells how, in recalling those days—the only peaceful ones of his life—he used to think, as he looked up at the infinite expanse of heaven and the confines of the horizon, with the towering volcano, that this must be the ultimate end of the earth, and it ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... until one approached within half a mile of it that it resolved itself into a copse of butternut-trees sunken below the distant levels. Here once, in geological story, the waters of Butternut Creek, despairing of ever crossing the leagues of arid waste before them, had suddenly disappeared in the providential interposition of an area of looser soil, and so given up the effort and the ghost forever, their grave being marked by the butternut copse, chance-sown by bird or beast in the saturated ground. In Indian ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... this continent are superior, because it presents every variety of climate, soil, and production of the earth, with every variety of mineral production, with all kinds of water privileges, arid ocean coast on all sides, presenting every commercial advantage. Upon the American continent we are determined to stay, in spite of every odds against us. What part of the great continent shall our destination be—shall we emigrate ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... looks beautiful and strong from the sea, being rich and populous owing to the resort of many nations for trade. But Immediately behind are the barren and rocky mountains of Arzira, which present numerous cliffs and precipices. The soil is arid, having very little water, which is procured from a few wells and cisterns, as this part of the country is scarcely watered from the heavens above once in two or three years. Hence it is devoid of all trees, and has neither ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... went desperately to work, gathering up dry wood and brush, which he stacked on the overhanging ledge, never pausing till a great mound was created sufficiently large to keep a fire blazing all night. By the time this was done the darkness became profound. Now arid then he could see drifts of foam tossed upwards, like the fluttering garments of a ghost fleeing from the storm. The little tavern at the foot of the rock was lost in the overwhelming darkness. The lights from the village seemed put out, and there ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... Bodin as a free man under the supreme government of another; like Montesquieu, he devotes attention to the adaptation of government to the varieties of race and climate. The attempts at a general history of France in the earlier part of the sixteenth century preserved the arid methods and unilluminated style of the mediaeval chronicles;[3] in the second half of the century they imitated with little skill the models of antiquity. Histories of contemporary events in Europe ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... vast region to the most rigorous and least generous conditions possible, leaving it unshielded alike from Polar winds in winter or scorching heat in summer, divesting it of beauty and of charm, and then casting this arid, frigid, torpid land to a branch of the human family as unique as its own habitation; separating it by natural and almost impassable barriers from civilizing influences, and in strange isolation leaving it to work out its own ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... for happy generations unborn. The children and the fields and the birds we have always with us. I would that for every child there might be the fields, to make long after a dream of green beauty, though the world has grown arid. Because the dream seems so sweet to me I have gossiped of it, but have not named half its delicate delights, nor some of the great ones: as the romps in the hay fields, the voyage of discovery after hens' nests, the mysteries of that double hedge ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... in here," he said, in an arid voice, and held wide the door of the room where he and Rudyard had settled the first chapter of the future and closed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... those that are widely distributed in the western United States and that occur in Colorado in both the mountains and the lower more arid intermontane areas. Some of these species are differentiated into subspecies, one of which inhabits the mountains and another the lowlands. Wide-spread species that do not have subspecies in the lowlands ...
— Mammals of the Grand Mesa, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... bean, And a freckled nose that grew between, A little awry—for I must mention That he had riveted his attention Upon his wonderful invention, Twisting his tongue as he twisted the strings, Working his face as he worked the wings, Arid with every turn of gimlet and screw Turning and screwing his mouth round, too, Till his nose seemed bent To catch the scent, Around some corner, of new-baked pies, And his wrinkled cheeks and his squinting eyes Grew puckered into a queer grimace, That made him look very droll in the face, ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... out of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the window." The wild coast scenery falls in with the desolate mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban; the arid desert holds in its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the lips of the dying Apostle. In the poetry of Men and Women we see the ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in Dramatis Personae, the processes of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... discharge of artillery in the outskirts, and the church bells begin ringing; but the peals dwindle away to a melancholy jangle, and then to silence. Simultaneously, on the northern horizon of the arid, unenclosed, and treeless plain swept by the eye around the city, a cloud of dust arises, and a Royal procession is seen nearing. It means the new ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... beauty and palatial mansions of a northern clime, we follow hero and heroine, with breathless interest, to the sun-scorched veldt and arid plains of Southern Africa. ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... the iguana and land agama are numerous. Snakes abound in the low bushes at the mouth of the Rimac, and some kinds, which are venomous, live on the arid sand-banks. All the sea tortoises have been driven out of the bay, and now inhabit the detached creeks of the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... relatively coarse and porous. Because these deposits are porous the rain that falls upon them and the run-off that reaches them from the mountains sinks into them, and the valleys in which they lie are exceptionally arid. These deposits, however, form huge reservoirs in which the water is stored and in which, to the limit of the capacity of the reservoirs, it is protected from evaporation. So well is this water hidden that its existence was not suspected by many of ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... see old ruins whitened by the sea-wind—ruins about which no grass ever grows. The dismal melancholy of deserts prevails over this arid land, whose cracked surface can barely nourish a few shriveled mimosas, cacti, and dwarf palms. Twenty yards away, along the course of a ravine, stones were gleaming whitely like a long line of scattered bones. They told me that was the ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... solitary adventurers, with the future of the world in their hands. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to understand that the ocean is not a limit, but the universal waterway that unites mankind. Shut in by Spain, they could not extend on land, and had no opening but the Atlantic. Their arid soil gave little scope to the territorial magnate, who was excluded from politics by the growing absolutism of the dynasty, and the government found it well to employ at a distance forces that might ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... concealed at the Elk City reservoir. Some he pictured in abandoned farmhouses. Others he saw in barns, in the stacks of ruined factories. And some he imagined as flinging their voices abroad amid the burning plains of the arid border-lands. But he could not picture to himself the invisible messenger that took the word across the boundary. He could not fathom the mystery, he could not picture to himself the missing link in the chain. ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... live, reared with almost incredible toil on the top of nearly inaccessible rocks or on the ledges of deep gorges, were constructed to serve at the same time as dwelling-places and as strongholds against the attacks of the roaming and murdering Apaches. These people till the thirsty soil of their arid region by irrigation with water conducted for miles. They have developed many industries to a remarkable degree, and their pottery shows ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... the dark we could hear the low swish of the rising river, and Burton, with a sly twinkle in his eye, remarked, "For a semi-arid country, this ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... shingle spotted with bright green Manchineels; while on the cliffs around, aloes innumerable, seemingly the imported American Agave, send up their groups of huge fat pointed leaves from crannies so arid that one would fancy a moss would wither in them. A strange place it is, and strangely hot likewise; and one could not but fear a day—it is to be hoped long distant— when it will ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... explanation of Mr. Thrush's exact relation to Rosamund that the silent contest began in the waning summer when London was rather arid, and even the Thames looked hot between its ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if Providence, which in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected agencies, had not made a special provision for her mental welfare. She was in that arid household as the prophet in the land where there was no dew nor rain for these long years. But as he had the brook Cherith, and the bread and flesh in the morning and the bread and flesh in the evening which the ravens brought him, so she had the river ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... fell into his brooding silence, looking up at the naked hills from habit, for there were no cattle there. And Rufus Hardy, quick to understand, gazed also at the arid slopes, where once the grama had waved like tawny hair in the soft winds and the cattle of Jeff Creede's father had stood knee-high ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... thirteen hundred. This weak army was destitute of commissariat and the engines necessary for such a siege. Before long it was a prey to the horrors of thirst. "The neighborhood of Jerusalem," says William of Tyre, "is arid; and it is only at a considerable distance that there are to be found rivulets, fountains, or wells of fresh water. Even these springs had been filled up by the enemy a little before the arrival of our troops. The crusaders issued from the camp secretly and in small detachments to look for water ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... humming had no sort of tune or purpose, and was but a vague musical sputtering. He almost perilled the gravity of the oath they all took to Valmond by this idiosyncrasy. His occupation gave him a lean, arid look; his hair was crisp and straight, shooting out at all points, and it flew to meet his cap as if it were alive. He was a genius after a fashion, too, and at all the feasts and on national holidays ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from the station at South East to Nepaug Beach was long and dusty, tedious enough to the traveller at any time, but especially on this July afternoon when the sun beat down pitilessly upon its arid stretches, and the dust, stirred by passing wheels, ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... Arid have we all become; and fire falling upon us, then do we turn dust like ashes:—yea, the fire ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... deceptive. It looks hardly larger than Arran, but it is really forty-six miles long by twenty-five broad, and is 530 square miles in extent. Diamond Hill, or Leahi, is the most prominent object south of the town, beyond the palm groves of Waikiki. It is red and arid, except when, as now, it is verdure- tinged by recent rains. Its height is 760 feet, and its crater nearly as deep, but its cone is rapidly diminishing. Some years ago, when the enormous quantity of thirty-six inches ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... arid countenance revealed no emotion. He was accustomed to understanding his clients a trifle better than they understood themselves, and inscrutable though Mr. Gunning's original motive in buying the mare had been, he had ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... remarkable fact that the weather is generally rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on the sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from captivity. The English strikers used some barren republican formula (arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic shibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except for a wage accepted by them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt employed some dry scholastic ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... growing since first the world began. It is not only that children re-create the world year by year, decade by decade, by making over human nature; by transforming trivial, thoughtless men and women into serious, earnest ones; by waking in arid natures slumbering seeds of generosity, self- sacrifice, and helpfulness. It is not alone in this way that children are bringing the dawn of the perfect day. It is the children (bless them! how naughty they were to-day!) who are going to do all ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... these folk of malice used to play on a small school-boy, new kicked out of his nest into the draughty, uncomfortable outer world, his unfledged skin still craving the feathers whereinto he was wont to nestle. The barrack-like school, the arid, cheerless class-rooms, drove him to Nature for redress; and, under an alien sky, he would go forth and wander along the iron road by impassive fields, so like yet so unlike those hitherto a part of him and responding to his every mood. And to him, thus loitering ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... which horse-flesh is heir,—or he never would have come to us. It was simply impossible that anybody who knew anything about horses should trade off such a promising young racer so long as there remained an unpledged pay-account in the officers' mess. Possibly the arid climate of Arizona had disagreed with him and he had gone amiss, as would the mechanism of some of the best watches in the regiment, unable to stand the strain of anything so hot and high and dry. Possibly the Third was so overjoyed at getting ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... pafarkisto. Archipelago insularo. Architect arhxitekturisto. Architecture arhxitekturo. Archives arhxivo. Arctic arktika. Ardent fervora. Ardour fervoro. Arduous laborega. Arena areno. Areopagus Aeropago. Argue argumenti. Argument argumento. Arid seka. Aright bone. Arise levigxi. Aristocracy aristokrataro. Aristocrat aristokrato. Arithmetic aritmetiko. Ark sxipego. Arm (milit.) armi. Arm (of the body) brako. Armament armilaro. Armchair ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... were needed to find a compromise,—perhaps an amendment of the Constitution,—which the feverish unrest and impatience of the nation would compel Congress to enact or propose, and the different States and sections, willing or unwilling, to accept arid ratify. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... was, out of curiosity, left in the water after the catkins had faded, merely to see what would happen. It bravely sent forth leaves, while at the base little white rootlets appeared. Its vigor appealing to us, it was planted in an arid spot in our back yard, and it is now, after a year and a half, a handsome, slender young tree that will give us a whole family of silken pussy-buds to stroke and admire ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... first glimpse of Chelan was not attractive. We had motored half a day through that curious, semi-arid country, which, when irrigated, proves the greatest of all soils in the world for fruit-raising. The August sun had baked the soil into yellow dust which covered everything. Arid hillsides without a leaf of green but dotted thickly with gray sagebrush, eroded valleys, rocks and ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... we do." She might not be able to show the under-white of her eyes arid look like a seraph, but she had her voice, her features, under perfect control, and she had never been quick to blush. She did not suspect that Alexina was angling, but the very sound of Gathbroke's name was enough to put ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... month, and a count whose father gave him five sous and a piece of bread for his breakfast when he left home, but the rest were plebeians, with neither past nor future, whose enthusiasm in the face of their weekly failures, and patience in following an arid path, were most interesting as a social phenomenon. I have always found more to wonder at in the failures than in the great successes of artist life—seeing the content and even happiness which some of the hopelessly enthusiastic found in their futile and endless labor. We used to ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... court at Fontainebleau. It was natural enough that to please the king the king's old Huguenot friend should be convicted of false citations from the fathers; but it would seem strange, were the motives unknown, that Henry should have been so intensely interested in this most arid and dismal of theological controversies. Yet those who had known and observed the king closely for thirty years, declared that he had never manifested so much passion, neither on the eve of battles nor of amorous assignations, as he then did for the demolition of Duplessis and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... offices to the door marked "private," and there, near the window of his sanctum, sat a stout and elderly gentleman. In the unsparing revelation of the morning sunshine the visitor's face declared all its wrinkles. The whitening hair, growing sparse, was carefully combed across an arid patch of scalp. Hamilton Burton's smile died and his face grew for a moment solicitous as he read his father's troubled eyes. Old Thomas Burton was shaven and manicured and betailored into a model of well-nourished—possibly ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... swaggering sea roll he came striding across the wide arid space between the wharf side and the buildings, puffing at a big black cigar as he walked, and glancing about him curiously, as though he could not quite understand the utter quietude and deserted aspect of the place. Apparently, however, this was not sufficiently marked ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... The roar of the falls grew louder, and at any moment we felt that we might come upon the sight, but we had to travel on nearly half a mile along what seemed to be a steep slope. It was no longer arid and barren here, for every shelf and crevice was full of growth of the most vivid green. For a long time we had not seen a tree, but here tall forest trees had wedged their roots in the cracks and crevices, curved out, and then shot ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... is not a period to which the student of literature can turn with joy. One who would know Gustavus well must traverse a vast desert of dreary reading, and pore over many volumes of verbose despatches before he can find a drop of moisture to relieve the arid soil. Sweden in the early part of the sixteenth century was not fertile in literary men. Gustavus himself, judged by any rational standard, was an abominable writer. His despatches are in number almost endless and in length appalling. Page after page he ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... before a puff-jawed Triton, who wallowed in an arid basin and uplifted toward heaven what an indulgent observer might construe as a broken conch-shell. "Love! Mon Dieu, how are the superior fallen! I have not the decency to conceal even from myself that I love my wife! I am ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the victim of enchantment, he became palsied with terror, arid began to plead with the unseen tormentors who he believed held him in thrall. "Only leave me loose, dear good little people," he howled, "and I'll never, never trouble ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... of this now almost-forgotten race—the Saracen—are still to be found on the northern seaboard of Africa, in the kingdom called Morocco, where they strive to eke out a scant existence from the arid plains of that parched ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... the necessities of our condition. I say that to meet the problem of the returned soldier we ought to take advantage of this opportunity to do the work now that must eventually be done and reclaim these arid lands of the West. Turn the waters of the Colorado over the desert of Arizona, store those waters in the Grand River and in the Green River, and let them flow down at the right times on that desert so as to raise cotton and cantaloupes and alfalfa. Then come east and take the stumps from ...
— Address by Honorable Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... perspirations began to diminish; and the extraordinary fatigue he experienced proceeded evidently from his travelling in a post-chaise, where he could not indulge in a recumbent position. The weather at Bristol had been hot, and the earth arid and dusty. At Matlock, during the month of June 1784, there was almost a perpetual drizzle, the soil was wet, and the air moist and cold. Here, however, the patient's cough began to abate, and at intervals he found an opportunity of riding more or less on horseback. From two or three ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... humanity had a vaulting ambition. He desired to slake the thirst of every man in Christendom; but this being impossible from the very nature of things, he determined to settle in some arid spot like Minerva Court, and irrigate it so sweetly and copiously that all men's noses would blossom as the roses. To supply his brothers' wants, and create new ones at the same time, was his purpose ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doorways to those caves are rare specimens of Nature's mysterious work; some large, some small and of queer, fantastic shapes; that black-mouthed gape at chance passers, while towering high above, a roof of table land—arid, scorching pampas, is just as uninviting as the water way below. So desolate is that part of the coast that it is but little known. Don Nicholas and a group of Peruvian officers to whom Paul described the caves, expressed the utmost astonishment, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... whole. Both parties in their platforms of 1900 stood for the admission as states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma; both declared in favor of legislation against monopolies and trusts; both favored liberal pensions, the construction of an Isthmian canal, irrigation of arid lands, reduction of war taxes and protection of American workmen against cheap foreign labor. Yet it does not by any means follow that a majority of the people voting really endorsed even these planks which were ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... odor through the sultry air. There was something in it, as I approached them, that recalled old associations; the pine-clad mountains of New England, traversed in days of health and buoyancy, rose like a reality before my fancy. In passing that arid waste I was goaded with a morbid thirst produced by my disorder, and I thought with a longing desire on the crystal treasure poured in such wasteful profusion from our thousand hills. Shutting my eyes, I more than half believed that I heard the deep plunging and gurgling of waters in ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... to Zola some scenes and characters of "La Terre." A French friend of mine, well acquainted with these parts, tells me that at any rate there, if anywhere, the great novelist might have found suggestions for such a work. The soil is arid, the cultivation is primitive in the extreme and the people are rough and uncouth. The other day an English resident at Marlotte, when cycling among these villages of the plain inquired his ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... doctor get matters arranged it will really make no difference whether a farmer is located in the black-waxy district, or on the arid cactus-cursed lands of the trans-Pecos country, as he will have to surrender to the public all he produces in excess of what the poorest land in use will yield. He will have no incentive to study the capabilities of his land and bring to bear upon ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... color of this country, by sending them to Africa. This is more inconsistent still. We are to be improved by being sent far from civilized society. This is a novel mode of improvement. What is there in the burning sun, the arid plains, and barbarous customs of Africa, that is so peculiarly favorable to our improvement? What hinders our improving here, where schools and colleges abound, where the gospel is preached at every corner, and where all the arts and sciences are ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... stared at himself with admiration by the coal-porters. Of his frame of mind at that moment his face offered a lively if an unconscious picture. He was lividly pale, and his lip was caught up in a smile that could almost be called a snarl, of a sheer, arid malignity that appalled me and yet put me on my mettle for the encounter. He looked me up and down, then bowed and took ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the vats necessary. Olives and vines have pretty names, and call up associations of landscape beauty. But here they were in no way beautiful. The ground beneath them was turned up, and brown, and arid, so that there was not a blade of grass to be seen. On some furrows the maize or Indian corn was sprouting, and there were patches of growth of other kinds,—each patch closely marked by its own straight lines; and there were narrow ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... the results of climatic conditions, or of the influence of soil or nourishment. Between [439] these two alternatives, many writers have tried to decide, by transplanting their specimens after some time in the garden, into arid or sandy soil, in order to see whether they ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... for Australind. The Grass-tree. Correspondence with Mr. Clifton, etc. Sail from Gage Road. Examination of coast. Reach Champion Bay. Visit Mount Fairfax and Wizard Peak. Arid nature of country. Want of water. Native Grave. The Greenough river. Natives. Leave Champion Bay. Koombanah Bay. Naturaliste Reef. Reach South Australia. Port Adelaide. Proposed Railroad. Visit Mount Barker. Encounter ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... milk of their herds and flocks, and sometimes eat their flesh. These burning deserts are stretched out to an immense extent on every side, and these they consider as their common country, without having any fixed or permanent abode. Arid and barren as are these wilds in general, there are various spots which are more productive than the rest; here are found supplies of water, and some appearances of vegetation; and here the Arabians ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... the dead calm that hangs over this world; no cloud ever tempers the fierce glare of the Sun that pours down his unmitigated rays from a sky of inky blackness; no refreshing shower ever falls upon her arid mountains and plains; no sound ever breaks the profound stillness that reigns over this realm of solitude ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... productive of such decisive results as might have been expected. Jugurtha avoided any general action, and eluded the pursuit of Metellus by the rapidity of his movements. Even when driven from Thala, a strong-hold which he had deemed inaccessible from its position in the midst of arid deserts, he only retired among the Gaetulians, and quickly succeeded in raising among those wild tribes a fresh army, with which he once more penetrated into the heart of Numidia. A still more important accession was that of Bocchus, king of ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... Climate: arid to semiarid; mild, wet winters with hot, dry summers along coast; drier with cold winters and hot summers on high plateau; sirocco is a hot, dust/sand-laden wind ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... summer in Berry was one of the most arid periods in Clerambault's life. He talked with no one, he wrote nothing and he had no way of communicating directly with the working people. He had always made himself liked on the rare occasions on which he had come ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... and dried as it sweeps over the arid surface of the soil, drinks up by day myriads of tons of moisture from the sea,—so much, indeed, that, were none restored to it, the surface of the ocean would be depressed eight or ten ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... conversation in which she, his guardian angel, bore her part. Did he talk of Avignon, for instance? It was the land of Laura and Petrarch, and she, seated with half-closed eyes beneath the Bayfield elms, saw the pair beside the waters of Vaucluse, saw the roses and orange-trees and arid plains of Provence, and wondered at the trouble in their spiritual love. She was not troubled; love as "a dureless content and a trustless joy" lay outside of her knowledge, and she had no desire to prove it. In this only she forgot the difference ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... consideration of the Senate with a view to ratification, a convention between the United States of America arid the United States of Colombia for facilitating and securing the construction of a ship canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the continental isthmus lying without the jurisdiction of the United States of Colombia, which instrument was signed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... Think of the clergy feeding their flocks on such food as the following: "God—a being who supports all the world at one time;" "Preestablished harmony—the eternal union of things;" "Ratio sufficiens—the sufficient ground;" with many other arid definitions of the same class. One preacher, in explaining the eighth chapter of Matthew, thought it necessary, when noticing the fact of Jesus descending the mountain, to define the term mountain by declaring it to be "a very elevated place;" and, when discoursing on Jesus stretching forth ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... horses were slowly moving, concealed, except for their nodding heads and plodding legs, by the bunches of green-golden fruit heaped upon their backs. On doorsills sat women combing their long, black hair and calling, one to another, across the narrow thoroughfares. Peace reigned in Coralio—arid and bald peace; but ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... mesa-fronts, verdureless, voiceless and unbeautiful. It is a land of soft, crumbling soil and parched rock, dyed with strange colors and broken into fantastic shapes. Nature is titanic and mad: the sane and alleviating beauty of fertility is displaced by an arid and inanimate desolateness, which glows with alien splendor in evanescent conditions of the atmosphere, but which in those moments when the sun casts a fatuous light upon it is more oppressive in its influence upon the observer than when the blaze of high noon exposes all of its unyielding ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... land, impressing one as a desert in the first stages of reclamation into productive soil, or a productive soil in the last steps of deterioration into a desert. It is a vast expanse of arid, yellow sand, broken at intervals by foul swamps, with a jungle-life growth of unwholesome vegetation, and teeming With venomous snakes, and all manner of hideous ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of two almonds, rough and bitter, from which an oil is produced, very excellent for frying. In order to use this oil it requires to be purified by fire, and set in a flame, which must be suffered to die away of itself; the most greasy particles are thus consumed, and its arid qualities wholly destroyed. "When the Moors gather these fruits they drive their goats under the trees, and as the fruit falls the animals carefully nibble off the skins, and ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... murmured with an intonation so just, with an accent so penetrating—the charm of her voice did not fail her even in whispering—that Heyst seemed to see the illusion of human fellowship on earth vanish before the naked truth of her existence, and leave them both face to face in a moral desert as arid as the sands of Sahara, without restful shade, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... so clearly reflects the habits and customs of the tribesmen and thus gives an indirect reflection of a well-marked environment. As among so many peoples, the sun is a prominent element; the ice-monsters of the north and the rain-myths of the arid region are lacking, and are replaced by the frequent thunder and the trees shaken by the storm-winds; the mythic creatures are shaped in the image of the indigenous animals and birds; the myths center in the local rocks and waters; the mysterious thearchy corresponds with the ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... the chaff of arid Rad And that of equally dry-and-dusty Tory? CHAPLIN would feed you on preposterous fad, And GARDNER on—postponement! The old story! While the grass grows the horse may starve. Poor ass! Party would bring ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... from tyranny, his nerves were now strung to the highest tension, and he spent many a sleepless night planning how best to achieve his high purposes and grim resolves, while his love for pretty Dorothy was the one green spot in the arid desert ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... a frightful orgy, and now arid as the Sahara desert and quite as flat and dreary, the bachelor dinner was in truth more often than not, a ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... sake, stop, and tell us if the world is coming to an end!" Arid in pity lie answered: "Do not be so afraid, good people. It is the Turks. They are trying to scare us by making a great noise. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... malapi, of fighting off bandits from the stage while the driver kept the horses on a run up Dragoon Pass, of grim old ranchmen stalking cattle-thieves by night, of frontier sheriffs and desperadoes and a wilderness that was more savage than the wild riders who sought sanctuary within its arid solitudes. He did not talk for more than forty-five minutes at the most and the words came slowly from his lips, but when he had done my head was spinning from more visions of bold men and large deeds than it had held since the Christmas night when I reeled ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... the seeming joyousness of popular faith. I have seen nothing grim, austere, or self-repressive. I have not even noted anything approaching the solemn. The bright temple courts and even the temple steps are thronged with laughing children, playing curious games; arid mothers, entering the sanctuary to pray, suffer their little ones to creep about the matting and crow. The people take their religion lightly and cheerfully: they drop their cash in the great alms-box, clap their hands, murmur a very brief prayer, then turn to laugh and talk and smoke their little ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... 'Boughs of thick trees'], i.e. the myrtle, which is fragrant, "and the branches of palm-trees, and willows of the brook," which retain their greenness a long time; and these are to be found in the Land of promise; to signify that God had brought them through the arid land of the wilderness to a land of delights. On the eighth day another feast was observed, of "Assembly and Congregation," on which the people collected the expenses necessary for the divine worship: and it signified the uniting of the people and the peace granted ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... romantic period of Spanish history Irving was in ardent sympathy. The story of the Saracens entranced his mind; his imagination disclosed its Oriental quality while he pored over the romance and the ruin of that land of fierce contrasts, of arid wastes beaten by the burning sun, valleys blooming with intoxicating beauty, cities of architectural splendor and picturesque squalor. It is matter of regret that he, who seemed to need the southern sun to ripen ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... hidden by north-east snowstorms, or drenched by gales from the north-west. No rain falls for two months after the middle of June, the luxuriant herbage withers more rapidly than it grew, and, except in a few spots near the streams, the steppe becomes a black, arid waste. Yet in some parts of these regions the vegetation is extraordinary: 'the wormwoods and thistles grow to a size unknown in the west of Europe; it is said that the thistle-bush, found where these abound, is tall enough to hide ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... brightened by the transient light of a missionary's pen only to relapse into the unfathomable darkness of the past. The few traditions that come down to us in Manbo legendary song and oral tradition furnish but little light in the darkness, arid that little is probably not the pure and simple light of truth, but the multicolored rays of the popular imagination that have transformed warriors into giants and enemies into hideous monsters. Thus Dbao, of whom mention will be made presently, was a giant according ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of the plain on leaving the flat monotonous banks of the Danube is anything but prepossessing. Although the land begins to rise almost immediately, the surrounding scenery is flat and arid. The soil, which is black or dark grey, is chiefly argillo-siliceous, and the plain is overrun with coarse grass, weeds, and stunted shrubs, diversified by fields of maize, patches of yellow gourds, and kitchen ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... Cairo's slaves, to bondage bred, The arid deserts roam, Through trackless sands undaunted tread, With skins of water on their head To cheer their ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... of canals and ditches to irrigate large tracts of land which would be otherwise worthless. By means of irrigation, the farmer has control of his water supply and is able to get larger returns than are possible where he depends upon the irregular and uncertain rainfall. It is estimated that in the arid regions of western United States there are 150,000 square miles of land which may be made available for agriculture by irrigation. Perhaps in the future the valley of the lower Colorado may become as productive as that of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... were walking over shining powder. At our right, along a long and irregular course, a tumultuous torrent ran with a continuous roar. And we staggered along under this heat, in this light, in this burning, arid, desolate valley cut by this ravine of turbulent water which seemed to be ever hurrying onward, without being able to fertilize these rocks, lost in this furnace which greedily drank it up without being penetrated or ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the little ones away. It was such a look as his men might have seen in their commander's eyes as he doggedly led them on to avenge some of the blood that has flowed so free and red to enrich the arid plains of South Africa, at the cost, alas! of the impoverishment of many a desolated heart. But none of his home folks had ever seen those frank, smiling eyes snap and sparkle in the way they did now, like broken ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... with relations of line and space which have little to do with imitation, finds in the submissive attention to external fact necessary to success in portraiture a source of refreshment and of that renewed contact with nature which is constantly necessary to art if it is not to become too arid an abstraction. Certainly it was so with Raphael, and the master of design has left us a series of portraits comparable only to those of that other great designer whose fate was to leave little but portraits behind him, Hans Holbein. Allowing ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... glossy, an anointed and bearded, Mr. Quackenboss, the junior partner, who conducted the classical department and never whacked—only sent down his subjects, with every confidence, to his friend. I make out with clearness that Mr. Forest was awful and arid, and yet that somehow, by the same stroke, we didn't, under his sway, go in terror, only went exceedingly in want; even if in want indeed of I scarce (for myself) know what, since it might well have been enough for me, in so resounding an air, to escape with nothing worse than a ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... a Mr. Grewgious, an arid, sandy man who looked as if he might be put in a grinding-mill and turned out first-class snuff. He had scanty hair like a yellow fur tippet, and deep notches in his forehead, and was very near-sighted. He seemed ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... now a whip he used, And now he kicked, and sore the palfry bruised; Yet, lo, the horse seemed patient at each kick, Arid bore with Christian spirit whip and stick; And what excessively provoked this prince, The horse so stubborn scorned even ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the still burning earth ascended warm odors, with the freer respiration of evening. At the foot of the terrace was the railroad, with the outlying dependencies of the station, of which the buildings were to be seen in the distance; then, crossing the vast arid plain, a line of trees marked the course of the Viorne, beyond which rose the hills of Sainte-Marthe, red fields planted with olive trees, supported on terraces by walls of uncemented stones and crowned by somber pine woods—broad amphitheaters, bare and desolate, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... fair and broad, And hold a river in its rest; Or small, arid with the silver gaud Of a lone lakelet on its breast, Or but a ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... stalk'd towards me with outstretch'd hand: I put mine behind me, and back'd away; My terrified brain could not understand, And my arid lips had nothing ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... russet-coloured grass lands of the border country looked forbidding beside the green herbage of the North Saskatchewan. But in 1879 Professor Macoun's investigations had shown that the southern lands had been belied by rumour, and that only a very small section was hopelessly arid. With this objection removed, the only drawback to the {161} southern route was the difficulty of finding as good a route through the mountains as the northerly Yellowhead Pass route afforded, but on this the company decided to take ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... Scrotton, not many years ago, had been surrounded with art-tinted hangings and photographs from Rossetti, and the austerity of her eighteenth-century reaction was now almost defiant. Her drawing-room, in its arid chastity, challenged you, as it were, to dare remember the aesthetics ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of Alutaya belongs to that province. It is a rocky and arid land. However, it has plenty of domestic and useful animals, [the rearing of which forms], the careful industry of its natives. It is about thirty leguas across the open sea from the islands of Calamianes. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... but he rejected it; wherefore Gharib bade crucify him on the gate of the city, and they shot at him with shafts till he was like unto a porcupine. Then Gharib honourably robed Jamrkan and said to him, "Thou shalt be lord of this city arid ruler thereof with power to loose and to bind therein, for it was thou didst open it with thy sword and thy folk." And Jamrkan kissed the King's feet, thanked him and wished him abiding victory and glory and every blessing Morever Gharib opened ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... addition to this he never failed to express his meaning clearly. Giotto indeed was not so much the pupil of any human master as of Nature herself, for in addition to his splendid natural gifts, he studied Nature diligently, arid was always contriving new things and borrowing ideas ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... gaunt and shaggy bison, which crops with sullen tranquillity a herbage more nutritious but less grateful to him than he loved to cull among the stony pastures of the Alleghany range, or of the howling solitudes surrounding Hudson's Bay. Though thousands of leagues have interposed between the arid sands from which they have been imported into this peaceful and common home, the camel of the Thebais, as he ruminates in his grassy parterre, surveys with composed surprise the wild dog of the Tierra del Fuego and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various |
