"Mirage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... letter had never reached me. But the young fellow who two years ago had wandered about the Green Chalybeate with her had become, now, as unreal as she. I glimpsed the couple, with immeasurable aloofness, as phantoms flickering about the mirage of a brook, throwing ghostly ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... plains? If it is not water and a lake those buffalo are standing in, what in the name of sense is it?" I told them that what they saw was nothing more than merely buffalo at a distance on the plain; that what they saw that resembled water was simply an optical illusion, called the "mirage." Webster describes the word as follows: "An optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere and causing remote objects to be seen double, as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as if suspended in the air. It is frequently seen in the deserts, presenting ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... horse in exhaustion or arrive at Kingswood—and which of the alternatives happened did not appear to him to matter seriously. The whole affair was fantastic; it was unreal, in addition to being silly. But, real or unreal, he would finish it. If he was a phantom and Kingswood a mirage, the phantom would reach the mirage or sink senseless into astral mud. He had Colonel Hullocher in mind, and, quite illogically, he envisaged the Colonel as a reality. Often he had heard of the ways of the Army, and had scarcely credited the tales told and printed. Well, he now ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... sunrise, continued through blazing middays, and ended after sundown. Always, before and behind, the gang picked and shovelled, always the eyes of the guards were turning toward him. Always against the horizon the mountains, flecked at midday with clouds and shadows, beckoned him like a mirage. ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... is used in the meaning of "mirage," and also as another name for H[o]rai, the Elf-land of Far Eastern fable. Various beings in Japanese myth are credited with power to delude mortals by creating a mirage of H[o]rai. In old pictures one may see a toad represented in the ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... was going to look for would be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records; when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees something black up ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... thought of that! She would wake him for one of their talks. It seemed an age since they had sat on the hill together among the young buds, and she had conjured up the high-reaching buildings of New York against the blue sky, like a mirage. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... a vague mirage Or memory of a storied page With only that appeal; But oftentimes a sound or sight Would bring to him his own delight More subtle ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... phenomena attend this state of the atmosphere, known as the Fata Morgana of Sicily, the Mirage of the Desert, the Spectre of the Brocken, and the more common exhibitions of halos, coronae, and mock suns. The Mountain House at Catskill has repeatedly been seen brightly pictured on the clouds below. Rainbows are also due to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... This singular mixture ought not to surprise us. M. de Lamennais, a man of our own times, has strikingly presented the same contrast. In his beautiful book, the "Words of a Believer," the most immoderate anger and the sweetest relentings alternate, as in a mirage. This man, who was extremely kind in the intercourse of life, became madly intractable toward those who did not agree with him. Jesus, in like manner, applied to himself, not without reason, the passage from Isaiah:[4] ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... own northern air. Intense clearness, whether, in the north, after or before rain, or in some moments of twilight in the south, is always, as far as I am acquainted with natural phenomena, a notable thing. Mist of some sort, or mirage, or confusion of light or of cloud, are the general facts; the distance may vary in different climates at which the effects of mist begin, but they are always present; and therefore, in all probability, it is meant that we should enjoy them.... We surely need ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... shadows. I thought that the land probably rose to a height of 5000 ft. forty or fifty miles inland. The accurate estimation of heights and distances in the Antarctic is always difficult, owing to the clear air, the confusing monotony of colouring, and the deceptive effect of mirage and refraction. The land appeared to increase in height to the southward, where we saw a line of land or barrier that must have been seventy miles, and possibly ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... Adventurers. Voyage. Yucatan. Slave-trade in Natives. The Ten Tribes. Vera Cruz. Don Ignacio Comonfort. Mexican Politics. Casualties. The City of the Dead. Turkey-buzzards. Northers. The "temperate region." Cordova. The Chipi-chipi. The "cold region." Mirage. Sand-pillars. The rainy season. Plundered passengers. Robber-priest. Aztec remains. Aloe-fields. Houses of mud-bricks. Huts of aloes. Mexican churches. Mexican roads. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... glimmers through the Worst, She feels the sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer through the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wailed "mirage." ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... another mirage of riches as these thoughts went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a grip on the coffer—which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes and held together—and managed by a good deal of straining to lift it up through the hatch into the cabin, where I could ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... same high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and mirage; the same occasional strips of green marking the watercourses and oases. As to smaller detail, we saw many interesting divergences. In the foreground constantly recurred the Bedouin brush shelters, each with its picturesque figure or so in flowing robes, and its grumpy ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... the romantic genius of Britain is beginning to see the contour of Gallipoli invested with a mist of sadness, and presenting an appearance like a mirage of ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... together not a drop could be procured, and had it not been for the tubers, and the little red melons I have described, the horses and our patient ox must have perished. At length the sheen of water in the bright sunlight was seen in the distance. This time we were convinced that it was not a mirage. We pushed forward, hoping that our sufferings from thirst were at an end. Trees of greater height than any we had yet met with since leaving the colony fringed the banks of a fine river. On examining the current we ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston
... words Through hot-lipped cannon and the teeth of swords, Listening with quickened heart and ear intent To each sharp clause of that stern argument, I still can hear at times a softer note Of the old pastoral music round me float, While through the hot gleam of our civil strife Looms the green mirage of a simpler life. As, at his alien post, the sentinel Drops the old bucket in the homestead well, And hears old voices in the winds that toss Above his head the live-oak's beard of moss, So, in our trial-time, and under skies Shadowed by swords like Islam's paradise, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sea; but, unlike the last, without water—not a sheet to cheer their eyes, not a drop to quench the thirst, almost choking them. Only its resemblance, seen in the white mist always moving over these arid plains—the deluding, tantalising mirage. Lakes lay before them, their shores garlanded by green trees, their bosoms enamelled with islets smiling in all the verdure of spring—always before them, ever receding; the trees, as the water, never to ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... lost where no mortal can find it, Since Love is a mirror we break in a minute In snatching the image our soul has cast in it, What is the use of the Summers and Springs, The wave of the woods and the waft of the wings— Since all means nothing, and good things and ill Make madness,—a mirage tormenting ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... in the middle of one of these desert plains and looking towards the interior, the view is generally bounded by the escarpment of another plain, rather higher, but equally level and desolate; and in every other direction the horizon is indistinct from the trembling mirage which seems to rise from the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... but there was something more than mere curiosity; the river instinct that the inexplicable and unknown should be watched and inquired into moved him almost unconsciously to watch that distant agitation which became a dot afloat in a mirage of light. A little later a sudden flash along the river surface disclosed that the thing was a shanty-boat turning in the coiling currents ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... ardour; but the ardour had all gone out of him now. Only the empty solitude remained. He had lived a life of fevered variety, he had drunk deep of many waters; but he had never been satisfied. And now it seemed to him that all he had ever looked upon, all he had ever achieved, was mirage. Nothing of all that he had ever striven for was left. The fruit had turned to ashes in his mouth, and no spring remained ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... awnings. Breakfast was hardly ended, before river, and convex field, and huddling red tiles of the town, lay under a blurred, quivering distortion. The day flamed. At night, against a glow of fiery umber, the western hills broke sharp and thin as sheet-iron, while below them rose in flooding mirage a ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Heva: "I believe I'll look about a little." He wanted to go West. He went to the western extremity of the island where there was a little narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland, and the devil, who is always playing pranks with us, produced a mirage, and when he looked over to the mainland, such hills and vales, such dells and dales, such mountains crowned with snow, such cataracts clad in bows of glory did he see there, that he went back and told Heva: "The country over there is a thousand ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... has come already, Jack. I'm hit hard. She showed me a mirage of happiness that has made my present world a desert. I am reckless; I'm desperate. You may think it is weak and unmanly, but you don't know anything about it. Time or the fever may cure me, but ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... noons of summer. Around the old mission, whose bells have rung o'er the valley for a century, a few houses were grouped; but beyond this there was scarcely a sign of man's work except the far-off speck of a herdsman looming in the mirage, or the white walls of the old Spanish ranch-house glimmering afar through the hazy sunshine in which the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... again, floating alluringly before his eager imagination, like a mirage lake in the desert. Johnny's eyes stared ahead through the shimmering heat waves—stared and saw not the monotonous neutral tints of sand and rock and gray sage and yellow weeds and the rutted, dusty trail that wound away across the desert. But Mary V's ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... well protected against ennui, that vile ennui, the precursor of storms, which she had so much reason to dread? In any event, she suffered herself to be deceived and had been living for several days in a state of delicious unrest, for love is so strong, so beautiful, that its semblance, its mirage, takes us captive and may move us ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... mirage. As it fades away, we discern an arid waste. War broke out between France and Austria within two months of this sanguine utterance. It soon embroiled France and England in mortal strife. All hope of retrenchment ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... celebrity and the praise of the public might satisfy you. But you are not, and I have studied your nature too thoroughly to mistake the result of your ambitious career. My darling, ambition is the mirage of the literary desert you are anxious to traverse; it is the Bahr Sheitan, the Satan's water, which will ever recede and mock your thirsty, toil-spent soul. Dear little pilgrim, do not scorch your feet and wear out your life in the hot, blinding sands, struggling ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... mean, real facts—or at least grounds for suspicion, then they would certainly have tried to hide their game, in the hope of getting more (they would have made a search long ago besides). But they have no facts, not one. It is all mirage—all ambiguous. Simply a floating idea. So they try to throw me out by impudence. And perhaps, he was irritated at having no facts, and blurted it out in his vexation—or perhaps he has some plan... he seems ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... coast live on the edge of a perpetual mystery; only a strip of yellow sand or gray rock separates them from the unknown; they hear strange voices in the winds at midnight, they are haunted by the spectres of the mirage. Their minds quickly take the impress of uncanny things. The witches therefore found a sympathetic atmosphere in Newscastle, at the mouth of the Piscataqua—that slender paw of land which reaches out into the ocean and terminates in a spread ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... building, the summoning whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that—for deliverance from one impending disaster simply meant ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... be a mirage created by enchantment. Nothing so beautiful could be real. Take the west coast of Scotland, bathe it in Mediterranean light and sun, and let its waves be those of the Pacific. Take the best of Devonshire, enlarge the hills, extend the plains, and dominate ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... youth') The Hour and the Ghost A Summer Wish An Apple Gathering Song ('Two doves upon the selfsame branch') Maude Clare Echo My Secret Another Spring A Peal of Bells Fata Morgana 'No, Thank you, John' May A Pause of Thought Twilight Calm Wife to Husband Three Seasons Mirage Shut out Sound Sleep Song ('She sat and sang alway') Song ('When I am dead, my dearest') Dead before Death Bitter for Sweet Sister Maude Rest The First Spring Day The Convent ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... power of fascinating everybody, for any woman can fascinate some one person. Their eyes preserve, no doubt, something of the infinitude they have gazed on. Has nature, in her foresight, armed their retina with some reflecting background to enable them to endure the mirage of the sand, the torrents of sunshine, and the burning cobalt of the sky? or, do human beings, like other creatures, derive something from the surroundings among which they grow up, and preserve for ages the qualities they have imbibed from them? The great solution of this problem of race lies perhaps ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... passionate intensity, and Nayland Smith hesitated. To my nostrils was wafted that faint, delightful perfume which, since one night, two years ago, it had come to disturb my senses, had taunted me many times as the mirage taunts the parched Sahara traveller. I ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... so hard that the track of an ox could not be seen on its glittering surface. At a distance those clay beds looked like water shining in the sun and were generally about three times as far as any one would judge, the air was so clear. This mirage, or resemblance to water was so perfect as often to deceive us, and almost to our ruin on one or ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... carvest out redemption, Laying thy golden streets in very skies, Making the stars but eyets of thy port, Must thou compact thee to a little earth, Displace some few small tenants of the sod, And find thou 'st room enough?... (Looks up) City of dream! Time's far ghost inn! Eternity's mirage! Desire's dim temple fashioned out of prayer, Builded and jointured by no carpenter But captious Fancy!... O Carlotta, wife! Thou wert my Christian heart! Faith, faith, my God! Death to the unbeliever is to land Upon a coast dumb in the moonless dark, Where no hands wave a welcome, ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... being analysed into its elements; but there is no means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a mirage produced by an invisible object according to an unknown ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... two nights here, on the golden shore of the blue Birket Karun, all that's left of Lake Moeris of which Strabo and Herodotus raved. From the dune-sheltered plateau where our white tents cluster, the glitter of water in the desert is like a mirage: a mysterious, melancholy sheet of steel and silver turning to ruby in the sunset, with dark birds skimming ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... glittering day in early August; a light shower the night before had washed the valley clean of dust, and now the hot harvest sun poured down his ripening rays over the pulsating earth. To the south the Brandon Hills shimmered in a pale gray mirage. Over the trees which sheltered the Stopping-House a flock of black crows circled in the blue air, croaking and complaining that the harvest was going to be late. On the wire-fence that circled the haystack sat a row of red-winged blackbirds like a string ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... waste, thirsty travellers are deceived by the effects of the curious mirage, when lakes glittering in the sun, with towers, domes, and minarets reflected on their surface, appear before their eyes, to vanish ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... surface of sand. There was scarcely a breath of air, and the bodies of men and horses were bathed in perspiration. Not a cloud hung in the blue sky; no wing of a bird broke the monotony of distance, no living animal crept across the blazing surface of the desert. Occasionally a distant mirage attracted the eye, making the dead reality even more horrible by its semblance to water, yet never tempting them to stray aside. After the first mile conversation ceased, the men riding grimly, silently forward, intent only on covering all the distance possible. Late that night they camped at the ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... stirred up Persian feeling in them everywhere. Thus: the impulse of Han Wuti's westward activities passed as a quickening into the Yueh Chi; and on from them, not into the Parthians, who were but an unreality and mirage of empire, but into these Persians, the true possessors of the land whose turn it was to be quickened. They began remembering, now, their ancient greatness; and turning their eyes to their still half-independent ancestral mountains, whence—dared they ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... white gate of one of these comfortable places, Squire Goodlet's home, but he is urged back into the road, and again the pursuit sweeps on. Those blue mountains, the long parallel ranges of Old Bear and his brothers, seem no more a misty, uncertain mirage against the delicious indefinable tints of the horizon. Sharply outlined they are now, with dark, irregular shadows upon their precipitous slopes which tell of wild ravines, and rock-lined gorges, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... been, she had become so accustomed to find her beauty irresistible and all powerful. How could it ever have occurred to her, that this man, the very first whom she loved sincerely, should also be the first and the only one to escape from her snares? She was taken in, besides, by the double mirage ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... implements. Port George the Fourth. Islands to the westward. Red Island of Captain Heywood. Strong tides. Camden Bay. Buccaneer's Archipelago. Cygnet Bay. Dangerous situation of the brig. High and rapid tides. Cape Leveque. Examination of the coast to Cape Latouche Treville. Remarkable effect of mirage. Leave the coast for Mauritius. Voyage thither. Arrival at Port Louis. Refit. Some account of ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... which we have almost forgotten the very taste; and that when things come to the worst we shall turn the corner, and enter into a period of universal abundance. These stores seem to me much like the mirage which lures on the traveller of the desert, and which perpetually recedes as he advances. But the great difficulty of the moment is to procure fuel. I am ready, as some one said, to eat the soles of my boots for the sake of my country; but then they must ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... an unique experience. Vista after vista opens into the world of long ago so graphically depicted on the monumental tablets of the processional paths, while type and symbol point also to the infinite future intensely realised by Eastern mysticism. Mortal life was but a fleeting mirage besides this vision of the life beyond. For the words "Shadow, Unreality, Illusion," perpetually repeated by the yellow-robed monks on the beads of the Buddhist Rosary were inscribed on the inmost heart of the faithful disciple, who strove ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... phenomena constructing and destroying apparent things, though studied till the observing eye sees nothing but mirage anywhere, has nothing to do with the steady persistence of spiritual identity. To force it to discredit our claim to a divine descent and an endless inheritance is a glaring sophism. The question must be snatched back from the assumption of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... most minute details of his life. His Southern fancy soon showed him the stones of his beloved Provence, in the play of the heat which undulated above the wide expanse of the desert. Realizing the danger of this cruel mirage, he went down the opposite side of the hill to that by which he had come up the day before. The remains of a rug showed that this place of refuge had at one time been inhabited; at a short distance he saw some palm trees full of dates. Then the instinct which binds us to life awoke again in his ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac
... a morning mirage inverts an image of a stretch of trees along the far-away river and blends them top to top till they seem greenish-black columns supporting the dun clouds of the west, while the belated moon peers through ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... without exception, are impermanent, unstable, despicable, sure to depart, disintegrating; all are temporary as a mirage, as a phantom, or as foam.... Even as all earthen vessels made by the potter end in being broken, so end the lives ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... gone forever the purpose for which one generation precedes another. Life was horror. Blood and death and shattered bodies were their daily portion. No matter how brave, they heard death scream in every shell. The world beyond existed as a mirage. No wonder they ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... eyes, the natural beauty and the beauty of enamel, the vague perfumes, the low murmur of voices, the soft rustle of silks, the music of ringing gold, all combine to produce a picture and ensemble as beautiful as a mirage and as false. Nothing is real in Monte Carlo but the little pieces of gold and the passion to win them. The two renewed their tickets of admission and passed on into the famous atrium, stared a while at the news bulletin, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... I had not thought of his attempting it," said Rendel, truthfully enough, with a sinking dread at his heart that perhaps after all the fair prospect he had been gazing upon was going to prove nothing but a mirage. ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... case for that religion was that it transmuted the individual subject of its adoration into the deathless splendor of a Madonna unique and yet divisible in a mirage of earthly loveliness. It was heaven come to Aquitaine, to the Courts of Love, in shapes of vivid fragrant beauty, with delectable hair lying gold on white samite worked in borders of blue petals. It chose not abstractions for its faith, but the most desirable ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... those of the trees upon them, could be distinctly traced on the unruffled surface. As we continued to advance, the water however constantly retreated before us and at last surrounded us. I now found that we had been deceived by mirage; the apparent islands being really such only when these plains are covered by the sea. In many places the sandy mud was so moist that we sank deeply into it, and after travelling for fifteen miles on a north-east course I could still see ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... concerning the State. The State is an active philosophic concept that holds off the people from discussing and gossiping about Wilhelm. It does not exist apart from the ruling family and apart from the bureaucracy which is the ruling family in action. It takes on their character. The State is a mirage which the citizen is made to gawk at in the air, thinking he sees something besides the frowning German sky. It surrounds the Emperor with the divine halo, removes him up above the rumbling clouds where the distant ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... dizziness, swimming, scotomy[obs3]; cataract; ophthalmia. [Limitation of vision] blinker; screen &c. (hider) 530. [Fallacies of vision] deceptio visus[Lat]; refraction, distortion, illusion, false light, anamorphosis[obs3], virtual image, spectrum, mirage, looming, phasma|; phantasm, phantasma[obs3], phantom; vision; specter, apparition, ghost; ignis fatuus &c. (luminary) 423 specter of the Brocken magic mirror[Lat]; magic lantern &c. (show) 448; mirror lens &c. (instrument) 445. V. be dimsighted &c. n.; see double; have a mote ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the pony I see isn't a desert mirage," muttered Grace. "Mirage or no mirage I am going ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... Limfjord is called Vendsyssel. Curious effects of mirage may be seen in summer-time in the extensive ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... "This is the gate of heaven," he stood watching all day long, careless of food and rest, as every forward plunge of the ship displayed some fresh wonder. Islands and capes hung high in air, with their inverted images below them; long sand-hills rolled and weltered in the mirage; and the yellow flower-beds, and huge thorny cacti like giant candelabra, which clothed the glaring slopes, twisted, tossed, and flickered, till the whole scene seemed one blazing phantom-world, in which everything was as unstable as it was fantastic, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... in the air of objects on the earth, like the images one sees in glass or water, but they were not generally upright, as in the case of this ship, but reversed—turned bottom upwards. This appearance in the air is called a mirage. He told a sailor to go up to the foretop and look beyond the phantom-ship. The man obeyed, and reported that he could see on the water, below the ship in the air, one precisely like it. Just then another ship was seen in the air, only this one was a ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... river that evening. The mid-day glare prevented observations; and as they followed the high ground along the Republican, at early evening indistinct objects were made out on the border of a distant mirage. ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... ever beyond?—what region rich, unknown, forbidden, whose rank vegetation steamed with such insidious poison? And on what arid, barren road, what weary road,—but, alas, long worn and beaten by the feet of other wayfarers! a road that ran real and strong through this noxious and seducing mirage! ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... momentous affair. He believed in the Idea; he saw it, with Wallingham, not only a glorious prospect, but an educative force; and never had he a moment of such despondency that it confounded him upon his horizon in the faded colours of some old Elizabethan mirage. ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... knows that if he stops he will fall, and I had a sort of bet with myself not to lie down—not at any rate just yet. If I lay down I should feel the pain in my head worse. Once I had ridden for five days down country with fever on me and the flat bush trees had seemed to melt into one big mirage and dance quadrilles before my eyes. But then I had more or less kept my wits. Now I was fairly daft, and every ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... where we struck it, was deep, level, and dry; but I believe there is water in it not far off, for there were some red-breasted cockatoos in the trees, and native parrots on each side. On the north side there is a part bearing off to the north-north-west. The mirage on the plain to the south of the creek was stronger than I have before seen it. There appear to be sheets of water within a few yards of one, and it looks sufficiently smooth and glassy to be used for an artificial horizon. To the westward of the plains, some fine sandhills were visible, nearly in ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... mirages. Why, here, hung above the earth, were scenes from every age: Cleopatra's galleys, Alexander's legions, the pomp of the Mamelukes, Ptolemy and Pompey, Napoleon and Gordon—their times and deeds were all pictured here. Perhaps the spirit world has its "movies," and only here in the desert mirage is the "screen" of stuff that can be seen ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... to Heva: "I believe I'll look about a little;" and he went to the northern extremity of the island, where there was a little, narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland; and the devil, who is always playing pranks with us, got up a mirage, and when he looked over to the mainland, such hills and dells, vales and dales; such mountains, crowned with silver; such cataracts, clad in robes of beauty, did he see there, that he went back and told Heva: "The country ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... me reality—its dumb, Dead bulk, inert, oppressive, grim, and crude? How hope has paled, alas, with roseate hue! And memory, the heavenly blue, grown hoary! And even poesy! Its acrobatic Exertions, leaps—they pall upon my sense; Its bright mirage can satisfy no soul— Light skimmings from the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the good and of the beautiful which is to be found in the female conscience delights us and settles the question for us. This is why religion is preserved to the world by woman alone. A beautiful and a virtuous woman is the mirage which peoples with lakes and green avenues our great moral desert. The superiority of modern science consists in the fact that each step forward it takes is a step further in the order of abstractions. We make chemistry ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... across no sign of life. As we advanced mile upon mile the mysterious tower seemed to get further away, an illusion possible in flat countries. I have often observed a similar phenomenon in Holland. Perhaps in this case mirage had something to do ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... some three miles from the ship, and often, deceived by the effects of the mirage and refraction, he went farther away than he intended. It was imprudent, for recent tracts of ferocious animals were to be seen. He did not wish, however, to return without some fresh meat, and continued on his route; but he then experienced a strange feeling, which turned his ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... of the beach-combers who had led their varied lives on those silvery shores. Bateman, mortified and exasperated, at first listened sullenly, but presently some magic in the words possessed him and he sat entranced. The mirage of romance obscured the light of common day. Had he forgotten that Arnold Jackson had a tongue of silver, a tongue by which he had charmed vast sums out of the credulous public, a tongue which very nearly enabled him to escape the penalty of his crimes? No one had a sweeter eloquence, and no one ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... prairies, a grimy-faced urchin, with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the "health resorts" of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth. Surely "Town" was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the unmapped spaces of this new world that God had made and called good; an omen of the abominations that men would make when they grew blind to the beauty of ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... son! Stay, Mustapha! It is no lake,—it is a device of Satan. What you behold is the mirage, spread by devils for ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... this world since the Fall! It stands at the end of each sentence we learn; It flits in the vista of all we discern; It leads us, forever and ever, away To find in to-morrow what flies with to-day. 'Twas the same little fatal and mystical word That now, like a mirage, led my lady and lord To the waters of Ems from the waters of Marah; Drooping Pilgrims in Fashion's ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... essayists arraigning the sublimest philosophy ever known to the world, and consecrated by the homage of ninety out of every hundred thinkers who have ever approached its study, as a system erected upon a mirage—the image of a man's own personality distorted by its projection into the infinite. Tennyson himself once said that "the average Englishman's god was an immeasurable clergyman, and that not a few of them mistook their devil for their god", That may very well be, but ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... you're sick of the highway, with its noise and its easy needs, And you seek the risk of the by-way, and you reck not where it leads. And sometimes it leads to the desert, and the tongue swells out of the mouth, And you stagger blind to the mirage, to die in the mocking drouth. And sometimes it leads to the mountain, to the light of the lone camp-fire, And you gnaw your belt in the anguish of hunger-goaded desire. And sometimes it leads to the Southland, to the swamp where ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... her life and glory but a memory, is still the citta nobilissima,—a city of moods,—all beautiful to the beauty-lover, all mystic to the dreamer; between the wonderful blue of the water and the sky she floats like a mirage—visionary—unreal—and under the spell of her fascination we are not critics, but lovers. We see the pathos, not the scars of her desolation, and the splendor of her past is too much a part of her to be forgotten, though the gold is dim upon her palace-fronts, and the sheen of her precious ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... "It is a mirage!" I muttered, but my voice made no sound. Slowly the light behind the fog died out; the vapor around us turned to rose, then dissolved, while mile on mile of a limitless sea spread away till, like a quick line pencilled at ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... when the Egyptian troops first conquered Nubia, a regiment was destroyed by thirst in crossing this desert. The men, being upon a limited allowance of water, suffered from extreme thirst, and deceived by the appearance of a mirage that exactly resembled a beautiful lake, they insisted on being taken to its banks by the Arab guide. It was in vain that the guide assured them that the lake was unreal, and he refused to lose the precious time by wandering ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... Port Said. There is iniquity in many parts of the world, and vice in all, but the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the vices in all the continents finds itself at Port Said. And through the heart of that sand-bordered hell, where the mirage flickers day long above the Bitter Lake, move, if you will only wait, most of the men and women you have known in this life. Dick established himself in quarters more riotous than respectable. He spent his evenings on the quay, and boarded many ships, and saw very many friends,—gracious ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... lava blocks, and its foot marked by piles of stones, the memorials of deeds of blood, the lofty conical peak of Jebel Seearo rose in sight, and not long afterwards the far-famed Lake Assad, surrounded by its dancing mirage, was seen sparkling at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... A kind of mirage floating over waste places, and appearing at a distance like water. Travellers and some animals, especially deer, are supposed to be attracted ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... look through these great masses of bloom; it is enough simply to live in an hour which brings such an overflow of beauty from the ancient fountains; but Nature herself lures one to deeper thoughts, and, through the vision which spreads like a mirage over the landscape, hints at some hidden loveliness at the root of this riotous blossoming, some diviner vision for the eye of the spirit alone. "Look," she seems to say, as I stand and gaze with unappeased hunger of soul, "this is ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... darker markings on the surface of the expanse which the workman at the salines declared to be the ruins of old buildings and quite inaccessible nowadays, but they may well have been small ridges of sand, magnified by mirage: those oasis-Arabs have rather indifferent eyesight. Plainly visible, however, was a line of palms about eight miles distant to the east; it was one of a group of oases of Oudiane. I looked at it, wondering whether I should pass that ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... in the following passage from one of the sacred books of the Hindus: "Who would have immortal life must beware of outward things, and seek inward truth, purity, and faith; for the treacherous and evanescent world flies from its votaries, like the mirage, or devil car, which moves so swiftly that one cannot ascend it." The mere negation of real life or blessedness is predicated of the careless worldling; positive death or miserable condemned unrest is predicated of the bad hearted sinner. Both these classes of men, upon accepting Christ, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the public criticism. He spoke of your unfortunate call, but said you bore the sulkiness very well. George Bradford was also very sorry; and it was bad that you should come so far, with the faces of friends for a hospitable city before you, and find a mirage only, or (begging ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... the edge every year. There is a strange phenomenon connected with Ontario, unaccounted for by scientific speculation; each seventh year, from some inscrutable cause, the waters reach to an unusual height, and again subside, mysteriously as they arose. The beautiful illusion of the mirage spreads its dreamy enchantment over the surface of Ontario in the summer calms, mixing islands, clouds, and waters in ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... at him with an admiration I could not repress. There was, indeed, something of the hero about this simple-minded Saharaman. We were at the edge of the oasis, in a remote place looking towards the quivering mirage which guards dead Okba's tomb. A tiny earthen house, with a flat terrace ending in the jagged bank of the Oued Biskra, was crouched here in the shade. From it emerged a pleasant scent of coffee. Suddenly Safti's bare legs began to "give." I felt it would be cruel to push on farther. ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... for that it is flattering, deceitful end treacherous, and the things thereof are but a loan to us which it will borrow back from all borrowers. It is like unto the dreams of the dreamer and the sleep-visions of the sleeper or as the mirage of the desert, which the thirsty take for water;[FN116] and Satan maketh it fair for men even unto death These are the ways of the world; wherefore put not thou thy trust therein neither incline thereto, for it bewrayeth him who leaneth upon it and who committeth himself ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... are its wards,—and wondering sadly over the "headache and heartache" of it all, and then saying, gleefully, "at all events Chancery will work none of its bad influence on us"? "None of its bad influence on us!" poor lad, whose life is wasted and character impaired in following the mirage of the suit, and who is killed by the mockery of its end. Thus do the two intertwined stories run; but apart from these, though all in place and keeping, and helping on the general development, there is a whole profusion of noticeable characters. ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... family—the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now—healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... worst of us, the heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like a ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... What was there to shoot at, but sand? The Arabs, warned by the death of the gaunt fellow in the burnous, had doffed their headgear. Their brown heads, peeping intermittently from the wady and the dunes, were evasive as a mirage. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... from the arm of a yohng woman full of red blood and tingling all over with swift nerve-currents. Life had never looked to her as it did that evening. It was the swan's first breasting the water,—bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of lake and river, and strange longings as the mirage came and dissolved, and at length afloat upon the sparkling wave. She felt as if she had for the first time found her destiny. It was to please, and so to command, to rule with gentle sway in virtue of the royal gift of beauty,—to enchant with the commonest ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ultimately signified which they, blind fools, so unsuccessfully tried to transmute. But we know more than they. We have climbed no doubt in the footholds they have carved, and we have gained the summit they only saw in the mirage of hope. For we know that there is no life, no death, no metals, no matter, no emotions, no thoughts; but that all that we call by these names is only the ether in various conditions. Life! I could live as long as this earth will submit to human existence ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... a constant school of negotiation and intrigue for the best diplomacy in the world. By favour of the Habsburgs, the papacy obtained a fixed dominion, secure against all comers, requiring no military defence, no wasting and profitless expenditure, nothing to dissolve the mirage of an ideal government, under spiritual and converted men. The pontificates became steadily longer, averaging six years in the sixteenth century, eight in the seventeenth, twelve in the eighteenth, sixteen in the nineteenth, and by the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... table. It was hard to believe that she had moved from the spot at all. The fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the hug round his neck, the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have been the unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life; a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts. He hesitated to speak till she ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... remarkable thing, and so is our remaining where we are now in spite of the northerly ones. It would seem that new powers of some kind must be at work. "To-day another noteworthy thing happened, which was that about midday we saw the sun, or, to be more correct, an image of the sun, for it was only a mirage. A peculiar impression was produced by the sight of that glowing fire lit just above the outermost edge of the ice. According to the enthusiastic descriptions given by many Arctic travellers of the first appearance of this god of life after ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... feet of snow covered the ground all through the long winter. As we left Holy Island, it was past ten o'clock at night, and yet what could that be? We were far away from land, and still there seemed to be land quite close to us. What could it mean? It was a mirage. Such a mirage is sometimes seen on the vast Ladoga lake as in the plains of Egypt, and vastly beautiful it was. A fitting ending to a strangely beautiful day we thought, as we ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak—so quiet,—so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... a woman, and one, it is plain, Whose sentiment hangs like a cloud o'er her brain. You gaze through a sort of traditional mist, And behold a mirage of God's laws which exist But in fancy. God made but one law—it is love. A law for the earth, and the kingdoms above, A law for the woman, a law for the man, The base and the spire of His intricate plan ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... around; every ear was intensely strained to catch the faintest noise, in momentary expectation of the unearthly war-whoop and of seeing dusky forms with gleaming tomahawks uplifted. In the moonlight mirage of the prairies, every taller clump of grass, every blacker hillock grew into a blood thirsty Indian, just ready to leap upon them. But, by faith, they were able to ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... reading, 'the parched land shall become a pool.' The word which he uses is that almost technical one which describes the phenomenon known only in Eastern lands, or at least known in them only in its superlative degree; the mirage, where the dancing currents of ascending air simulate the likeness of a cool lake, with palm-trees around it. And, says he, 'the mirage shall become a pool,' the romance shall turn into a reality, the mistakes shall be rectified, and men ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was magnificent; he could scarcely comprehend that this languid world of sea and palm, of heavy odour and slow breezes, was his own land still. Under the spell the Occident vanished; it was the Orient—all this dreamy mirage, these dim white walls, this spice-haunted dusk, the water inlaid with stars, the fairy foliage, the dew drumming in the stillness like the sound ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... were being discharged. The river 'came down' from the heads and filled the gully with a roaring flood. The lagoon was again almost level with its banks. The dry water-course on the plain sparkled in the distance, like a mirage—only that it was no mirage. No one who has not seen the extraordinary rapidity with which a dry river out West can be changed into a flooded one, could credit the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows; but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north—a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... getting back—escape and exchange. Exchange was like the ever receding mirage of the desert, that lures the thirsty traveler on over the parched sands, with illusions of refreshing springs, only to leave his bones at last to whiten by the side of those of his unremembered predecessors. Every day there came ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... The form seemed familiar and the horse looked like one I had seen, but I dared not believe my eyes. Clyde, who was helping to draw water from the eighty-foot well without a pulley, thought I was bereft as I ran from the camp toward the advancing rider. But although I thought what I saw must be a mirage, still I knew Mrs. ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... imagined that I was in love for an hour, for a day. I had foolishly yielded to the influence of surrounding circumstances. I allowed myself to be beguiled by the mirage of an aurora. Would you like me to relate for you ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... too, how the grey pebble beach is already dancing and quivering in the mirage which steams up, like the hot breath of a limekiln, from the drying stones. Talk of "glazings and scumblings," ye artists! and bungle at them as you will, what are they to Nature's own glazings, deepening every instant ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... life looked as practical and hard as the stones of the street. Even the pictures on the walls seemed to him but things for sale, representing money values; and money appeared the beginning, middle, and ending of the world's creed. Like the unsubstantial mirage had vanished the beautiful, happy life of the past few weeks. Around him were the rocks and sands of the desert, through which he must toil with weary, bleeding feet till he reached the land watered by the river of life. Reason and duty, as he ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... that same day, the rebel government at Richmond faded thence like a mirage, and, within one week, General Lee surrendered his enfeebled relic ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... upon the city of Irkutsk with its pleasant squares and great stone buildings beside the shining river, the gilded domes and crosses of its thirty churches and convents glittering in the sun, the whole picture beckoning to the delirious brain of the traveler like some mirage of the desert, his appearance was the signal for a salute from the fort; and the Governor-General, privy counselor and senator de Pestel, accompanied by the civil governor, the commandant, the archbishop, and a military escort, ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... not forget that it was a beautiful day and a perfectly calm sea with the shore of France looming like a blue mirage on the horizon. It lasted about forty minutes altogether, and through it all the little destroyers—don't forget them—were weaving in and out among the big ships; and on the big ships were thousands of troopers, white life-belts around ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... show for what they are, the light yellow hard-baked soil of the desert, without even the ordinary sage brush; but in early morning and, less frequently, toward evening, these lakes take on a semblance of their former state, sometimes (so strong is the mirage) almost deceiving those best acquainted with the region. Years ago—how many it would be difficult to say—these dry lakes were veritable bodies of water; indeed, at an earlier period than that, they were, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... delight, almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been the dupe. All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again, and again he beheld the vision. There were the four lines outlined with inexorable clearness. This time it was no mirage. The recurrence of a vision is a reality; it was palpable, it was the writing restored in the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... There's nothing to be frightened at!" said the doctor. "There's no danger! Look, commander, look ahead, Mr. Wall; it's only an effect of the mirage, ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... desolation. Sandy had called it six or seven miles. It might have been two or twenty. The deceit of rarefied air was intensified by the dazzle of the merciless sun beating down on powdered alkali, on snaky flows of weathered lava, on mock lakes that sparkled and dissolved in mirage. The broken mesa, across which ran the road to the deserted mining camp, mysteriously changed form before their eyes; unsubstantial masses in pastel lights and shades of saffron, mauve and rose. Over all was the hard vault of the sky-like ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... would fain hurry toward it, as the caravan moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word along the file that water is in sight Though each little party that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of Life, and thought they heard its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... mirage did for the plain the work that man had neglected. It set great cities on the waste land as though for our sole benefit. I saw walls and battlements, stately mosques, cool gardens, and rivers where caravans of camels halted for rest and water. Several times we were deceived and ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... did solve itself, at least part of it, that very night; the remaining part of the problem was to be solved months later under conditions so strange that, had the girls been able to vision them lying away, like a mirage on the horizon of the future, they would have been tempted to change their plans for ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... knight, etc. The correct name for the individual fairy is fay, Fr. fee, Vulgar Lat. *fata, connected with fatum, fate. This appears in Ital. fata, "a fairie, a witch, an enchantres, an elfe" (Florio). The fata morgana, the mirage sometimes seen in the Strait of Messina, is attributed to the fairy Morgana of Tasso, the Morgan le Fay of our ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... a wondrous mirage an effect very common in high latitudes, the American Coast, though separated from Siberia by a broad arm of the sea, loomed so close that a bridge might seemingly be thrown from one world ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... jealousy, she had, in quite another circle, heard strange, wonderful, even romantic stories about Falconer and his doings among the poor. A new world seemed to open before her longing gaze—a world, or a calenture, a mirage? for would she cross the 'wandering fields of barren foam,' to reach the green grass that did wave on the far shore? the dewless desert to reach the fair water that did lie leagues beyond its pictured sweetness? But I think, mingled with whatever motives she may have had, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... by a spiral haze of smoke so vague that one could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the mast round ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... towns. These white specks diminish swiftly,— dwindle to the dimensions of salt-grains,—finally vanish. Then the island grows uniformly bluish; it becomes cloudy, vague as a dream of mountains;—it turns at last gray as smoke, and then melts into the horizon-light like a mirage. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... hope's mirage upreared In their warm hearts its rosy palaces; They deemed them real, and longing, only feared Life was too short for ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... the old shoes, and the wire fences. Outside these ramparts began the vacuum, white, gray, indigo, florescent, where all the year the sun shines. Not the semblance of any tree dances in the heat; only rocks and lumps of higher sand waver and dissolve and reappear in the shaking crystal of mirage. Not the scar of any river-bed furrows the void. A river there is, flowing somewhere out of the shiny violet mountains to the north, but it dies subterraneously on its way to Sharon, misses the town, and emerges thirty miles south across the sunlight in ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... a low tone as we rode along, "tell me what you think of this. Aren't we pretty near the edge? I've felt for three days as if an Indian was riding beside me and I couldn't see him. It's not the mirage, and I'm not locoed. Did you ever feel as if you were ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous details, should have had behind it something, probably a great deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though with a grandeur which is homely and simple. Hence the fascination which we ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... told me to hurry up, but I called him out of his tent and asked him if I was really a sergeant, or if it was a mirage. He said if I made a success of that bridge, and the command got across, and I was not killed I would be appointed sergeant. He said the general would try me as a bridge-builder, and if I was a success he would try me, no doubt, in other capacities, ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... extremity of Afghanistan. The sand of this desert is so fine that its particles are almost impalpable, and the action of the wind causes it to accumulate into heaps ten or twenty feet high, divided by deep valleys. Even in calm weather a great number of particles float in the air, giving rise to a mirage of a peculiar kind, and getting into the traveller's eyes, mouth, and nostrils, cause an excessive ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... far away. The change was right, just, natural; not a word could be said: but I loved my Rhine, my Nile; I had almost worshipped my Ganges, and I grieved that the grand tide should roll estranged, should vanish like a false mirage. Though stoical, I was not quite a stoic; drops streamed fast on my hands, on my desk: I wept one sultry shower, heavy ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... thread of land, with the dark waters rolling around them far and near, they presented an insubstantial dream-like aspect, seeming rather like castles floating between air and ocean than actual fortifications—a deceptive mirage rather than reality. There was nothing imaginary, however, in the work which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... they reached a plain of alternating sand and rocks, where nothing grew except some prickly shrub. On one side, not far off, a lake was seen, with many palm-trees mirrored in its tranquil waters. The Frank stared at it in amazement, remarking that it was not in the map. Iskender guessed it was mirage, and was soon confirmed in that opinion by the gradual disappearance of both lake and palm-trees. But the vision tended to reassure him, seeming a word from the Most High. If Allah, he thought, could thus imprint a perfect likeness of trees and water on the hot, still air, He would ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... harmony led the other. How near they were akin! how far apart they have wandered! Yet there has always been this essential difference between them, that while the Buddhist regards the senses as windows looking out upon unreality and mirage, to the Taoist they are doors through which the freed soul rushes to mingle with the colours and tones and contours of the universe. Both Buddha and Lao Tzu are poets, one listening to the rhythm of infinite sorrow, one to the rhythm of infinite joy. Neither ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... my mother's love, warm, tender, true, To guide me o'er the billowy deep, was given; E'en now I view her barge's silvery trail, And faint, in distance, mark her snowy sail Bloom like a lily on the water blue. 'Tis but a mirage, she ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... off running with their empty water-bottles to fill them in that lake or river. Many, many travellers have hastened towards it when they knew that they must have water or die. But ever the mirage, as it is called, retreats before them. That water is like magic water that no human being can ever drink. The palaces and towers are like fairy palaces and towers into which no real person ever enters. The green leaves and white birds, the trees and the grass, are only a picture that the ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... below him. Miramar, he had named it—"Beautiful Sea." The name was half an affectionate mockery of this land where the nearest water was fifty miles away, and half because of the sea of blue that he looked at now. Garry had never ceased to wonder at the mirage. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... central canal has done its work the water is turned into the side canals, in order to utilise it as far as possible. Through their splendid telescopes they must view our seas and ample rivers; and must die like travellers in the desert seeing in a mirage the cool waters of ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... making no further objection for fear of irritating the old man. At the same time he fervently hoped that General Sokolovitch and his family would fade away like a mirage in the desert, so that the visitors could escape, by merely returning downstairs. But to his horror he saw that General Ivolgin was quite familiar with the house, and really seemed to have friends there. At every step he named some topographical or biographical detail that left nothing ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... thing to go do; schoolin' or no schoolin', he wouldn't be givin' people any call to say the O'Beirnes were after playin' a dirty thrick." At this Nicholas's experience was like that of a desert traveller who should see a mirage of palms and pools grow swiftly before his delighted eyes into a substantial oasis, and then anon, or ever he could approach it, shimmer back, with all its sheen and shade, into mocking illusion again. For thus did it fare with his hopes as his grandfather ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... himself with his spy glass on clear days to see whether it is his old friend Cap'n Perry down there on number two oyster bar, or how heavy the traffic is to-day far out beyond the yellow beach line, where Block Island rises like a blue mirage. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds, and being very rich—she died worth about L60,000, mostly in land—she was in perpetual quest of an heir. The mirage of this fortune hung before successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy. The grandniece, Stephen's daughter, the one who had not "married imprudently," appears to have been the first; for she was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Smithfield: "To the right! you are driving them back to the pastures—to the right! that way lies the barn-yard!" "Barn-yard?" cried a voice; "you are dreaming, old man." And so, Israel, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had dreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures again. But how different the flat, apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists which, goat-like, climbed the purple ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... particularly large one; but when one is in the middle of it, it might as well be as extensive as Sahara itself, for anything he can see to the contrary, and away off to the right I behold as perfect a mirage as one could wish to see. A person can scarce help believing his own eyes, and did one not have some knowledge of these strange and wondrous phenomena, one's orbs of vision would indeed open with astonishment; for seemingly but a few miles away is a beautiful lake, whose ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... on, absorbed in their fascinating quest. For the hunting of birch bark is ever enticing and lures one on to further treasures like a mirage. ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells |
