"Torrid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leave before taking up his duties as an officer at the post and it was a halcyon time at the Commandant's house. In spite of the torrid heat, there were parties of pleasure and little dances, and all the round of gaieties that prevail at army posts. The Colonel was proud of his well-set-up stripling, although, of course, a boy could never be of so ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... awhile and view One who has travelled more than you, Quite round the world, through each degree, Anson and I have ploughed the sea, Torrid and frigid zones have past, And safe at home ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... Roche Canillac the road descended into a very deep valley by so many turns and windings that I was thankful to be in the pedlar's cart, especially as the mid-day sun smote with torrid strength. But the scenery was of exquisite beauty, and this valley will remain in my memory as one of the most charming I have ever seen. Luxuriant woods, flashing water, savage rocks, emerald-green patches of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... was open. A torrid heat entered along with the clouds of dust; the flames of the four candles were flickering in the direction of the immobile corpse, and upon the cloth which covered the face, the closed eyes, the two hands stretched out, small flies alighted, came, went, and careered up and down incessantly, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... in attending on poor old Sewis, who would lie on his pillows recounting for hours my father's midnight summons of the inhabitants of Riversley, and his little Harry's infant expedition into the world. Temple and Heriot came to stay at the Grange, and assisted in some rough scene-painting—torrid colours representing the island of Jamaica. We hung it at the foot of old Sewis's bed. He awoke and contemplated it, and went downstairs the same day, cured, he declared: the fact being that the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the infinite of being. As with the vegetable kingdom, the tiny seed or acorn silently working its magical transformation into a plant or tree, and directing its destiny with marvelous intelligence through the torrid and frigid vicissitudes of the seasons; so is man without beginning in the infinitude of his own being or microcosm. Man is both a type and antitype. A type of what pre-existed in the imagination of the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... y'are entered; see the coddled cook Runs from his torrid zone to pry and look And bless his dainty mistress: see The aged point out, "This is she Who now must sway The house (love shield her) with her yea and nay": And the smirk butler thinks it Sin in's napery not to express his wit; Each striving to devise Some gin wherewith ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... species of cloister the human guests were privileged to spread their blankets in case of rain or an icy norther. Otherwise they slept in the sky-vaulted court among the four-footed transients, for what men on the torrid Gulf coast would allow his beast more fresh air ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... principally desert; December to February - northeast monsoon, moderate temperatures in north and very hot in south; May to October - southwest monsoon, torrid in the north and hot in the south, irregular rainfall, hot and humid periods ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... regions his vast reputation has flown, Through the torrid, the frigid, and temperate zone; The wretch, just expiring, springs healthy and strong From his bed at one touch of the great ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... to see that she could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders "without looking,"—that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone—that, in short, she might possess "education" and other good things ending in "tion," and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll. When she made remarks to this edifying effect, she had a ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... day of waiting. Gradually got known that we shan't land to-day, though it is possible still we may to-night. Torrid, windless day, and very hot work 'mucking out' and tramping round with the horses, which we did all the morning, and some of the afternoon. News sent round that we had captured Cronje and 5000 prisoners; all the ships dressed with flags, and whistles blowing; rockets ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... She still, it is true held in Europe the Milanese and the two Sicilies, Belgium, and Franche Comte. In America her dominions still spread, on both sides of the equator, far beyond the limits of the torrid zone. But this great body had been smitten with palsy, and was not only incapable of giving molestation to other states, but could not, without assistance, repel aggression. France was now, beyond all doubt, the greatest power in Europe. Her resources have, since those days, absolutely ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to the greater length of its year, Mars's seasons are much longer than ours. Winter and summer visit in succession its northern and southern hemispheres just as occurs on the planet that we inhabit, and the torrid, temperate, and frigid zones on its surface have nearly the same angular width as on the earth. In this respect Mars is the first of the foreign planets we have studied to ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... many steamboats, yet it may be doubtful whether one understands the mechanical principle by which they are propelled and directed. They have seen the flowers and vegetation, birds and beasts, of our region of country, and yet they doubtless are about as ignorant of them as of the products of the torrid zone. They live under our form of government, yet how many know wherein it differs from other governments! They have heard or read of almost every science, yet how little acquainted are they with the commonest principles of science! ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... breakers on the barrier reef, the beating of his heart, and the growling of the dog. Once only came a shrill chizzling chirping, evidently made by some kind of cricket, otherwise there was the stillness of a torrid day when the very vegetation ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... wingless (and even featherless) biped, has not so much even as a dream of wings ever come? 'Talented young parishioner'? Among the Arts whereof thou art Magister, does that of seeing happen to be one? Unhappy Artium Magister! Somehow a Nemean lion, fulvous, torrid-eyed, dry-nursed in broad-howling sand-wildernesses of a sufficiently rare spirit-Libya (it may be supposed) has got whelped among the sheep. Already he stands wild-glaring, with feet clutching the ground ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the raven, and the bald eagle, the subject of the present account. He has been long known to naturalists, being common to both continents, and occasionally met with from a very high northern latitude, to the borders of the torrid zone, but chiefly in the vicinity of the sea, and along the shores and cliffs of our lakes and large rivers. Formed by nature for braving the severest cold; feeding equally on the produce of the sea, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... of a ramrod than ever to-day," said Egon to his friend as they went on. "Whenever that cold, calculating countenance comes near me I feel frost-bitten and long to fly to the torrid zones." ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... much-despised SALSOLEA and other shrubs should be coveted and sought after; that the bugbear of Oxley, the ACACIA PENDULA, should now be held to indicate good country was inconceivable; and when, above everything, the most fondly cherished of all delusions, that in the torrid north the sheep's wool would turn to hair, had to be given up, it was quite evident that a new order of belief would soon ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... tribe, More numerous, those fewer who beneath The torment lay, but louder in their grief. O'er all the sand fell slowly wafting down Dilated flakes of fire, as flakes of snow On Alpine summit, when the wind is hush'd. As in the torrid Indian clime, the son Of Ammon saw upon his warrior band Descending, solid flames, that to the ground Came down: whence he bethought him with his troop To trample on the soil; for easier thus The vapour was extinguish'd, while alone; So fell the eternal ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... traveller finds lands of wonderful fertility and great natural resources. Approaching German Southwest Africa from the east access is across the Kalahari Desert. This in its trackless desolation, its frequent sandstorms and torrid heat through which only the hardiest and best provisioned caravans may penetrate is worse than the worst that Sahara can show. There is not a sign of life. Approached from the sea the principal port is Walfish Bay, a fair harbor that was improved by the British when they occupied it. Near Walfish ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... week of June—a torrid, airless day—he came home reeling. For the moment a black fear fell on her that she would be too weak to wrestle with this attack; but she braced herself to ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ashes at Jamaica during the eruption of Coseguina, in Guatamala, in February 1835, as coming from south-west, whereas the true direction was about west south-west, and the trade wind below was about north. But do we deny that there is an interchange between the frigid and torrid zones? By no means; but we would show that the great controlling power is external to our atmosphere, and that the relative velocities of the earth and the atmosphere is not alone adequate to account for it. By this view the polar ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... No wonder the bewildered Clerk jumps up at last and over-turns the table, letters and all, and audibly expresses a desire to let all the winds loose upon the world at once, to revel and tear and do as they like, to bring blinding snow from the far north and drenching rains from the torrid zone, to order a select assortment of thunderstorms from the Cape of Good Hope, and a healthy tornado from the Indian Ocean. But he thinks better of it, burns all the letters, and goes quietly on ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... voice, the same yet not the same, "elevation does not always give coolness, and one may be torrid and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... it had been at the time of their first visit. The rank Carboniferous vegetation, intensely, vividly green, was motionless in the still, hot, heavy air; the living nightmares inhabiting that primitive world were lying in the cooler depths of the jungle, sheltered from the torrid rays of that strange and ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... Fifth Avenue, of Capitol City, that smoky illuminant of our great central levels, but although it esteems itself an established cosmopolitan thoroughfare, it is still provincial enough to be watchful; and even in its torrid languor took some note of the ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... with his mother on the porch, or under the trees, lying sprawled out like a boy, resting at times with sweet forgetfulness of the whole world, but feeling a dull pain whenever he remembered the stern, silent man pitching hay in the hot sun on the torrid ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... extreme of sweetness pressed out beneath the torrid sunbeams as under flaming hoofs. Lucina passed between the wilting ranks and flattened beds of flowers, and the breath of them in her face was like the rankest sweetness of love, when its delicacy, even for itself, is all gone. The pungent odor of box was like a shameless call from the street. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... delightful valleys below these sullen hills. In the dry season their torrents are stony bridle-paths, with only two or three inches of water, along which the traveller can pass from the flourishing plantations, where all the forms of a torrid vegetation are displayed, into this upper region of decay. The transition is sudden and unpleasant. Everything below is stately, exuberant: the sugar-cane, the cotton-tree, the coffee-shrub are suggestive of luxury; the orange and lemon shine through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... Bear in mind, though, that neither the cold of winter nor the heat of summer, in northern Arizona, are as frigid or as torrid as the readings of the thermometer may seem to indicate. The cold or heat is not felt to such an extreme as in the East. A minimum of humidity is the basic reason for this wide difference between, for example, the July or January ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... all very well," said Hatteras, who had not yet spoken, "and I'm much obliged to the doctor for his information; but we are talking as if we had to endure torrid heats. Would it not be wiser to talk about the cold, to know to what we are exposed, and what is the lowest temperature that has ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... Upington was transformed in those days. Around the Dutch Reformed Church, standing peaceful and dazzling white in the torrid sun, were tents, wagons, horses, motor-cars, signalling-parties, despatch-riders and infantry. Away over the hard red sand dunes to the north was the action zone, and from that direction every five minutes came sweating motor despatch-riders, who tore along to ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... her beauty fell flat. He evidently failed to recognise her supreme loveliness. It might be that she was the wrong type for Cuba. Every nation has its own Venus; and that far away spot beyond the torrid zone might have a somewhat barbarous idea of beauty. At any rate, Don Gomez was apparently unimpressed. And yet Lesbia flattered herself that she was looking her best to-night, and that her costume was a success. She wore a white satin gown, short in the skirt, for the luxury of freedom in ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... York came along duly, and Flint clambered into it as quickly as the impediment of his luggage permitted. He stowed away his belongings in the car-rack,—his bag, umbrella, and the overcoat which seemed a sarcasm upon the torrid heat of the car. A flat, square package which formed part of his luggage he treated with more respectful courtesy, giving it the window-seat, and watching with care lest it slip from the position in which he had ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... burrowing in this beastly world that isn't a world, with its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside that torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all these things that are chasing us now, beastly men of leather—insect men, that come out of a nightmare! After all, they're right! What business have we here smashing them and disturbing their world! For all we know the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... and improved in every way. As regards climate, it is in winter the coldest spot in all Siberia, the frost often exceeding 40 deg. of Reaumur; the average heat of summer is not beyond 16 deg., though there are periods at which it is as hot as in the torrid zone. The public buildings are well constructed, and kept in excellent order. There is an ancient citadel of wood, built by the Cossacks nearly two hundred years ago, which still forms a strong and good defence; ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... through these channels which his Providence selected. Look abroad, my hearers, upon this great land, with its spreading population. See what a country is yours,—washed by two oceans, and stretching from the arctic to the torrid zone. Note its immense resources; its mountains reaching to the skies, its vallies nestling in the bosom of sunshine, its rivers on which a nation's traffic may be borne, and its lakes on which the navies ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... is known to frequent, being so arranged that the carcass swings a foot or so above the surface of the stream at high water level, the end of the rattan being planted in the bank. Lured by the smell of the bait, which in that torrid climate quickly acquires a bouquet which can be detected a mile to leeward, the crocodile is certain sooner or later to thrust its long snout out of the water and snap at the odoriferous bundle dangling so temptingly overhead, the slack line offering no resistance until the bait has ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... river as himself. Nobody can have any wish to undervalue the adventurous gallantry of Mr. G. Cumming. But, in the single case of the Cape lion, there is an unintentional advantage taken from the traditional name of lion, as though the Cape lion were such as that which ranges the torrid zone.] ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... mid-July. The sea was glassily calm, while the sun, a mere molten blot in the haze overhead, whose heat was unmitigated by the least suspicion of a breeze, was still sufficiently powerful to make it most uncomfortably warm. Altogether the torrid clamminess of the atmosphere, and its distinct earthy flavour, reminded one irresistibly of ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... time, she feels an unconquerable sense of lassitude. For the first time, her feet begin to fail her. For the first time, she, who traversed, with firm and equal footsteps, the moving lava of torrid deserts, while whole caravans were buried in drifts of fiery sand—who passed, with steady and disdainful tread, over the eternal snows of Arctic regions, over icy solitudes, in which no other human being could live—who had been spared by the devouring flames ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... old Scotia's bleak domains, Far dearer than the torrid plains Where rich ananas blow! Farewell, a mother's blessing dear! A brother's sigh! a sister's tear! My Jean's heart-rending throe! Farewell, my Bess! tho' thou'rt bereft Of my parental care, A faithful brother I have left, My part in him thou'lt share! Adieu ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... regard their health should be careful to adapt their clothing to the state of the climate, and the season of the year. Whatever be the influence of custom, there is no reason why our clothing should be such as would suit an inhabitant of the torrid or the frigid zones, but of the state of the air around us, and of the country in which we live. Apparel may be warm enough for one season of the year, which is by no means sufficient for another; we ought therefore neither to put off our winter garments too soon, nor wear our ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... struck by a phenomenon in the torrid zone," says the narrative. "As long as the ships remained in these latitudes, we had had scarcely any night, and he had seen that we could write at midnight by the light of the sun. OEdidi could scarcely believe his eyes, and he assured ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... was a worthy man. You would not dislike to have some account of our last voyage, I suppose. We were 11 months from Sydney, and all that time without fresh meat or vegetables, excepting when we were at Timor, and now and then some fish, and mostly in the torrid zone, the sun continually over our head, and the thermometer at 85, 86, and 89. The ship's company was so weakened by the immense heat that when we were to the southward they were continually ill of the dysentery; nay, nine of them died, besides ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... in England, Lord Sheffield, regarded his prayer and sent him a hogshead of "best old Madeira" and a tierce, containing six dozen bottles of "finest Malmsey," and at the same time wrote: "You will remember that a hogshead is on his travels through the torrid zone for you.... No wine is meliorated to a greater degree by keeping than Madeira, and you latterly appeared so ravenous for it, that I must conceive you wish to have a stock."[141] Gibbon's devotion to Madeira ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... this sort are not confined to the wilds of Africa and Asia or the torrid deserts of Australia and the New World. They have been practised in the cool air and under the grey skies of Europe. There is a fountain called Barenton, of romantic fame, in those "wild woods of Broceliande," ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... held his mistletoe; There, for the scorched son of the sand, coiled bright, The torrid snake was hissing sharp and low; And there the Western savage paid ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... in the long torrid days of that summer there seemed time for neither anxiety nor disappointment. Every minute of her eighteen waking hours was spent in keeping the children washed, dressed, and good-humoured. She thought of herself so little that it never occurred ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... mass of gas and not a solid body, there would be nothing incredible in the supposition that spots are occasionally endowed with movements of their own like ships on the ocean. It seems, however, from the facts before us that the different zones on the sun, corresponding to what we call the torrid and temperate zones on the earth, persist in rotating with velocities which gradually decrease from the equator towards the poles. It seems probable that the interior parts of the sun do not rotate as if the whole were a rigidly connected mass. The mass of ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... countries. The Boleti constitute the only exception to this rule, since they select the temperate and frigid zones for their special abode, and some of them at times find their way to the higher regions of the Alps. No one can describe the luxuriance of the torrid zone in Polypori and Trametes, genera of Hymenomycetes, which flourish beneath the shade of the virgin forests, where perpetual moisture and heat promote their vegetation and give rise to an infinite variety of forms. But though the genus ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... Osmanli Baths in Cork Street four or five recumbent individuals, in a state of moist nudity and self-respecting inertia, were smoking cigarettes or making occasional pretence of reading damp newspapers. A glass wall with a glass door shut them off from the yet more torrid regions of the further swelter chambers; another glass partition disclosed the dimly-lit vault where other patrons of the establishment had arrived at the stage of being pounded and kneaded and sluiced by Oriental-looking ...
— When William Came • Saki
... and wind alone! The terrors of the torrid zone, The indiscriminate cyclone, A man might parry; But only faith, or "triple brass," Can help the "outward-bound" to pass Safe through that eastward-faring class ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... ready access, will long be the land of promise to travelers expatriated in search of health. But if ever the ancients had reached this Andean valley, they would have located here the Elysian Fields, or the seat of "the blessed, the happy, and long-lived" of Anacreon.[34] No torrid heat enervates the inhabitant of this favored spot; no icy breezes send him shivering to the fire. Nobody is sun-struck; nobody's buds are nipped by the frost. Stoves and chimneys, starvation and epidemics, are unknown. It is never either spring, summer, or autumn, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... unconvincing; it was like a story told without the "vital impulse." Always had these plains blistered under this July sun; always had the spots of alkali made the only whiteness; and the dry harsh snarl and snap of the grasshoppers' wings had pricked this torrid silence through ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... ways, and dragged him down, riches and all. Bed of disease, secret-place of the unclean, and graveyard of the seas; yet, this yellow-breasted fiend, ancient in devil-lore, can smile innocently as a child at the morning sun, and beguile the torrid stars ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... against a centaur; she can bring down a stag without stopping her horse. Her body never perspires; it inhales the fire of the atmosphere, and lives in water under pain of not living at all. Her love is African; her desires are like the whirlwinds of the desert—the desert, whose torrid expanse is in her eyes, the azure, love-laden desert, with its changeless skies, its cool and starry nights. What a contrast to Clochegourde! the east and the west! the one drawing into her every drop of moisture for her own nourishment, ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... through which we are passing on this torrid forenoon—"They mend this road with lime, the dirty devils!" The road has become blinding—a long-drawn cloud of dessicated chalk and dust that rises high above our columns and powders us as we go. Faces turn red, and shine as though varnished; some of the full-blooded ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Where thou art is clime for me. Let them sail for Porto Rique, Far-off heats through seas to seek; I will follow thee alone, Thou animated torrid-zone! Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer, Let me chase thy waving lines; Keep me nearer, me thy hearer, Singing over ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... Canadians will work for nobody but themselves. Black Slaves are certainly the only people to be depended upon, but it is necessary, I imagine they should be born in one or other of our Northern Colonies, the Winters here will not agree with a Native of the torrid zone, pray therefore if possible procure for me two Stout Young fellows, who have been accustomed to Country Business, and as I shall wish to see them happy, I am of opinion there is little felicity without a Communication with the Ladys, you may buy for each ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... numerous, those fewer who beneath The torment lay, but louder in their grief. O'er all the sand fell slowly wafting down Dilated flakes of fire, as flakes of snow On Alpine summit, when the wind is hush'd. As, in the torrid Indian clime, the son Of Ammon saw, upon his warrior band Descending, solid flames, that to the ground Came down." CARY'S Dante, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... to hail that last morning of the great council, and beamed with torrid tolerance upon the ceremony of kindling the greatest of the fires. On this morning Colonel Clark did not sit alone, but was surrounded by men of weight,—by Monsieur Gratiot and other citizens, Captain Bowman and the Spanish ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... what they would say to us? Was it weakness and ignorance that made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or me? She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned trance, from which she roused ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... animals peculiar to the torrid zone have been found in the north of Siberia, and on the banks of the river Ohio. Plants have been found in the fossil state in the interior of Germany, which demand the present climate of Hindostan for their production. (Cabanis, "Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme", volume ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... The torrid summer heat came imperceptibly, or it could never have been borne by white men. It changed the lives of the fugitives, making them partly nocturnal in habit. The nights had the balmy coolness of spring, and would have been ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... single move—speak a single word—and you are food for the buzzards!" came a whisper from the bush that well might chill his blood. "You know this rifle—and you know me!" And in the negro's face shone a persuasive glitter of the old, untamable, torrid ferocity of his ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... walk at Christmas? What seduction hath Yule Tide for these phantastic fellows, that it lures them from their warm fireplaces? Is it that the cool snow is grateful after the fervours of their torrid zone, where even the pyrometer would fail to record the temperature? Is it that Dickens is responsible for the season, and that Marley's ghost has set the fashion among the younger spooks? The ghost of Hamlet's father was not so timed: he walked in all weathers. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... a depth of azure in her eyes that looked ocean-deep into an interior soul; she had softly purplish windings of hair around a low, cool brow, that said, "There are no torrid thoughts in me." And yet I always felt that there was an equator in Sophie's soul, only no mortal could find it. Looking at her, as thus she stood, I forgot that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... hardly put pen to paper since I came here. I never could endure heat; it always laid me flat. Yesterday there was a let-up to the torrid zone, and to-day it is comparatively cool. Yesterday the mother of our pastor here got her release. I cried for joy, for she has been a great sufferer, and had longed to die. What a mystery death is! I went in to see how she was, and she had just breathed ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... palm-tree, seem to thrive best when most abused. Men who have stood up bravely under great misfortune for years are often unable to bear prosperity. Their good fortune takes the spring out of their energy, as the torrid zone enervates races accustomed to a vigorous climate. Some people never come to themselves until baffled, rebuffed, thwarted, defeated, crushed, in the opinion of those around them. Trials unlock their virtues; defeat is ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... day on her red, red mouth (Cats, cradles and trilobites! Love is the master!) Too utterly torrid, a sweet, spicy South (Of compositae, fairest the Aster.) Stars shone on our kisses—the moon blushed warm (Ursa major or minor, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... American spring. Men tell me they have seen in a single week the snows disappear, ice break in the streams, the grass spring up, and the trees beginning to bud. Nature adapts herself to all her conditions. In the Arctic as in the Torrid zone she fixes her compensations and makes her laws for the best good ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... the air, against the inundations of the peopling of any country or water, against the fire of volcanoes, of the world. In this state of natural against the intemperance of frigid liberty, society will be our first and torrid zones, against the sterility thought. A thousand motives will of the earth which, refuses him aliment, excite them thereto. The strength of or its baneful fecundity, which one man is so unequal to his wants, makes poison spring up beneath his and his mind ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... statutes called for no state election in Indiana. For every one knows that there is no hour of the day in any year when politics wholly cease from agitating the waters of the Wabash: somewhere some one is always dropping in a pebble to see how far the ripple will widen. In the torrid first days of September the malfeasance of the treasurer of an Ohio River county afforded the Republican press an opportunity to gloat, the official in question being, of course, a Democrat, and a prominent member of ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... touch with the movement of German thought, and followed the German idealists in placing Aesthetic in a sort of middle kingdom, a temperate zone, between the glacial, inhabited by the Esquimaux of thought, and the torrid, dwelt in by the giants of action. He dethroned the Beautiful, and put Aesthetic in its place, for the Beautiful is but the first moment; the later ones are the Comic, the Humorous, and the Dramatic. His fertile imagination found metaphors and similes in everything: for instance, he called the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... An English gentleman, unquestionably in the highest sense of the word, was Sir Jasper Coleman; a true type of that class who, from the time of the Norman conquest to the present day, whether beneath the Torrid or Frigid Zone's; on the bloody battlefield, or launching their thunders on the billows of the white-crested main, nobly upheld the honor of their country's flag, whose heroic deeds and honorable names have been handed down ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... who, when torrid Summer's sickly glare Beat down upon the city's parched walls, Sat him within a room scarce 8 by 9, And, with tongue hanging out and panting breath, Perspiring, pierced by pangs of prickly heat, Wrote variations of the seaside joke We all do know and always loved ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... life of Saul—at that time probably a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim—was his conversion to Christianity, as sudden and unexpected as it was profound and lasting, while on his way to Damascus on the errand already mentioned. The sudden light from heaven which exceeded in brilliancy the torrid midday sun, the voice of Jesus which came to the trembling persecutor as he lay prostrate on the ground, the blindness which came upon him—all point to the supernatural; for he was no inquirer after truth ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing undiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of understanding life. The social changes desired by the various assailants of the old order are only the expression of a deeper change in moral idea, and the drift of the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... abroad either enjoy only the short period of one summer, or else doze away the cold uncomfortable months in profound slumbers; but these, residing as it were in a torrid zone, are always alert and merry—a good Christmas fire is to them like the heats of the dog-days. Though they are frequently heard by day, yet is their natural time of motion only in the night. As soon as it grows dusk, the chirping ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... the pulsing heart of the land, living still though so many rules and rulers have risen and fallen beside it, their pomps and glories drifting like flotsam dawn the river to the eternal ocean that is the end of all—and the beginning. Dead civilizations strew its banks, dreaming in the torrid sunshine of glories that were—of blood-stained gold, jewels wept from woeful crowns, nightmare dreams of murder and terror; dreaming also of heavenly beauty, for the Lord Buddha looks down in moonlight ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... Moslem doctors themselves, the sun poured down sheets of liquid flame upon the ground and kept the sea and the rivers boiling day and night with the fiery heat. So any sailors would of course be boiled alive as soon as they got near to the Torrid Zone. ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... conditions of growth are less powerful in winter, when the temperature is ten degrees lower, and the fall of rain small. At the same time, there is more sunshine to impart those aromatic qualities which are so much relished by smokers of tobacco. In Virginia the torrid heat and thunder showers during the summer months are by no means favorable for developing the mild aroma of a good smoking leaf. Such atmospheric conditions are better suited for cotton and Indian corn than tobacco, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... upon the bushes that follow the windings of the steep ravine. Only six weeks to frost! Only six weeks to the time for the unbottling of the year's vintage and the exchange of tea for sparkling wine. Hasten forward, then, oh, days of radiant life and sparkling weather! We are tired of torrid waves and flies; ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... cretaceous formation is still extant. It would be just as true to nature to say that the tertiaries are continued in the tropics, on account of the similarity of the miocene mammalia to those of the torrid zone. ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... in name but in fact. Its area, including Tasmania, is almost 3,000,000 square miles, which is about the area of the United States exclusive of Alaska, and only about one fourth less than the area of the continent of Europe. Fully two fifths of this area lie within the torrid zone, and of the rest, even in Victoria, the part farthest from the equator, the climate is so warm that it corresponds with that of Spain, southern France, and Italy. But over so vast a territory great differences of climate must ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... thoroughfares. No collisions of any kind took place; no ill humour was visible. The Republicans seemed to enjoy the jokes and squibs and flaunting mottoes of the Democrats; and when a Republican banner appeared with the legend, "No frigid North, no torrid South, no temperate East, no Sackville West," nobody appeared to relish it more than the hard-hit Democrat. The Cleveland cry of "Four, four, four years more" was met forcibly and effectively with the simple adaptation, "Four, four, four months more," which proved ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... home as the Derby artist covets. The Ohio is here about half-a-mile wide, but high-pitched voices of people on the opposite bank are plainly heard across the smooth sounding-board; and in the quiet evening air comes to us the "chuck-chuck" of oars nearly a mile away. Following a torrid afternoon, with exasperating headwinds, this cool, fresh atmosphere, in the long twilight, is inspiring. Overhead is the slender streak of the moon's first quarter, its reflection shimmering in ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... pine Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast Of some great ammiral, were but a wand— He walked with, to support uneasy steps Over the burning marle, not like those steps On Heaven's azure; and the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire. Nathless he so endured, till on the beach Of that inflamed sea he stood, and called His legions—Angel Forms, who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of his Road, and makes him wander from his Subject for a Page together. I remember a young Fellow, of this Turn, who having said by Chance that his Mistress had a World of Charms, thereupon took Occasion to consider her as one possessed of Frigid and Torrid Zones, and pursued her from the one Pole to the other. I shall conclude this Paper with a Letter written in that enormous Style, which I hope my Reader hath by this time set his Heart against. The Epistle hath heretofore received great Applause; but after what hath been ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in angry sort, A scowl upon his forehead, Relieved his chest, of wrath possessed, In words distinctly torrid; His brows were raised, his eyes they blazed, His ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... In the present torrid state of the weather, can the Oriental craftsmanship lately introduced here be properly termed ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... there lived a Creole trader of some wealth in the little town of Araure, in the province of Barinas, upon the outskirts of the Llanos. Don Jose had a stalwart son, aged about sixteen, whom he had trained to active usefulness amid the monotonous ease of the torrid little municipality. Young Jose Antonio had received, it is true, only a scanty education, but he could sign his name, could verify a calculation, and had a shrewd, quick head for business. The doctors-of-law, tolerably numerous even in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... steamer twice, the letters being mailed from Plymouth; then he wrote once from London, once from Paris; later again from Switzerland, where he had found it cooler, he said, than anywhere else during that torrid summer. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... thunder-caps spotted across the brilliant, sunny sky. Gaspier and gaspier in each lulling tree-top, in each hushing bird-song, in each drooping grass-blade, the whole torrid earth seemed to be sucking in its breath as if it meant never, never ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... general temperature, this sense is relative and is much modified by habit, for what is cold to an inhabitant of the torrid zone would be warm to one accustomed to a very ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... men performed the feats they did, wandering over vast and unknown oceans, visiting unknown coasts with iron-bound shores, beset with sunken reefs, subsisting on food not fit for human beings, suffering from scurvy caused by salted diet and rotten biscuit, with a short allowance of water, in torrid zones, and liable to be attacked and killed by hostile natives, it is difficult for us to conceive. They suffered all the hardships it is possible to imagine upon the sea, and for what? for fame, for glory? That their names and achievements might be handed down to us; and this seems to have ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... After the visit of my father's friends, we were not so unhappy, and yet enjoyed some tranquillity in our humble cottage. He bought a barrel of wine, and two of flour, to support us during the rainy season or winter, a period so fatal to Europeans who inhabit the torrid zone. ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors and magazines to don summer covers, it seemed to Lilly that somewhere an interim too subtle for mortal eyes must have occurred, because suddenly there came a very torrid day in September, the fourteenth, to be exact, when the little apartment in West End Avenue stood denuded, stripped to a few huddled trunks, and Zoe's dressing table, chair, piano, and desk ready to be carted out to the little sea-view room that awaited her ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... pictures were thrown upon an immense canvas, were marvellously realistic, and were so much admired by the great audience, which overflowed the large lecture hall, that the word demonstrative does not describe their enthusiasm. But the lecture! Description, experience, suffering, adventure, courage, torrid heat, wild beasts, poisonous insects, venomous serpents, half-civilized peoples, thirst,—almost enough of torture to justify the use of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner in illustration,—and yet a perpetual, quiet, rollicking, jubilant humor, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... of the torrid zone are thus denominated from their shadow being turned one part of the year to the north and ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... into the world's ends, Lover of roadside hazard, roadside friends, Loiterer oft by upland farms to gaze On ample prospects, lost in glimmering haze At noon, or where down odorous dales twilit, Filled with low thundering of the mountain stream, Over the plain where blue seas border it The torrid ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... Queensland the Italian colonists are said to stand the heat better than the English, and Mr. Roosevelt, among other items of good advice which he bestowed so liberally on the European nations, advised us to populate the torrid parts of Australia with immigrants from the Latin races. In Natal the English families who are settled in the country are said to be enervated by the climate; and on the high plateaux of the interior our countrymen find it necessary to pay periodical ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... dear pledge, is pure and bright, As in that well-remember'd night, When first thy mystic braid was wove, And first my Agnes whisper'd love. Since then, how often hast thou press'd The torrid zone of this wild breast, Whose wrath and hate have sworn to dwell With the first sin which peopled hell; A breast whose blood's a troubled ocean, Each throb the earthquake's wild commotion!—O, if such clime thou canst endure, Yet ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... he pushed on, having a general idea of the direction he should take. It was a week before he reached Loreto, a week of loneliness, hunger, thirst, and torrid monotony. A week, too, of thought and bitterness of spirit. In spite of his love, which never cooled, and his courage, which never quailed, Nature, in her guise of foul and crooked hag, mocked at earthly happiness, at human hope, ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... Persians wavered, having been never very fierce; and at last, no longer able to support the heat of their armour, they retreated in haste to their city, which was near: they were pursued by our soldiers, weary as they were with having fought in those torrid plains from daybreak to sunset; and we, pressing close on their heels, drove them, with their choicest generals, Pigranes, the Surena, and Narses, right up to the walls of Ctesiphon, inflicting many wounds on ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... steps On Heaven's azure, and the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... manhood till the shadow of death falls upon him; and while his moral and physical structure adapts itself to the incessant vicissitudes of his being, he imagines himself the same. The same in sunshine and in tempest—in the temperate and the torrid zone—in sickness and in health—in joy and sorrow—at school and in the camp or senate—still, still he is the same. His passions change, his pleasures alter; what once filled him with rapture, is now indifferent, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... mingled with the twittering and chirping of the birds, as they flew from spray to spray. The air was fresh, even to keenness, and anyone suddenly wafted to the scene would little have imagined that he was under the torrid zone. ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Philippick Islands give a Flavour to our European Bowls. The single Dress of a Woman of Quality is often the Product of a hundred Climates. The Muff and the Fan come together from the different Ends of the Earth. The Scarf is sent from the Torrid Zone, and the Tippet from beneath the Pole. The Brocade Petticoat rises out of the Mines of Peru, and the Diamond Necklace out ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... shall nurse the Nurses? When the strain Of ministry on India's torrid plain Brings the fatigue that, long-neglected, kills, They'll need, as health-resorts whereto to send, For rest restorative, the soldiers' friend, Homes in ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... the universal use of close stoves, so necessary in the extremity of the winters. Mr S's implication, that because negroes have perfect teeth, therefore so should the whites, is another error. The negroes were born for, and in, a torrid clime, and there is some difference between their strong ivory masticators and the transparent pearly teeth which so rapidly decay in the eastern states, from no other cause than the variability of the climate. Besides, do the teeth of the women in the western states decay so fast? Take a ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the Torrid Zone, the two steamers proceeded to the north, obtaining a long view of Formosa, and hearing a lecture about it. Their next port of call was Shang-hai, reached by ascending the Woo-Sung. From this port they made an excursion up the Yang-tsze-Chiang, which was an exceedingly interesting trip to them. ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... droughts of more than three months' duration, and corn will not ripen in regions having cool nights. Wheat does not produce a kernel fit for flour anywhere except in the temperate zone; and the banana will not grow outside the torrid zone. ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... hot, a. torrid, sultry, fiery, scalding, scorching, grilling, broiling, tropical, candent; vehement, passionate, irascible, fervid, ardent, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the fair Beauty of your forehead! How I hate your fragrant hair! How I hate the torrid Touches of your splendid lips, And the kiss that drips ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... and yet for nine long hours of that fearful day, the air so heated that it hardly fed the lungs, and the sun blazing so pitilessly upon the log structure that a faint odor of parching wood mingled with the torrid air within the Fort, yes, for nine long hours the elder prayed, or preached, or recited aloud the deep abasement of the penitential psalms, and the wail of the prophets, proclaiming, yet deprecating, the wrath ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... choosing his way, exultantly. He did not watch the North now; the quiet old dream of content was gone; his thick blood throbbed and surged with passions of which you and I know nothing: he had a lost life to avenge. His native air, torrid, heavy with latent impurity, drew him back: a fitter breath than this cold snow for the animal in his body, the demon in his soul, to triumph and wallow in. He panted, thinking of the saffron hues of the Santilla flats, of the white, stately dwellings, the men that went in and out from them, quiet, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... investigate, they found Vessons preparing a tremendous meal, hot and savoury as a victorious and penitent old man could make it. He showed in his manner that bygones were to be bygones, and night came down in peace on Undern. But it was a curious, torrid peace, like ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... 'Now, don't you stir out of this box, whatever you do. I shall be back before the end of the play. Be good and you will be happy. Is this zone torrid enough for the abandonment of great-coats, Bobs? No? Well, then, I should say you were sickening for something—mumps or measles or thrush ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... living under a torrid zone and a despotic government, are of an indolent disposition, and, it is said, require great excitement to make them work; but the real secret of their idleness is the certainty that they will not ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... calendar this is Natal's summer, when hills and veldt, refreshed by genial showers, should be green with luxurious growth of young grass, or brightened by a profusion of brilliant wild flowers. But the seasons are out of joint just now. We get days of torrid heat, bringing a plague of flies from which there is no escape, and then a sudden thunderstorm sends the temperature down to something that reminds one of chill October among English moorlands. The sun hides its face abashed behind a misty veil, but the flies remain. Drizzling rain, with white ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... move out or fight, and not even Putnam believed they would retreat from their snug quarters in Boston town. He knew well what was coming, and was not at all surprised to see, gathering beneath the blazing morning sun of the torrid day that had succeeded to a sultry night, the thousands of redcoats, armed and equipped ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... complaint, even to Simon. The outburst that followed Lounsbury's return was her first and last. She questioned now if her suffering justified a lament. In this, she resembled her mother. A woman, coming to the section-house one torrid day, remarked wonderingly that Mrs. Lancaster gave "nary a whimper." The latter looked up with a smile. "I don't think I'm sick enough," she said. "Other people, worse off, have a right to groan." Dallas, certain that Marylyn's heartache was the keener, would not be behindhand ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... to systematic views, are not only suited to please the imagination, p 28 but may also, when properly considered, indicate the grades of the impressions of which I have spoken, from the uniformity of the sea-shore, or the barren steppes of Siberia, to the inexhaustible fertility of the torrid zone. If we were even to picture to ourselves Mount Pilatus placed on the Schreckhorn,* or the Schneekoppe of Silesia on Mont Blanc, we should p 29 not have attained to the height of that great Colossus of the Andes, the Chimborazo, whose height is twice that of ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... whole bunch of them," declared the reckless Bobby. "There's one torrid, two temperate, two frigid, and ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... it, swarthy Arab chiefs have encamped under it; it has threaded the narrow streets of Damascus—that city the most beautiful—on the backs of gaunt gray dromedaries; it has crossed the seas,—and all for you, if you take it, this product of desert freedom, torrid ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... The heat was torrid, the noon ardors still imprisoned between the slanting walls. Presently she sat back on her heels, and with an earthy hand pushed the moist hair from her forehead. The movement brought her head up, and her wandering eyes, roving in morose inspection, turned to the cleft's ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... went away, he took with him the prescription for the tonic and gave the doctor his solemn word of honour that he would straightway telephone for beef and beer. He kept his word so well, and so clever had been the doctor's diagnosis that Reed Opdyke, flat on his back through all the torrid heat of summer, felt moved to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... take their bits in their mouths, and go sideways some of the time, but can be managed by a sensible, affectionate hand, and with her other hand at the same time she can carry her principles aloft, wavin' in every domestic breeze, frigid or torrid, plain to be seen ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... Mula and went to work. His sector was the Santa Magdalena, a scrap of bald-headed and desolate mountains, steep but not high, and so torrid in the afternoons that it was said that the old lava sometimes began to writhe and flow again from the sun's ...
— Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas • Raphael Aloysius Lafferty
... Peleides' son. That bard, his country's ornament and pride, Who e'en with Maro might the bays divide: Far worthier he, thy glories to rehearse, And paint thy deeds in his immortal verse. We live, alas! where the bright god of day, Full from the zenith whirls his torrid ray: Beneath the rage of his consuming fires, All fancy melts, all eloquence expires. Yet may you deign accept this humble song, Tho' wrapt in gloom, and from a faltering tongue; Tho' dark the stream on which the tribute ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the general struggle for the harvest. The Atlantic roar hides all minor pipings. The breed of fisher-folk from these deep-sea voyagings consist of the toughest specimens of human endurance. All other dangers which lure men to venture everything for excitement or for fortune, the torrid heat or arctic cold, the battle against man or beast, the desert or the jungle, all land adventures are as nothing compared to the daring of the hourly existence of the heroic souls whose lives are cast upon ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... here also, and not merely by scores as battle captives, but alarmingly near, in arms and by thousands. Terrible Ship Island, occupied by the boys in gray and fortified, anathematized for its horrid isolation and torrid sands, had at length been evacuated, and on New Year's Day twenty-four of the enemy's ships were there disembarking bluecoats on its gleaming white dunes. Fair Carrollton was fortified (on those lines laid out by Hilary), and down at Camp Callender the ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... rose into view looked sad in their proper dimness. There were even now no houses to see, but only the minarets peered out from the midst of shade into the glowing sky, and bravely touched the sun. There seemed to be here no mere city, but rather a province wide and rich, that bounded the torrid waste. ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... was at hand, the season of impulse, when we obey most readily the sudden stirrings of our hearts. Even in the torrid climate of Egypt, squalls of rain passed over like stray birds of passage. Asako Barrington felt the fresh influence and the desire to do new things in new places. Hitherto she had evinced very little inclination to revisit the home of her ancestors. But on their return from ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... and the Terceras [i.e., Azores] are to Africa; and Inglaterra [England], Escocia [Scotland], Hibernia, Irlanda, Olanda [Holland], Gelanda [Iceland], and the Oreadas [Orkney] Islands, to Europe. Some of the islands of this great archipelago cross the equinoctial line, or the torrid zone, and following the coast-line of Great China and India, terminate on the north side with the islands of Japon, which extend beyond the fortieth degree; in the south the archipelago has as yet ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... glare of the tropic sun, whose torrid beams fall from heavens that glow like hot walls of brass, and beat down through an atmosphere whose faint undulations in the breath of the desert wind ebb and flow over the parched travellers, like waves of a fiery sea; under a sun that seems to grow ever ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... to make them acquainted; but nothing would have induced Dame Martina to go out of her rooms, protected to the utmost from the torrid sunshine, so she left it to Heliodora to pay the visit and give her a report of the hero's daughter. Heliodora had devoted herself heart and soul to the little heiress, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the great mountains of the Old World, which took place previous to the glacial period. One pair, or perhaps a few pairs, of those progenitors were driven away from the luxurious climate of the torrid zone to the northern half of the globe, and found their return cut off by glaciers and high mountains; in place of a comfortable life on the trees, necessity urged them to gain support from conditions less favorable to existence, and necessity, this mother of so many virtues and ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... action. But of all the consequences of the victory, none was more grateful than plenty of fresh water, after we had languished five weeks on the allowance of a purser's quart per day for each man in the Torrid Zone, where the sun was vertical, and the expense of bodily fluid so great, that a gallon of liquor could scarce supply the waste of twenty-four hours; especially as our provision consisted of putrid salt beef, to which the sailors gave the name of Irish ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... to believe, however, that there is a larger proportion of musical birds in the temperate than in the torrid zone, because in the former region there are more of those species that build low and live among the grass and shrubbery, and it is well known that the singing-birds are mostly of the latter description. In warm climates the vegetation consists chiefly of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... torrid heat of the north you can go to the cold, bleak glacial regions of the south, all in Argentine. The seasons are just the opposite from ours. July is their coldest month and the hottest time in the year is in January. The ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from "art exhibit" to dress-maker's opening. High-stepping ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... to the sandy plains, In the zone called torrid; Send her where it never rains, Where the heat is horrid. Mind that she has only flour For her daily feeding; Let her have a page an hour ...
— The Nursery, November 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 5 • Various
... rustle through the maze of their branches, if Lebanon had never been beautiful to sense, it would not now be a fit or poetic subject of allusion. And the word "Fez" would be without imaginative value if no traveller had ever felt the intoxication of the torrid sun, the languors of oriental luxury, or, like the British soldier, cried amid the dreary moralities of ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Seas, while of course there would be no need for disembarking at the Isthmus of Suez. The writers who thus curtailed Africa of its true proportions assumed another continent south of it, which, however, was in the torrid zone, and ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... its bravery, Both first itself disclose, But so high it turns, that oft it burns With the flames of a torrid nose. ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... coasting all Africa, and one part of Arabia and Persia; by taking this compass, the Indies are distant from Portugal about four thousand leagues, and the passengers are constrained to suffer twice the scorching heats of the torrid zone, in going under the equinoctial line, which divides Africa almost in two ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... Hans in the Arctic Sea or the torrid zone, or anywhere out of the Strand for that afternoon. And as if to render his discomfiture more complete, here came Mr Winter and Tom Rookwood, arm in arm, just as they reached Mrs More's door. What on ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... accomplished by an unlimited command of men and money, are the common dreams of every Nebuchadnezzar. What we know if we know anything of his intentions is that he was about to set out on a campaign against the Parthians in whose plains this prototype of Napoleon might perhaps have found a torrid Moscow. No great advance of humanity can take place without a great moral effort excited by higher moral desires. The masters of the legions can only set in action by their fiat material forces. Even these they often misdirect; ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... journey been worth it? Has the result repaid one for the cold, dirt, and privation of Persia, the torrid heat and long desert marches through Baluchistan? Perhaps not. There are some pleasant hours, however, to look back upon. Kashan, a vision of golden domes and dim, picturesque caravanserais; Ispahan, with its stately Madrassa and blue Zandarood, winding lazily through miles on ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... of September spent in torrid New York were a strange period of time to have projected itself into the calm life of Miss Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. Suddenly she found herself a cog screwed tight into a rapid-fire piece of ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... manufactured by the Government in the above list was sold at the same price, whether the Government warehouse where the goods were sold was in the most populous city of Eurasia or at a lonely fishing-station in the icy regions of the Arctic or in the torrid deserts of the Tropics. ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... and in May, 1512, Henry went down to Southampton to speed the departing fleet.[108] It sailed from Cowes under Dorset's command on 3rd June, and a week later the army disembarked on the coast of Guipuscoa.[109] There it remained throughout the torrid summer, awaiting the Spanish King's forces to co-operate in the invasion of France. But Ferdinand was otherwise occupied. Navarre was not mentioned in the treaty with Henry, but Navarre was what Ferdinand had in his mind. It was then an independent kingdom, surrounded on three sides by Spanish ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... a land of splintered peaks, of deep, dry gorges, of barren mesas burnt by the suns of a million torrid summers. The normal condition of it was warfare. Life here had to protect itself with a tough, callous rind, to attack with a swift, deadly sting. Only the ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... is reckoned the endemic Distemper of the West Indies, of the Coast of Guinea, and other Places in the Torrid Zone; but in those warm Countries it appears in a more violent Degree; makes a much more rapid Progress; and proves far more fatal than in our cooler and more temperate Climate. And it is observed to be always most frequent and most fatal where a Country is covered with Wood, or is marshy; and where ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... Herb speaking, as the radio boys and their families left the group of cottages where all had spent such an eventful and pleasant summer. Brilliant sunlight beat down on the yellow sand, but its heat was very different from the torrid rays that had kept them running to the ocean to cool off all that summer. There was a clear and sparkling appearance to the air and sky, and the wind that came sweeping over the level sands had a nip in it that made even Jimmy ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... of a red shade, floating upon the surface of the ocean, which, to those unused to such sights, are considered as indications of danger beneath. I met with two patches of this description lately in the Torrid Zone, but the captain being familiar with such instances, sailed through them without apprehension. The first consisted of myriads of small orbicular medusae, about the size of a pea, of a purple hue; the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... which we live is full of animal life. In the great forests, under the ground, on the steep mountainsides, in the depths of the oceans, rivers, streams, from the frigid north to the torrid south, in the parched deserts, are animals of every size, colour, and form, all of which are, in their general form, adapted to their peculiar places in nature. Their lives and habits undeniably demonstrate proofs of divine wisdom, intelligence, and beneficence. In fact they ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... sufficiently praise. But when the question arose whether he was not only a lyrist but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid Base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the reader should bear in mind, that what is put down in this book is but a small part and scantling of the acts of sorcery and witchcraft which have existed in human society. They have been found in all ages and countries. The torrid zone and the frozen north have neither of them escaped from a fruitful harvest of this sort of offspring. In ages of ignorance they have been especially at home; and the races of men that have left no records behind them to tell almost that they existed, have been most ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... illumined the whole ship; the sails, the spars, and the countenances of the people, all assumed a sepulchral hue, which gave her the appearance of some phantom bark, such as has appeared to the excited imagination of many a seaman in his wandering through those distant and torrid climes, whose pestilential vapours, rising from the overteeming earth, fever his blood and cut ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston |
