"Waterless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out into the great dry Karoo prairie. It was a comfortless trek. Earth and sky seemed to have forgotten the rain of preceding days; or it may have been that the storms which had distressed us had been purely local, for we had struck a great waterless plain which showed not the slightest sign of moisture. The shuffling mules and lumbering waggons churned up a pungent dust; a great spiral pillar of brown cloud mushroomed out above the column; no breath of air gave relief from the vertical rigour of the sun; the ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... had not thought of that as a reason for this summons. Johnny Grantline was a close friend to us both. He had organized an exploring expedition to the Moon. Uninhabited, with its bleak, forbidding, airless, waterless surface, the Moon—even though so close to the Earth—was seldom visited. No regular ship ever stopped there. A few exploring parties of recent years ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... in time to be too late, and was itself extricated from imminent disaster by the masterful promptitude of Sir Redvers Buller. Notwithstanding a general consensus of professional and expert opinion in favour of the alternative route from Souakin to Berber, 240 miles long and far from waterless, the adoption of it was condemned as impossible. In June 1801, away back in the primitive days, an Anglo-Indian brigade 5000 strong ordered from Bombay, reached Kosseir on the Red Sea bound for the Upper Nile at Keneh thence to join Abercromby's force operating in Lower Egypt. The distance from ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... desolate distances, forbidding and menacing. This was not the desert upland country of Utah, but a naked and bony world of colored rock and sand—a painted desert of heat and wind and flying sand and waterless wastes and barren ranges. But it did not daunt Slone. For far down on the bare, billowing ridges moved a red speck, at a snail's pace, a slowly moving dot ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him his whole armor wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils. 23 He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth. 24 The unclean spirit when he is gone out of the man, passeth through waterless places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will turn back unto my house whence I came out. 25 And when he is come, he findeth it swept and garnished. 26 Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more evil than himself; and they enter ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... cabin and new graves. By and by they came to that deadly waste known as the Alkali Desert, strewn with the carcasses of dead beasts and with the heavy articles discarded by emigrants in their eagerness to reach water. All day and night they pushed through that choking, waterless plain to reach camp on the other side. When they arrived at three in the morning, they dropped down exhausted. Judge Oliver, the last survivor of the party, in a letter to the writer of ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... from the overpowering beams. Once more he anxiously studied the country, but it gave him little hope. The green of the grass was gone, and most of the grass with it. The brown undulations swept away from horizon to horizon, treeless, waterless, and bare. In all that vast desolation there was nothing save the tired and dusty train at the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... insignificant portion of the universe, it is about a fourth part, as Ptolemy's proofs have taught us, which is inhabited by living creatures known to us. If from this fourth part you take away in thought all that is usurped by seas and marshes, or lies a vast waste of waterless desert, barely is an exceeding narrow area left for human habitation. You, then, who are shut in and prisoned in this merest fraction of a point's space, do ye take thought for the blazoning of your fame, ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... according to the inscription on one of the cottages. A great flood, caused by a very sudden thaw which liberated some miles of snow-water on the higher portions of the Plain, tore down the narrow (and usually waterless) valley and caused great destruction in the tiny village; the old Norman church being the only building that was quite undamaged. Market Lavington is farther east on the Pewsey road. It was once of some importance and is one of those decayed towns that almost justify ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... of the barranca, and tracked it with my eye as far as I could see: it was waterless as the lain itself. The rocks rested upon dry sand and gravel; not a drop of the wished-for element appeared within its bed, although it was evident that at some time a torrent must have ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... the labourer, may be discontinued. We have now arrived at a pass when the absence of those who have already emigrated becomes a matter of regret. There is work to be had nearer than the Canadian woods or the waterless prairies of Australia—work, too, that in its results must be of incalculable benefit to the community. But the government is bound to regulate it so, that, amidst superabundance of wealth, due regard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... variety of game, including giraffe, rhino, bush-buck, the lesser kudu, zebra, wart-hog, baboons and monkeys, and any number of paa, the last being of a redder colour than those of the Tsavo valley. Of natives or of human habitations, however, we saw no signs, and indeed the whole region was so dry and waterless as to be quite uninhabitable. The animals that require water have to make a nightly journey to and from the Sabaki, which accounts for the thousands of animal paths leading from the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... Waterless of the Lower Dale. Early this morning as I was going afield I met on the way a man akin to me, Fox of Upton to wit, and he told me that men were being summoned to a Gate-thing. So I turned back home, and caught up any weapon that came handy, and here ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... like to die of thirst, they and the beasts of burden. In this emergency the prophet Elisha, who was with the army, called for a minstrel and bade him play. Under the influence of the music he ordered the soldiers to dig trenches in the sandy bed of the waterless waddy through which lay the line of march. They did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the water that had drained down into them underground from the desolate, forbidding mountains on either hand. The prophet's success in striking water in the wilderness resembles the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... old hillside, over whose denuded surface the grass had begun to spring again in fitful patches; there were the abandoned heaps of tailings already blackened by sun and rain, and worn into mounds like ruins of masonry; there were the waterless ditches, like giant graves, and the pools of slumgullion, now dried into shining, glazed cement. There were two or three wooden "stores," from which the windows and doors had been taken and conveyed to the newer ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... on July 5 kept along the right bank of the Green River for about three miles, and then led over the bluffs and across a sandy, waterless plain for sixteen miles, to the left bank of Black's Fork, where they camped for the night. The two following days took them across this Fork several times, but, although fording was not always comfortable, the stream added salmon trout to their menu. On the 7th the party had ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Scout with Sandy on his back, that he might put the boy on one of the boulders beside the top of the Downfall, and, holding him fast, bid him look down at the great icicles which marked its steep and waterless bed, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... after an uneasy stirring. So, sitting there, looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench—their crutches beside them—its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and the ring. And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning away, he told her a great deal he ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... vermin for the sake of precious stones in the earth. Thalassa brought up before the young man's eyes a vivid picture of an African diamond rush of that period—a corrugated iron settlement of one straggling street, knee-deep in sand, swarming with vermin and scorpions, almost waterless, crowded with a mongrel, ever-increasing lot of needy adventurers brought from all parts of the world by reports of diamonds which could be picked out with a penknife from the dunes and sandy shingle which formed the background of the villainous "town." In the great waves ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... serve rather to connect the plain of Megiddo with the valley of the Jordan than to separate them. A single river, the Kishon, cuts the route diagonally—or, to speak more correctly, a single river-bed, which is almost waterless for nine months of the year, and becomes swollen only during the winter rains with the numerous torrents bursting from the hillsides. As the flood approaches the sea it becomes of more manageable proportions, and finally distributes ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... command of the sea, Egypt is well adapted for defence. The tropical Soudan makes a well-nigh impossible line of advance for a large hostile force from the south, and the routes of approach from the east and from the west, across the waterless deserts, present obstacles scarcely less formidable. Since the seventies, however, another important factor has entered the problem, namely, the Suez Canal and the area of cultivation and civilization which has sprung up along its banks. The large amount ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... into noble architectural forms— into cathedrals, pyramids, amphitheaters, towers, arches, and colonnades—by the processes of weathering aided by deflation. It is thus by the help of the action of the wind that great plateaus in arid regions are dissected and at last are smoothed away to waterless plains, either composed of naked rock, or strewed with residual gravels, or covered ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... sandstone ridges with thin forests of pine or fir, clambered and sweated up and down incessantly by slopes steeper than any stairway, until I felt like the overworked chambermaid of a tall but elevator-less hotel. My foot was much swollen, and to make things worse the region was arid and waterless. Once I came upon a straggling mud village, but though it was half-hidden by banana and orange groves, not even fruit could be bought. Yet a day or two before some scoundrel had passed this way eating oranges constantly and strewing the trail with the tantalizing peelings; a methodical, selfish, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... that Life has no place at all upon this airless and waterless globe, since we know not under what strange conditions it may manifest its presence; and our most powerful telescopes, besides, do not bring the lunar surface sufficiently near to us to disprove the existence there of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... than the Chaco and Chelly "rivers," which are really merely drainage channels and are dry during most of the year. The eastern slope of the mountain range gives rise to no streams, and the foot of the range on that side is as dry and waterless as the valley itself. One may travel for 20 miles over this valley and not find a drop of water. Except at Sulphur springs, warm volcanic springs about 30 miles south of the San Juan, the ordinary traveler will not find sufficient ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... rarest blessings of the soul that is led of God. All through the day's roaming the shepherd keeps one thing in mind. He must lead his flock to a drinking-place. The refreshment of good water makes the coveted hour of all the day; the spot where it is found amid the rough, waterless hills and plains is the crowning token of the shepherd's unfailing thoughtfulness. When at last the sheep are led 'beside the still waters,' how good it is, after the dust and ...
— The Song of our Syrian Guest • William Allen Knight
... that our lives shall be a continual reception. Are they? How many Christian men there are whose Christian lives at the best are like some of those Australian or Siberian rivers; in the dry season, a pond here, a stretch of sand, waterless and barren there, then another place with a drop of muddy water in some hollow, and then another stretch of sand, and so on. Why should not the ponds be linked together by a flashing stream? God is always pouring Himself out; why do we ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... broke out, I proceeded once more on my extensive travels, and I became something of an expert in the waterless, sandy wastes of the southern half of German Southwest Africa. As for the Kalahari Desert, over which the movement of men and transport was supposed to be quite impossible, we did not rest until we had sunk bore-holes for water for hundreds of miles, and until we had moved a large ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... priest of Oaxaca, who visited them in 1674, states that these beautiful halls were the scene, in prehistoric times, of the most diabolical rites. To-day the ruins are surrounded by a rude native population, most of whom dwell in wretched jacales, in a waterless and sun-beat valley—an environment in striking contrast to the antique splendour of these halls of the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... justice a king is a cloud without rain; Without goodness a sage is a field without fruit; Without manners a youth is a bridleless horse; Without lore an old man is a waterless wady; Without modesty woman ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... into Europe by the warriors who returned from the Crusades, the riches and smiling aspect of Tuscany and the mountain-region of Italy are chiefly to be ascribed; for nothing can be more desolate by nature than the waterless declivities, in general almost destitute of soil, on which it has been formed. The earth required to be brought in from a distance, retaining walls erected, the steep slopes converted into a series of ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... of the Canal and of the eastern frontier of Egypt had depended almost entirely on the waterless nature of the 130 miles of country which separated it from Palestine. There were troops on the Canal, but their numbers and equipment forced them to remain strictly on the defensive, and Kitchener's ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... Puna coast is waterless. From the Volcano House you take with you not only food for the journey back to Hilo, but water in bottles; and your thirsty animals get none until you reach the end of your first day's journey, at Kaimu. ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... O husband mine, Thou in the dim dominions Driftest with waterless lips, Unburied; and me the ships Shall bear o'er the bitter brine, Storm-birds upon angry pinions, Where the towers of the Giants[43] shine O'er Argos cloudily, And the riders ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... Germans were contesting stubbornly every mile of waterless, thorn-covered ground and clinging desperately to their positions along the railway. The officers of the Second Rhodesians had seen nothing more of Tarzan of the Apes since he had slain Underlieutenant von Goss and disappeared toward the very heart of the German position, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... scruple to take with him for the journey any of the wine and fruits that were still fit for use, and Antonia assured him that by the direct way, well known to her, they would reach the fruitful shore of this waterless ocean in a few days. So with the approach of evening coolness they set out ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... mare, Frank Hamersley pursues his way, wondering at his strange guide. So lovely a being encountered in such an out-of-the-way corner of the world—in the midst of a treeless, waterless desert, over a hundred miles from ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... Caledonians and the Maeatae; for even the names of the others, as may be said, have merged in these. The Maeatae dwell close to the wall which divides the island into two parts; the Caledonians beyond them. Each of these people inhabit mountains wild and waterless, and plains desert and marshy, having neither walls nor cities, nor tilth, but living by pasturage, by the chase, and on certain berries; for of their fish, though abundant and inexhaustible, they never taste. They live in tents, naked and barefooted, having wives in common, and rearing ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes. It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless ravine, to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills—hills it might be of a greener kind—and above them invisibly supported, and ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... no route. Between us and the Silver Palace lie waterless deserts, great mountains, and, at last, a yawning chasm, miles in width, miles in depth. This chasm extends entirely round the broad plateau on which the wonderful palace stands like a dazzling dream. The bottom of the chasm is hidden by mists which assume ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... romance of the unconquered West, of the earth's virgin spaces, of the buffalo and the Indian. In their idle silence, treeless, waterless, clothed as with a dry pale hair with the feathered yellow grasses, they looked as if the monstrous creatures of dead epochs might still haunt them, might still sun their horny sides among the sand hills, and wallow in the shallows of the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... them. On their left hand they saw the Thermae of Caracalla, their external magnificence scarce touched by decay, but waterless, desolate; in front rose the Caelian, covered with edifices, many in ruin, and with neglected or altogether wild gardens; the road along which they went was almost as silent as that without the walls. Arrived at a certain point, the two looked at each ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... road innumerable caravans were passing. Everything was rushing to Goldite. There were horsemen, hurried persons on foot, men in carriages and autos, twenty-horse freight teams, and men on tiny burros. Nearly all were shedding bottles as they went. A waterless land is not necessarily devoid of ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... Africa enjoys many natural advantages. Her capital is far in the interior. Between her railway on the south, which almost reaches the Cape frontier, and her border spreads out the desert of Kalahari and the arid, waterless plains of northwest Cape Colony. The branch railways are separated by about 200 miles from German territory, and on the northern line Kimberley was a little less than 400 miles distant. British forces entering the colony by land must encounter many difficulties, especially in the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Tabooneeah, began to enter upon the plateau. It is difficult to convey an idea of the solemn impressions with which one enters upon such a journey. Everything ahead is unknown and invested with perhaps exaggerated terrors by imagination and report. The name of Desert—the waterless Desert—hangs over the horizon, and suggests the most gloomy apprehensions. Behind, in the fading light, the trees of the valley still show their dim groups; before, the lofty level, slightly broken by undulations, stretches away. There ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... relatively the sharp apex of the triangle, the mere intersection of two lines. This point, this seemingly dimensionless dot, was in reality two score weary miles of sandhills, shapeless, vague, and low; waterless, colorless, and forlorn. Southward the central desert was uninhabitable; opinions ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... the 39th Regiment! What visions are conjured up when this name comes on the scene! Cracked and gaping plains, desolate, desert and abandoned of life, scorched beneath a lurid sun of burning fire, waterless, hopeless, relentless, and accursed: that is the picture he draws of the great interior. He had followed up Oxley's footsteps and exposed the fallacies into which that explorer had fallen, and erred just as egregiously himself. True, like Oxley, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and have heard others told of, but the best mirages of all we never hear described; the mirage that waterless travellers see at the last. Those fountains rising out of onyx basins, blue and straight into incredible heights, and falling and flooding cool white marble; the haze of spray above their feathery heads through which the pale green domes of weathered copper shimmer and shake a little; ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... dispirited company which went into camp, waterless and hungry, in the dense jungle. Attracted by the horses, lions roared about the boma, and to their hideous din was added the shrill neighs of the terror-stricken beasts they hunted. There was little sleep for man or beast, and the sentries were doubled that ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... whole, as agreeable as that of the Hawaiian Islands, though pitched in a lower key, and with greater variations between day and night. The key to its peculiarity, aside from its southern exposure, is the Colorado Desert. That desert, waterless and treeless, is cool at night and intolerably hot in the daytime, sending up a vast column of hot air, which cannot escape eastward, for Arizona manufactures a like column. It flows high above the mountains westward till it strikes the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... lie strung well out from the coast, Master Cockrell. Waterless they be, and without shelter. Blackbeard's fancy is to let the ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... obstacles and dare such hardships. Yet there were compensations. Squaw Creek's clear, pellucid, snow-fed stream runs purling, babbling or roaring and foaming by to the right. These pioneers with their women and children had crossed the sandy, alkali and waterless deserts. For days and weeks they had not had water enough to keep their faces clean, to wash the sand from their eyes. Now, though they had come to a land of apparently unscalable mountains and impassable rock-barriers, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... some food, though scanty and insufficient, from the herbs, of water he was quite destitute in that waterless and dry desert. And so at noon-tide, as he held on his way under the fierce blaze of the sun, he was parched with thirst in the hot drought of that desert place, and he suffered the extreme of anguish. But desire of Christ conquered nature, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... had been in fearful situations in the face of charging lions and elephants, and once he had been bowled over and carried some distance by a lion, but on none of these occasions had fear demoralized him. There was no question of his general pluck. But on one occasion he was lost in rocky waterless country in Somaliland. He strayed out in the early morning while his camels were being loaded, followed some antelope too far, and lost his bearings. He looked up expecting to see the sun on his right hand and found it on his left. ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... could follow to that hidden nest of the Hawk. It was very dark now except for glimmer of stars through lacy, slow-drifting clouds,—there was no wind. Later there would be a waning moon! Much of every waking life is a dream, and her dreams were of the No Man's Land of the desert,—the waterless trail from which she had been ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... in the black edge of the Bad Lands when Philip dashed up out of the dip into the plain. There was only one break ahead of him, and toward this he urged his horse. In the entrance to the break there was another sandy but waterless dip, and across this trailed the hoof-prints of the outlaws' mounts, two at a walk—one at a gallop. At one time, ages before, the break had been the outlet of a stream pouring itself out between jagged and cavernous walls of rock from the black heart of the upheaved ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... river-pulse,— Therefore I turned from the oozings muddy, And bring thee a chalice I found, instead: See the brave veins in the breccia ruddy! One would suppose that the marble bled. What matters the water? A hope I have nursed: The waterless cup will quench my thirst." —Better have knelt at the poorest stream That trickles in pain from the straitest rift! For the less or the more is all God's gift, Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite-seam. And here, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... been occasionally visited by Europeans, are guarded by the cruel jealousy of its inhabitants; or, if that is overcome, advances to any very great distance from the coast are effectively impeded by natives still more savage, or by waterless and foodless deserts. ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... from Kerman to Kubenan is to Zerend about 50 miles, to the Sar i Benan 15 miles, thence to Kubenan 30 miles—total 95 miles. Marco Polo cannot have taken the direct road to Kubenan, as it took him seven days to reach it. As he speaks of waterless deserts, he probably took a circuitous route to the east of the mountains, via Kuhpayeh and the desert lying to the north of Khabis." (Houtum-Schindler, l.c. pp. 496-497.) (Cf. Major ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... since it is perfectly true that in the same Desert is a wonderful city where all the rich money lenders retreat after they have made their fortunes (fortunes so vast that the owners cannot trust even the strong hand of the Government to protect them, but take refuge in the waterless sands), and drive sumptuous C-spring barouches, and buy beautiful girls and decorate their palaces with gold and ivory and Minton tiles and mother-of-pearl, I do not see why Jukes's tale should not be true. He is a Civil ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... shone "with sparks of gold" when broken across. They did not stay to wash the river-mud, for gold dust and golden pellets, but fell in for the march, and climbed from dawn till nearly dusk. They went over "a steep Mountain" which was parched and burnt and waterless. Four of the buccaneers refused to go farther than the foot of this hill, so they returned to the ships. The others, under the guidance of Antonio, contrived to cross the mountain "to an Hollow of Water," at which ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... profaned its cleanliness by so much as one expectoration of tobacco juice, though all were either smoking or chewing that weed. They had far too great respect for Janet, Aleck's wife, and for the labor that cleanliness meant in that waterless region. They were all deep in the discussion of the late events at Sobrante and none heard the old traveler's approach over the soft ground, till he stood close beside them with his ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... V. Bryant, the Copperfield, and Vernon Steele, the Steerforth, are both English. O. P. Heggie deserves more than a passing word of commendation for the things he refrains from doing as Uriah Heep. He is not forever going through that waterless ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple-trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek. Nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilization—a ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... scenery in the Low Country was to be found in the vicinity of the rivers. These, considering that they are African, do not lie very far apart. Yet sometimes there were long stretches of waterless country to be traversed, and severe suffering from thirst was a possibility occasionally realized. Besides, as we were practically explorers in a country without human inhabitants or recognizable landmarks, we might unwittingly ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... home of Israel. It was a land of rugged and picturesque mountains, interspersed with a few tracts of fertile country, shut in between the sea and the ravine of the Jordan, and falling away into the waterless desert of the south. It was, too, a land of small extent, hardly more than one hundred and sixty miles in length and sixty miles in width. And even this amount of territory was possessed by the Israelites only during the reigns of David and Solomon. ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce |
