"Sinuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blowing strong, and an "ugly sea" was rolling on the bank where the Swordfish had gone ashore many years before. This, however, mattered little, because the direction of the wind was such that they could steer well clear of it. But the channel leading to the harbour was very sinuous, and, as the pilot observed, required careful steering. In one part this channel was so crooked that it became necessary to go on the other tack a short distance. In ordinary circumstances the captain would have thought nothing of this, but he felt anxious just then, because some ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... against the floe until she had fairly mounted up on it and slid back rolling heavily from side to side. The rolling had been more frequently caused by the operation of cracking through thickish young ice, where the crack had taken a sinuous course. The ship, in attempting to follow it, struck first one bilge and then the other, causing her to roll six or seven degrees. Our advance through the pack had been in a S. 10 E. direction, and I estimated that the total steaming distance had exceeded ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... little son Paul the "mysteries of flying a kite," they caught the rare fleeting glimpse of a glittering glacier. La Lorraine, only half a mile from Berne, is noted as "one of the pretty little retired villas that dot the landscape," with "the sinuous Aar glancing between" it and the town. The trim little garden and half-ruined fountain were well shaded by trees, and the adjoining farmhouse and barn-yard, all Swiss, made a fine playground for the children's summer holiday. The house and its furniture they found "faultlessly neat." There was ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... set in, and the outline of New-Berne on the left bank of the sinuous Neuse became more and more indistinct until it disappeared in the deepening shades of night. A mist set in from the sea, but though it obscured the moon it brought no sign of rain. The lights gleamed out ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... waver, bending back and forth, sometimes slowly, sometimes with a quick, springing motion, as if testing its elasticity. Now it took the shape of a bow, now undulated into Hogarth's line of beauty, brightening and fading in its sinuous motion, and finally formed a shepherd's crook, the end of which suddenly began to separate and fall off, as if driven by a strong wind, until the whole belt shot away in long, drifting lines of fiery snow. It then gathered again into ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... she was dancing she held the attention of all; everybody's eyes followed her sinuous movements, now indicative of glowing passion, now of frolicsomeness. Not until she ceased her rhythmic swayings was the spell interrupted. The audience went mad with rapture, and the entire dance had to be repeated over and ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... faster than they knew. Madame Chaouache, so to call her, prepared breakfast. The children played with the dog and cat. Thus it happened that still nobody looked out into the swirling rain. Why should they? Only to see the wide deluged plain, the round drenched groves, the maraises and sinuous coolees shining with their floods, and long lines of benumbed, wet cattle seeking in patient, silent Indian file for warmer pastures. They ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... hair, exposing only the mask, the hard features intensified through strong contrasts of light and shade, the cheeks hollow up to the inner angle of the eye, the projecting cheek-bones, the massive, protuberant jaw, the sinuous, mobile lips, pressed together as if attentive; the large, clear eyes, deeply sunk under the broad arched eyebrows, the fixed oblique look, as penetrating as a rapier, and the two creases which extend from the base of the nose to the brow as if in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... lay over the damp grassy hills of the Libertad district. It edged away from the Amerrique range on our right. To our left, about three miles distant, rose the dark sinuous line of the great forest of the Atlantic slope. Only a fringe of dark-foliaged trees in the foreground was visible, the higher ground behind was shrouded in a sombre pall of thick clouds that never lifted, but seemed to cover a gloomy and mysterious country beyond. Though I had dived into the recesses ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... after many windings, we reached the Downs. The white booths, following the direction of the course in their sinuous lines, looked like stately white marble streets and crescents in the dim, uncertain light of that hour which, between May 31 and June 1, is neither day nor night. Under the stands and around the booths, tabernacling beneath costermongers' barrows, and even lying out openly ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... your boost orations—say, that was a classic! He tells 'em confidential how Gopher is the comin' metropolis of the great West; how, "with its main boulevard laid out along the sinuous, lovely banks of the pellucid Pinto River, and its western boundaries stretching off to the sunset-tinted tops of Soup Kettle Range, it has a scenic setting unsurpassed anywhere this side of Switzerland." And when it comes to predictin' how prosperity has ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... was covered with houses, which were divided by three or four streets; these were paved with wooden boards. Every house was a shop, an inn, or a lodging-house. The cliff is accessible on one side only, and is ascended by means of sinuous wooden staircases. When the summit is reached, one stands upon the real island, for the sand-bank below is an accident and an intruder. Heligoland proper may be described as a precipice-plateau, containing a small cluster of houses, a lighthouse, various pole-nets, springes, and other contrivances ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... the country lane, passing through leafy hamlets, across a great breezy moorland, from the top of which they could see the Thames winding its way into Oxfordshire, a sinuous belt of silver. Then they sped down into the lower country, and Arnold looked at ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... famous for its beauty (see DERBYSHIRE). The Derwent flows south past Chatsworth, Matlock and Belper and then, passing Derby, debouches upon a low plain, and turns south-eastward, with an extremely sinuous course, to join the Trent near Sawley. Its length is about 60 m. It falls in all some 1700 ft. (from Matlock 200 ft.), and no part is navigable, save certain reaches at Matlock ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... were tracing figures with geometrical precision; the affected dancer, on the other hand, glides with an excess of delicacy, as if he feared to injure himself on coming in contact with the ground, and his feet and hands describe only lines in sinuous curves. The other sex, which is essentially in possession of true grace, is also that one which is more frequently culpable of affected grace, but this affectation is never more distasteful than when used as a bait to desire. The smile of true grace thus gives place to the most repulsive ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a notch on the tiptop of a long divide, a thousand feet above the general level. A wide valley rolled below, and from the height they overlooked two great, sinuous lakes and a multitude of smaller ones. The mountain range to which Bill pointed loomed seventy miles distance, angling northwest. The sun glinted on the snow-capped peaks, though they themselves ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and terrible conflict. It was the earth and air (or their respective representatives) at war for mastery; the base and the lofty, the groveller and the soarer, were engaged in deadly battle. At length the flat head of the serpent sank; his writhing, sinuous form grew still; and wafted upward by the cheers of the gazing multitude, the eagle, with a scream of triumph, and bearing his prey in his iron talons, soared towards the sun. Several monkeys escaped from ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... in the splendid forest, there was fire,—at first nothing but a thin, serpentine trail of ashes through moss and bedded needles; then, scarcely six inches in width, a smouldering, sinuous path from which fine threads of smoke rose straight upward, ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... hills—not a pretty hollow, but more what the Yorkshire people call a 'bottom,' or 'botham.' I left Keighley in a car for Haworth, four miles off—four tough, steep, scrambling miles, the road winding between the wavelike hills that rose and fell on every side of the horizon, with a long illimitable sinuous look, as if they were a part of the line of the Great Serpent, which the Norse legend says girdles the world. The day was lead-coloured; the road had stone factories alongside of it,—grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... if in smoke I could perceive the body of the creature to which these incredible eyes belonged. It was slender and sinuous and sometimes I thought it to be that of a human being and sometimes that of an animal. For at one moment it possessed all the lines of a woman's form and in the next, with those terrible eyes regarding me from low down upon the ground, it had assumed the shape of a crouching beast of prey. ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... which no doubt lay at the side of the yawl. But reflection suggested that so desperate a deed would only mean getting a bullet through me, and perhaps through her as well. Then I speculated on my chances of making a sinuous way along the deck on my hands and knees, or on my stomach, snake-fashion, with the idea of listening at the hatch of the galley—reflection, again, warned me that such an adventure would as likely as not end up with ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... round its curves, dropping lower and lower, the valley broadened out, and the great mountains moved away into ampler distances. The river ran in a wide and sinuous band to the east and the south. He realized it to be the Potomac, whose very name is history. He began to look ahead to seeing Harper's Ferry, and in the nearing distance ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... a rattlesnake—the harsh alarm that is unmistakable even when heard for the first time, and the sinuous green thing was poised in the centre of the tent, with head thrown back in the attitude to strike. It had been startled by Holden's sudden movement on awakening, and now was armed ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... at once a powerful and sinister figure. Ned felt that he was in the presence of genius, but it belonged to one of those sinuous creatures, shining and terrible, that are bred under the vivid sun of the tropics. There was a singular sensation at the roots of his hair, but, resolved to show neither fear nor apprehension, he stood and ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... light. Engaged to a powerful mechanism of romantic dogma, the nett article of its creed; the neochromatic acoustic regalia of stage eloquence, the key, or longest recurrent note; the van or middle the next, the sinuous lever of stage discipline. After all, concurrently may it not, be said that this colour instinct aspect of cosmically conceived romanticism is never wilfully vulgarized. For its incomparable, iconographical purpose it exists, and is as intrinsically useful and serviceable to ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... brought home by myself, Mr. T. Reeks has ascertained that the muriate of lime is very abundant. With respect to the origin of this saline mass, from the manner in which the gently inclined, compact bed follows for so many miles the sinuous margin of the plain, there can be no doubt that it was deposited from a sheet of water: from the fragments of embedded shells, from the abundant iodic salts, from the superficial saliferous crust occurring at a higher level and being probably of marine origin, and from the plain resembling ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... the crevices between the stones, urges us to follow its straight course northwards; but the sternest and most remarkable portion of Upper Newton Dale lies to the left, across the deep heather, and we are tempted aside to reach the lip of the sinuous gorge nearly a mile away to the west, where the railway runs along the marshy and boulder-strewn bottom of a natural cutting 500 feet deep. The cliffs drop down quite perpendicularly for 200 feet, and the remaining distance to the bed of the stream ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... tops curled over as daintily as the waves had curled over on the moonlit beach of Monomoy. The lake was frozen over and snow-covered; but the creek that came rushing down to meet it was too swift to be overtaken by the frost, and it showed, an inky-dark, sinuous line of open water, winding away and away among the trees, now losing itself in a thicket of alders, now drawing a straight black mark across an open stretch of meadow where the frost-flowers on its banks offered a delicate ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... with peculiar interest as the boat passed near the rock. They were moving about awkwardly by means of their flippers, moving their sinuous necks this way and that and regarding the strange boat with their soft brown eyes. Then they dived headlong into the sea, swimming about with ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... slipped in, as it were, reluctantly, hard-wrung concessions to indisputable and overwhelming evidence. But there they were, scarcely noticeable to the casual reader, perhaps, but to passionate partisans sticking up like palm-trees on a plain. In a backhanded, sinuous but unmistakable way, the Post was telling the legislature that it had better postpone the reformatory for another two years. It was difficult to say just what phrase or phrases finally pushed the odious idea out into the light; but Sharlee lingered longest ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... bull-frogs; weird squeaks arose at intervals, the murmuring complaint of water-fowl, guttural quack of duck and bittern—a vague stirring everywhere of wild things settling to rest or awaking. There were things moving in the unseen ooze, too, leaving sudden sinuous trails in the dim but growing lustre that whitened above ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... past our waist, past our quarter. We could pick the painted ports and the protruding black muzzles of her port battery as she passed, a huge shapeless shadow racing one way, and we going the other way like some long, sinuous, black devil of a creature streaking through a ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... with the quick, sinuous and graceful swing of her body, he was impressed with her perfect health and vital power. She had recovered her balance now, and when she spoke it ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... understand, my admiration for the game does not extend to the cat family. I always turn my back and walk away when I see Beatty walk into a cage of tigers, leopards, lions, or cougars. I admire his pluck but condemn his judgment. I cannot join the general public in admiring the sinuous majesty of the cats. I was always glad to hear the final slam of the gate and to wonder if the latch caught ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... appendages, arises not from an angle of a triangle, but from the middle of one side. This gives us a very common form of butterfly symbol, which is found, variously modified, on many ancient vessels. In such designs there is commonly a row of dots on each side, which may be represented by a sinuous line, a series of triangles, bars, or ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... small. Plants deliquescent. Time of growth, summer. autumn. Habitat In woods, in uncultivated places, on ground. In grass and fields, on ground. On other plants—epiphytal. On stumps. On wood. On manure. Gills, free. adnate. decurrent. sinuous. serrated. distant. in folds. Volva. Veil adhering to margin of cap. Ring. Stem, cartilaginous. lateral, or eccentric. none. brittle. Pileus, scaly or warted. campanulate. silky, cracked or fibrillose. umbonate. umbilicate. striate. Pileus and ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... brave followers stiffened with fear. Out of the mango-tree a black, writhing mass crept toward the terrified squealing boar. Unfolding length after length, the thing advanced, until nearly thirty feet of sinuous, undulating life stretched between the mango tree and the boar's cage. Papita, sickened with fear, buried her face in her mother's bosom, weeping hysterically; Sicto, pale and trembling, grasped the window ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... was that some long, sinuous, apparently endless Thing was passing along the room, close to the wall farthest from us, coming from under the sofa and disappearing beneath ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... sinuous, ever-narrowing bayou slipped behind him as the night advanced. He kept a wary eye upon the black masses of foliage to right and left, knowing that a runaway negro, a mutineer from Barataria, or a murderous ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... and sometimes plashing over. Was that the dried sweetness of balsam,—the pungent odor of pennyroyal and water-mint,—the clean, resinous fragrance of the pines? Out there were lily-pads,—great golden-hearted chalices, with long, sinuous greenish-pink stems under the shady, transparent water. How cool and peaceful! The sky overhead was of palest blue with white flecks, and somewhere a bird was singing. If he could go to it; if he could stay amid ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or Worme; those wav'd thir limber fans For wings, and smallest Lineaments exact In all the Liveries dect of Summers pride With spots of Gold and Purple, azure and green: These as a line thir long dimension drew, 480 Streaking the ground with sinuous trace; not all Minims of Nature; some of Serpent kinde Wondrous in length and corpulence involv'd Thir Snakie foulds, and added wings. First crept The Parsimonious Emmet, provident Of future, in small room large heart enclos'd, Pattern of just equalitie perhaps Hereafter, join'd in her popular ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... miles away, and at a level more than six thousand feet below the brink on which we stood, extended a long, glittering trail. This, where the sunlight struck it, gleamed like an outstretched band of gold. It was the sinuous Colorado, yellow ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... suddenness of the attack. He still held the boot, his fingers gripping it tightly. He raised it, with a purely involuntary motion, as though to hurl it at his insidious enemy. But he did not. The arm fell to his side, and his face slowly whitened. He stared dully and uncomprehendingly at the sinuous shape that was slipping noiselessly away through the ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... her sinuous yet malleable nature, so full of guile and so full of goodness, that reminded us pleasantly of lowly folks in elder lands, where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints of fear between master ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... from the Arctic was made with all swiftness, keeping close to the Coppermine River. For thirty miles from the sea not a tree was to be seen. The river was sinuous and narrow, hemmed in by walls of solid rock, down which streamed cascades and mountain torrents. On both sides of the high bank extended endless reaches of swamps and barrens. Twenty miles from the sea Hearne found the copper mines from which the Indians made their weapons. ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... fixed that he should lead the attempt. At the hour, then, for chapel the prisoners passed as usual through the door. When it came to Paul's turn he drew himself by his hands to the pipe, and then creeping along its sinuous course, gained the wall before he had even fetched his breath. Rather more clumsily, Augustus followed his friend's example. Once his foot slipped, and he was all but over. He extended his hands involuntarily, and caught Paul by the leg. Happily our hero had then gained ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... left hand she guided Baldy, while Buck strode beside, never wavering from the easy, powerful stride that was the expression of his sinuous strength. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... luck desert him again? Would Sylvester be away, or refuse to see him? or, while receiving him, contrive by some sinuous legal device, adroitly to divert his attack? The mere contemplation of any such ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Beneath the shade of this tree the inhabitants often collected, to gather tidings of each others welfare, or to listen to some matter of interest that rumor had borne from the towns nearer the sea. A narrow and little-used wheel-track ran, with a graceful and sinuous route, through the centre of the wide and grassy street. Reduced in appearance to little more than a bridle-path, it was to be traced, without the hamlet, between high fences of wood, for a mile or ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... ravines. The surface of the mountains is cleft, hollowed out in all directions, and in these sinuous crevices grow veritable forests of lemon trees. Here and there where the steep gorge is interrupted by a sort of step, a kind of reservoir has been built which holds the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... our march on Thursday at eight o'clock in the morning. The great granite tunnel, as it went round by sinuous and winding ways, presented every now and then sharp turns, and in fact all the appearance of a labyrinth. Its direction, however, was in general towards the southwest. My uncle made several pauses in order to consult ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... not quite, adopt words received today from Granville. "It is clear, I think, that Gordon has our messages, and does not choose to answer them."' Nearly, but not quite! The qualification was masterly; but it was of no avail. This time, the sinuous creature was held by too firm a grasp. On August 26th, Lord Wolseley was appointed to command the relief expedition; and on September ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... we got caught in the top-most branches of a tree, released from which we pushed on along the sinuous river that had no banks. It was not hot, even at noonday. We sweated a bit in poling a thirty-foot boat out of a tree-top, but cooled again directly we were off. My kodak was far away at the other end of the Zone. But then, on second thought it was ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... through Mike almost paralyzed him. In hypnotized fascination he watched the sinuous uncoiling of the serpent; the ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... she wished. Well-frocked, looking her best, a woman is a dangerous animal; but throw her in contact with another of her sex who is but poorly clad, socially beneath her, and in training her inferior, and you may behold all the grace, all the symmetry of the cobra as it unwinds its beautiful, sinuous body before the ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... neighbor, above the little water-fonts which sleep sunless in ever-verdant caves. Sometimes along these emerald canals there comes a sudden rush and hurry, as if some anxious housekeeper upon the hill above were afraid that things were not stirring fast enough,—and then again the waving and sinuous lines of water are quieted to a serener flow. The delicious red-thrush and the busy little yellow-throat are not yet come to this their summer haunt; but all day long the answering field-sparrows trill out their sweet, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... ornamental paintings, bore at its upper end a sculptured head of Hathor surmounted by an ostrich-plume. The nine cords were stretched diagonally and quivered under the long, slender hands of the harpist, who often, in order to reach the lower notes, bent with a sinuous motion as if she were about to float on the waves of music and accompany ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... A very wonderful little figure in white satin, lithe and sinuous as a cat, Chinese in the subtlety of her looks, European in her almost sinister over-civilisation, stood smiling ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to recognise a friend. He darted out his forked tongue in rapid vibration, and licked her neat grey glove respectfully. Then, lifting his flattened head with serpentine deliberation, he coiled his great folds slowly, slowly, with sinuous curves, round the girl's soft arm till he reached her neck in long, winding convolutions. There he held up his face, and trilled his swift, sibilant tongue once more with evident pleasure. He knew his place. He was perfectly at home ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... the deck that evening, his old cloak drawn about his shoulders, a lady passed up and down before him, arm-in-arm with a gentleman whom he had never seen. There was a grace, a certain sinuous strength about the woman's figure that was strangely familiar to him. He tried to think where he had seen such a form before; and, do what he would, his memory would not stray from the library in the old lodge at Ripon House. The man with ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... more or less, On the sinuous line of a letter S, Twining its little houses through The twists of the street, as our hamlets do, For no good reason, so far as I know, Save that chance has arranged it so. It's a quaint old ramshackle moss-grown place, Keeping ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... curiosity in his movements and his coming thither was a woman. She seemed slight and sinuous, sitting there against the stone parapet, and deep dark eyes accentuated the pallor of her face. He did not think it strange she should always be at this spot when he came; in fact, it was quite a while before he noticed the almost daily coincidence ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... true. The long sinuous strands of ocean grass, known under the name of "serpent weed," had caught around the whirling propellers and there had been wound and twisted very tightly. Just as sometimes the stern line gets so tightly twisted around a motor ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... ascending from the cabin to the deck. Turjun, the panthan, crept close to the companionway, his sinuous fingers closing tightly upon the hilt of his dagger. Could he despatch them both before he was overpowered? He smiled. He could slay an entire utan of her enemies in his ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... carefully remember that in rough country where the lode strikes across hills and valleys, the line of the cap or outcrop will apparently be very sinuous owing to the rises and depressions of the surface. Many people even now do not understand that true lodes or reefs are portions of rock or material differing from the surrounding and enclosing strata, and continuing down to unknown depths ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... were sinuous as serpents, the fingers tapering, the nails very long like the Chinese. Her nose was exquisite, but thin-edged, and with a cruel line on each side that vanished ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... attention and comment. Darrell's pale, intellectual face, penetrating eyes, and dark hair already streaked with gray would have attracted attention anywhere, as would also Walcott with his olive skin, his cynical smile, and graceful, sinuous movement. In addition, Darrell's peculiar mental condition and the fact that his identity was enveloped in a degree of mystery rendered him doubly interesting. In the case of each this was his introduction to the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... silence from the moon's deepest valley. Fire rays fall athwart the robes Of hooded men, squat and dumb. Before them, a woman Moves to the blowing of shrill whistles And distant thunder of drums, While mystic things, sinuous, dull with terrible color, Sleepily fondle her body Or move at her will, swishing stealthily over the sand. The snakes whisper softly; The whispering, whispering snakes, Dreaming and swaying and staring, ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... flower-bordered vista the cat went stalking his prey, his sinuous body a tawny streak winding along the green path. These trivial humans, with their subtle attractions and compunctions, were as though they never had been when the chase was on—the real ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... off the hill and in the plain below, saw the heavens gloriously alive with the pageantry of conflict. The vault was pitted with woolly tufts of shrapnel and beautiful dead-whitesmoke-wreaths from the phosphorescent bombs. These spread their sinuous toils high and low and seemed to fill the skies. On both sides the aerial combatants were going home to roost, exchanging challenges by the way. And all the time, hidden in a hundred woods and brakes, the Archies sang in chorus. These evening ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of red, white, grey, and yellow tints.'" Vischer also made fun of Zimmermann's enthusiasm for the aesthetic value of the sense of touch. "What joy it must be to touch the back of the bust of Hercules in repose! To stroke the sinuous limbs of the Venus of Milo or of the Faun of Barberini must give a pleasure to the hand equal to that of the ear as it listens to the puissant fugues of Bach or to the suave melodies of Mozart." Vischer ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... the low, reedy swamps, yellow, withered Lilliputian forests, rattling their brittle canes in the morning breeze.... Through these dreary banks we wound a most sinuous course for a long time; at length the irregular buildings of the little town of Darien appeared, and as we grazed the side of the wharf, it seemed to me as if we had touched the outer bound of civilized creation. As soon as we showed ourselves on the deck we were hailed by a shout from the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... no answer. He walked down the steps, and across the lawn beneath the iron-work gate in the street wall. A thick shrubbery of holly and laurel bushes stood on his right—and as he passed it something darted out—something alive and alert and sinuous—and went scudding ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... elaborate and sinuous grace. His smile revealed brilliant teeth, enhanced the brilliance of his eyes. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... a little cluster of eight or ten beautiful mottled creatures lying close to the surface, almost motionless, except that one now and then changed the S-like figure into which it lay by bending and waving its long sinuous body into some other graceful curve, progressing by a slight wavy motion of ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... of sheathed loveliness. The dark, long-lashed eyes looked out at Kirby with appealing wistfulness. When she moved, the soft lines of her body took on a sinuous grace. From her personality there seemed to emanate an ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... the hills were black with the heaving, rolling, bellowing mass, and no meal was served for many days without fresh buffalo. As we wended our way up the valley of the Platte one could look back for miles and miles on a line of wagons, the sinuous line with vari-colored wagon covers resembling a great serpent crawling and wriggling up the valley. Fortunately for "our train" we were well in advance and thus escaped the sickness that later dotted the valley of the ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... Warwick, in which he had passed the previous night, thrust its smoking factory chimneys, its spires and towers, above the shining roofs and lofty elms. But the final element of charm was found in a broad and sinuous river, blue as the reflected sky, which flowed past the city's wharves, under a fine stone bridge, and on through woodland and ploughed land to the sea. Small wonder that he now forgot for a moment his own ambitions and plans, and thought only that St. George's Hall lifted ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the Garth take-off, and they switched themselves back to the mountainside and took other chairs. A red-haired, green-eyed, tanned, sinuous young woman called Flam appeared from time to time to renew brandy glasses and pass iced fruits around. She gave Trigger coolly speculative ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... of the Los Gatos road streams on and upward like the sinuous trail of a fiery rocket until it is extinguished in the blue shadows of the Coast Range, there is an embayed terrace near the summit, hedged by dwarf firs. At every bend of the heat-laden road the eye rested upon it wistfully; all along the flank of the mountain, which seemed to pant ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... slew. As when on fish-abounding Hellespont's strand The fishermen hard-straining drag a net Forth of the depths to land; but, while it trails Yet through the sea, one leaps amid the waves Grasping in hand a sinuous-headed spear To deal the sword-fish death, and here and there, Fast as he meets them, slays them, and with blood The waves are reddened; so were Xanthus' streams Impurpled by his hands, and choked ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... of lost Milesian tales, of a life growing into sculpture or breaking into sinuous hexameter waves. The one mystic, the other ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... that hoard a glittering trace Of bygone colours, broidered to the knee, Behold her, daughter of a wandering race, Tameless, with the bold falcon's agile grace, And the lithe tiger's sinuous majesty. ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... case of the river Somme, we have a wide and deep valley, a large part of which has been excavated in chalk rock, through which the river now winds its way in a sinuous course to the English Channel. Yet we feel sure that at some time in the past it was a mighty stream, and that its waters surged along over a bed at least two hundred feet higher than now. In proof of this fact we still find, at ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... and transient fire—the next instant it had taken on all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and wavered in a flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping from the groin of the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though it were along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I was following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books clasped in their hands; a moment later the little lozenge windows had put on the deep transparence, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on some enormous breastplate; ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... drives: Shimmer of lake and shine of sea, Brown's bare hill with its lonely tree, (It wasn't then as we see it now, With one scant scalp-lock to shade its brow;) Dusky nooks in the Essex woods, Dark, dim, Dante-like solitudes, Where the tree-toad watches the sinuous snake Glide through his ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... its sentinel islets of Chumbi and French, with its whitewashed city and jack-fruit odor, with its harbor and ships that tread the deep, faded slowly from view, and looking westward, the African continent rose, a similar bank of green verdure to that which had just receded till it was a mere sinuous line above the horizon, looming in a northerly direction to the sublimity of a mountain chain. The distance across from Zanzibar to Bagamoyo may be about twenty-five miles, yet it took the dull and lazy dhows ten hours before they dropped anchor ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... on each side of the points not having been fully developed. I am quite ready to admit that this is the correct explanation in many instances, as in those figured by Prof. Meyer, in which there are several minute points, or the whole margin is sinuous. I have myself seen, through the kindness of Dr. L. Down, the ear of a microcephalous idiot, on which there is a projection on the outside of the helix, and not on the inward folded edge, so that this point can have no relation to a former apex of the ear. Nevertheless in some cases, my original ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... him now, a lean, almost emaciated figure with slow, sinuous movements and a trick of glancing sideways with those dark, unfathomable, slightly oblique eyes. He could take up his bow in such a way as to create ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the corridor, gathered into groups, speaking excitedly and thoughtfully in hollow voices. Scarcely anybody stood alone; all faces bore evidence of a desire to speak, to ask, to listen. In the narrow white passageway the people coiled about in sinuous curves, like dust carried in circles before a powerful wind. Everybody seemed to be seeking something hard ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... straightforward expression of his regret that he could not accept her very generous offer for St. Johnswort because the place was already sold. He had the taste to forbear any allusion to the motives which (she told Hewson) she had said prompted her offer; but then he became very darkling and sinuous in a suggestion that if Miss Hernshaw wished to have her offer known as hers to the purchaser of St. Johnswort he would be happy to notify ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... fields, fences, and streams. As we climbed higher, the river seemed directly beneath us, the farms on the opposite bank were plainly discernible, and Richmond lay only a little way off, enthroned on its many hills, with the James stretching white and sinuous from its feet to the horizon. We could see the streets, the suburbs, the bridges, the outlaying roads, nay, the moving masses of people. The Capitol sat white and colossal on Shockoe Hill, the dingy buildings of the Tredegar works blackened the river-side above, the hovels of rockets clustered ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where, when unyoked, His chariot-wheel stands midway ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... the latter cases the radicles in growing downwards were deflected only a little from the direction which they had followed whilst germinating in sawdust, and they pressed lightly on the glass-plates (Fig. 21). Five of the most distinct tracks are here copied, and they are all slightly sinuous, showing circumnutation. Moreover, a close examination of almost every one of the tracks clearly showed that the tips in their downward course had alternately pressed with greater or less force on the plates, and had ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... the phenomena. The "lines" and "bands" so frequently spoken of are seen as such for no other reason than because the light forming them is admitted through a narrow, straight opening. Change that opening into a fine crescent or a sinuous curve, and the "lines" will at once appear as crescents ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... household are often bandied about when the black coffee is being served. The marriageable young men of Morovenia had learned of the calamity in Count Malagaski's family. They knew that Kalora weighed less than one hundred and twenty pounds. She was tall, lithe, slender, sinuous, willowy, hideous. The fact that poor old Count Malagaski had made many unsuccessful attempts to fatten her was a stock subject for jokes of an unrefined ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... north. A glance at the map will show the immensity of the task before them. The distance from Fort Churchill {52} to the Slave Lake, even as the crow flies, is some seven hundred miles, and from thence to the Arctic sea four hundred and fifty, and the actual journey is longer by reason of the sinuous course which the explorer must of necessity pursue. The whole of this vast country was as yet unknown: no white man had looked upon the Mackenzie river nor upon the vast lakes from which it flows. It speaks well for the quiet intrepidity of Hearne that he was ready alone ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... Muda Saffir's war prahu saw his chief disappear beneath the swift waters of the river, but the word of command that would have sent the boat hurriedly back to pick up the swimmer was not given. Instead a lusty cry for greater speed ahead urged the sinuous muscles gliding beneath the sleek brown hides; and when Muda Saffir rose to the surface with a cry for help upon his lips Ninaka shouted back to him in derision, consigning his carcass to the belly ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Preston the coast assumes a very different character from that to the eastward, being less sinuous, very low, and either fronted by mangroves, or by a range of sandhills, both of which conceal the interior. The coast, at from three to seven miles, is fronted by a range of low, sandy islets, from one quarter to two-thirds of a mile in diameter: there are, however, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... of drifting, breezes soft as a sigh; Night trailed her robe of jewels over the floor of the sky. The moonlit stream was a python, silver, sinuous, vast, That writhed on a shroud of velvet—well, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... swinging his rope around his head, and when he was close enough he made a beautiful cast and the rope went through the air as true as a bullet, hovering in a sinuous loop above White Fang. But just as it was about to settle the wily old rascal dodged to one side, and the rope fell ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... divans or low seats around three of its walls. These divans were occupied by a motley company of Turks, Egyptians, Greeks, and others; and I noted two Chinese. Most of them smoked cigarettes, and some were drinking. A girl was performing a sinuous dance upon the square carpet occupying the center of the floor, accompanied by a young negro woman upon a guitar and by several members of the assembly who clapped their hands to the music or hummed a ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... is twelve miles from Chihuahua as the crow flies, but if one goes by rail one twists round thirty sinuous miles of rough mountainous country in the descent from the pass to the capital of the State. The ten men who slipped singly or by twos out of the city in the darkness that evening and met at the ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... which lies before the eyes of the traveller from Assisi, when he suddenly emerges upon the plain of Rieti, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. From Terni the road follows the sinuous course of the Velino, passes not far from the famous cascades, whose clouds of mist are visible, and then plunges into the defiles in whose depths the torrent rushes noisily, choked by a vegetation as luxuriant as that of a virgin forest. On ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... and padded footfalls. Now and again, as they rustled some low tree, a pewee or a nuthatch would give a startled chirp. For an hour the noiseless journeying continued, and ever and anon the two gray, sinuous shapes would come for a moment into the view of the now well-risen moon. Suddenly there fell upon their ears, far off and faint, but clearly defined against the vast stillness of the Northern forest, a sound which made those stealthy hunters pause and lift their ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... covered with coarse grass six or seven feet high, relieved at intervals by solitary palm trees. This is all Portuguese territory, the Congo State here possessing only a narrow strip of land along the northern bank. The course of the river here is very sinuous, winding in and out among the hills, the curves being cut more sharply each day as the water eats into the sand and carries it to be digested in the ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... made a movement as if he were thinking of going out through the window into the garden. So Timmy, with a swift, sinuous movement, withdrew from the curtain, and edging up against the outside wall of the house, walked unobtrusively back into ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... pitcher, a weaver, a sunfisher, this roan had no equal. Its ill-shaped nose and wicked red eyes were enough to give one bad dreams. But the lean-flanked young miner appeared clamped to the saddle. Lithe and sinuous as a panther, he rode with a perfect ease that was captivating. Teddy tried all its tricks. It went up into the air and came down with all four legs stiff as iron posts. It shot forward in a series of quick ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... but much nearer. He was lying with his ear to the ground. Now the earth is a conductor of sound and Henry was sure that he heard a soft tread. He rose upon his elbow and gazed into the darkness. There he beheld at last a dim form moving with sinuous motion, and slowly it took the shape of a great cat-like animal. Then he saw just behind it another as large, and he knew that they were the two panthers whose cries ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is very flat between Faventia and the Spina. I do not believe that in any part of that forest the surface of the soil was four yards higher than in any other part. And it was marshy, all quagmires and sloughs, with narrow, sinuous ribbons, as it were, of fairly dry land between them. We were hopelessly involved among its morasses before we realized our plight and, after we did realize it, we seemed to make little progress. We agreed that it would be folly to try to regain our camp: we held ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... before he died, tell you his intention to do this?" pressed Marie, feeling less interest in the Dutch embalmer's method than in the sinuous motive of a man who ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... minutes I saw him returning. He carried in his hand a plant which, as before, he had pulled up by the roots. Like the former, it was a herbaceous plant, but of a very different appearance. The leaves of this one were heart-shaped and acuminate, its stem sinuous, and its flowers ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... was enclosed a long, silken tress of golden hair. It curled around Miriam's fingers as though it were alive, and she thrust it from her. It was cold and smooth and sinuous, like a snake. She folded up the letter, put it back in the envelope with the lock of hair, then returned it to its ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... imagination I was enjoying then, I was almost afraid to try to sleep. But just as I was going into a doze, I raised up my head, and there was my cat walking up and down my frame, his back arched and his tail flirting with the slow sinuous movement of a snake. I reached for my gun, and as it clicked in cocking, he began raking my legs, sharpening his claws and growling like a tiger. I gave a yell and kicked him off, when he sprang up on the old table and I could ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... Indian Summer, and which now hung heavily over all objects, served, no doubt, to deepen the vague impressions which these objects created. So dense was this pleasant fog that I could at no time see more than a dozen yards of the path before me. This path was excessively sinuous, and as the sun could not be seen, I soon lost all idea of the direction in which I journeyed. In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect—that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... evening, stood out two graceful forms, a pair of coyotes, distinct against the sunset behind them. Only these two were visible in all that great lonely plain, and they stood together watching the train go by, their sinuous bodies and low sweeping tails touched and tipped with fire in ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... round his waist. He was trained to a hair, his skin gleaming like silk, and every muscle rippling down his broad shoulders and along his beautiful arms as he moved them. They bunched into ivory knobs, or slid into long, sinuous curves, as he raised ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... grass rope from about his neck, and as Numa stood above the body of the boar, challenging head erect, he dropped the sinuous noose about the maned neck, drawing the stout strands taut with a sudden jerk. At the same time he called shrilly to Sheeta, as he drew the struggling lion upward until only his hind feet touched ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Narrow streets with sinuous curves; dwarfed houses with minute shops protruding on inch-wide sidewalks; a tiny casino perched like a bird-cage on a tiny scaffolding; bath-houses dumped on the beach; fishing-smacks drawn up along the shore like so many Greek ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the leaden hours of the gray night! Out of that ghostly mist of pale moonlight through which the dogs were traveling like sinuous shadows Upi and his tribe could close in on him silently and swiftly, unseen until they were within striking distance. In that event all would be lost. He urged the dogs on, calling them by the names which he had heard Blake use, and occasionally he sent ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... root. And the tap root and its runners, and the branch roots and theirs, get knotted and knit into each other, till the whole forms one solid mass of roots, thousands of yards of a tangle of roots, sinuous and strong. Conceive the uprooting of such a tree, like the famous one of North India, for instance, which sheltered an army of seven thousand men. You cannot conceive it; it could not be done, the earthward hold is ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... straight avenue, but a broad smooth carriage road curved gently up a hillside, and on both margins of the graveled way, ancient elm trees stood at regular intervals, throwing their boughs across, to unite in lifting the superb groined arches, whose fine tracery of sinuous lines were here and there concealed by clustering mistletoe—and gray lichen masses—and ornamented with bosses of velvet moss; while the venerable columnar trunks were now and then wreathed with poison-oak vines, where red trumpet flowers insolently blared defiance ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... six hundred feet to the flat bottom of the valley. Beneath, the Tugela curled along like a brown and very sinuous serpent. Never have I seen such violent twists and bends in a river. At times the waters seemed to loop back on themselves. One great loop bent towards us, and at the arch of this the little ferry of Potgieter's floated, moored to ropes which looked through the field ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... came explanation—the sort of explanation dreams bring. She understood. For, beneath the water, she had seen the world of seaweed rising from the bottom of the sea like a forest of dense green-long, sinuous stems, immense thick branches, millions of feelers spreading through the darkened watery depths the power of their ocean foliage. The Vegetable Kingdom was even in the sea. It was everywhere. Earth, air, and water helped it, way of ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... oranges and lemons grew here, too, and many beautiful banana-palms. The rank forest growth had been so thoroughly cleared out that it had not yet returned, except stealthily in the shape of brilliant-flowered creepers which wound their sinuous way from tree to tree, like fair Delilahs striving to overcome arboreal Samsons by their wiles. They were rankest beside the stream, which ran at one edge of the hollow under the rise ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... above Orfa, Mardin, and Nisibin, best known as the "Mons Masius" of Strabo. They are not, however, streams of equal importance. The Belik has a course which is nearly straight, and does not much exceed 120 miles. The Khabour, on the contrary, is sufficiently sinuous, and its course may be reckoned at fully 200 miles. It is navigable by rafts from the junction of its two main branches near the volcanic cone of Koukab, and adds a considerable body of water to the Euphrates. Below its confluence with this ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson |
