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Desert   /dˈɛzərt/  /dɪzˈərt/   Listen
Desert

noun
1.
Arid land with little or no vegetation.



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"Desert" Quotes from Famous Books



... extraordinary attention, such as admitting them to the table, laying napkins before them, presenting wine to them and more of that kind of thing, which they did not receive like Esop's man, but as their due and desert, insomuch that they were not content but began to hate when such civilities were not shewn them. To this familiarity and freedom succeeded another evil. As the cattle usually roamed through the woods without a herdsman, they frequently came into the corn of the Indians ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various

... it," said the King, with his most radiant smile, "none of you would desert me! I depend on your help, then; and on victory as sure."—The speech winds up with a specific passage: "The Cavalry regiment that does not on the instant, on order given, dash full plunge into the enemy, I will, directly after ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... ill-clone our foraging, too," exclaims Schmettau again and again: "Had we done it with neatness, with regularity, the Country would have lasted us twice as long. Doing it headlong, wastefully and by the rule-of-thumb, the Country was a desert, all its inhabitants fled, all its edibles consumed, before six weeks were over. Friedrich is not now himself at all; in great things or in little; what a changed Friedrich!" exclaims Schmettau, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... the gallows. A nephew of Laporte named Roland had audaciously carried it off, leaving behind a writing nailed to the gibbet. This was a challenge from Laporte to Poul, and was dated from the "Camp of the Eternal God, in the desert of Cevennes," Laporte signing himself "Colonel of the children of God who seek liberty of conscience." Poul was about to accept the challenge when he learned that the insurrection was spreading on every ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Of what they spurn, or what is never missed: Such tilth will never yield, and never could, A harvest save of coarse ingratitude. A wise good man is evermore alert, When he encounters it, to own desert; Nor is he one, on whom you'd try to pass For sterling currency mere lackered brass. For me, 'twill be my aim myself to raise Even to the flattering level of your praise; But if you'd have me always by your side, Then give ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... and form a new union or partnership. In many chemical changes the atoms divorce themselves, each forsaking its mate or mates, and seeking some newer affinity in the shape of a more congenial atom. The atoms manifest a fickleness and will always desert a lesser attraction for a greater one. This is no mere bit of imagery, or scientific poetry. It is a scientific statement of the action of atoms along the lines ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... he had finished the hearty breakfast that restored his strength, his confidence in himself and his belief that everything was about to turn out for the best, after all. Nor did his good fortune desert him, for the broad surface of the great lake was as peaceful as a mill-pond all that day; the light breeze that ruffled it was so directly in his favor that he was enabled to aid his paddle with a sail, and at sunset he was nearing the southern ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... gave his reasons—uncommonly well, I must admit. He said our men were in good spirits, and had been damped enough by the rains. The Frenchman Law might come up and join the Nawab, and then every froggy who entered our service after Chandernagore would desert and fight against us. We're so far from Calcutta 'twould be difficult to protect our communications. These were his reasons. I watched Clive while Coote was speaking; he stuck his lips together and stared at him; ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... Crowbar Brigade' advances to the devoted township, takes possession of the houses, such as they are, and, with a few turns of the crowbar and a few pulls at a rope, bring down the roof, and leave nothing but a tottering chimney, if even that. The sun that rose on a village sets on a desert; the police return to their barracks, and the people are nowhere to be found, or are vainly watching from some friendly covert for the chance of crouching once more under their ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... Passion. But in this sacrament the memorial of His Passion is given by way of food which is partaken of daily; and therefore in this respect it is represented by the manna which was given daily to the people in the desert. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... your business. Do you see that other youngster striving against a wolf with a lead pencil for weapon? It is your second son. Well, they are males, these two, and must manfully expect what they get. But do you see these four creatures with their hands cut off, thrust out into the infested desert? They are your wife and your daughters. You cut their hands off. You did it so kindly and persuasively. And that chiefly is why you are a ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett

... he went forth from the dominions of the Commander of the Faithful, under pretence of visiting certain of his kinsmen, and took with him servant nor companion, neither acquainted any with his intent, but betook himself to the road and fared on into the desert and the sandwastes, knowing not whither he went. After awhile, he fell in with travellers intending for the land of Hind [and journeyed with them]. When he came thither, he lighted down [in a city of the cities of the land and took up his abode] in one of the lodging-places; ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... till they fell on their backs when he came to the line where the desert beauty calls her Royal husband a "fatted ass." In truth, they needed something to cheer them, for the sky was burnished brass, and their goats died like flies. Simoon and sand-pillar threw down the camels, and loathsome vultures ready ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... Gorgon sisters did not know whether he was above or below them, behind or before them. On Perseus went, flying toward where Atlas stood. He flew over this place, over Libya. Drops of blood from Medusa's head fell down upon the desert. They were changed and became the deadly serpents that are on these sands and around these rocks. On and on Perseus flew toward Atlas and toward the hidden valley where the nymphs who were again to guard the magic treasures had their dwelling place. But before he came ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... water; and, like the Dutchmen in Hans Christian Andersen's story, who put on the galoches of happiness and stepped out into the Middle Ages, let us slip our feet into the sandals of imagination and step out into the desert or the jungle. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... been time to love, to weep, to pity, to enjoy; before wrath breeding wrath, and violence begetting violence, had driven out the Spirits of Tenderness and Hope. She seemed to see, to feel them—the sad Exiles!—fleeing along desert ways; and her bitter heart cried out to them—for the only—the last time. For in the great names of Love and Justice, she had let Hate loose within her, and like the lion-cub nurtured in the house, it had grown to be the soul's master and ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... thinking so myself, Swinton, as I looked at the map yesterday, when I lay in my waggon," said the Major; "so then to-morrow for a little variety; that is, a desert." ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat

... both reduced to ashes. The consuls then united their camps, where mutual congratulations took place between them and between their soldiers. Here, in the view of the two armies, Carvilius bestowed on his men commendations and presents according to the desert of each; and Papirius likewise, whose troops had been engaged in a variety of actions, in the field, in the assault of the camp, and in that of the city, presented Spurius Nautius, Spurius Papirius, his nephew, four centurions, and a company of the spearmen, with bracelets ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius

... hung upon her voice as if it had been music. Every laugh shook him out of his long misery—it appeared to be to him like new life running along the nerves of the old dead tabernacle. So might one think of a man in the desert, as he looks down into the well, with the reflection of the sun in it; the water is drunk in living light; he shakes off all the horrors of his long-borne thirst, and rises renewed and glad. It was pitiful—yea, it was pleasant too—to see how he ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... still remain manuscripts sufficient to fill two volumes; one of these will consist of his travels in Arabia, which were confined to the Hedjaz, or Holy Land of the Musulmans, the part least accessible to Christians; the fourth volume will contain very copious remarks on the Arabs on the Desert, and ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... and feeding poor scholars with the remnants from his table, is as characteristic as the more common picture of the student begging his way from one seat of learning to another, and suffering the severest privations rather than desert his studies. Yet the function of the studium as promoting a healthy circulation between the various orders of medieval society, must not ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... Many people will like him because they see in him—or they think they do—a certain happy mean. Will they not fancy they catch him taking the middle way between the unsociable French etude and the old-fashioned English "picture"? If one of these extremes is a desert, the other, no doubt, is an oasis still more vain. I have a recollection of productions of Mr. Alfred Parsons' which might have come from a Frenchman who was in love with English river-sides. I call to ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... degrees, until the last degrees were very fast, the day came, and I was tired and could sleep. And it is not, as I used to think, going home at such times, the least wonderful thing in London, that in the real desert region of the night, the houseless wanderer is alone there. I knew well enough where to find Vice and Misfortune of all kinds, if I had chosen; but they were put out of sight, and my houselessness had many miles upon miles of streets in which it could, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... "Desert my charming wife!" he replied. "Ask the hungry pauper, who turns his back upon the fragrant restaurant, if he deserts his dinner. You are as beautiful, as bright, as lovely as ever—you cannot think with what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... ordeal as this of mine who can fully understand all that human sympathy may be in that hour of darkest woe when a man, still standing on the threshold of life, finds himself alone in a world which to him has suddenly become an empty desert. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert. The club on the hill alone, from its semi-cylindrical front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard-balls. As "every one" was out of town perhaps ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James

... following many of the beaten lines of travel in the British Isles we arrived in London, where we formed our plans for traveling across Europe, Asia, and America. The most dangerous regions to be traversed in such a journey, we were told, were western China, the Desert of Gobi, and central China. Never since the days of Marco Polo had a European traveler succeeded in crossing the Chinese empire ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... prodigalities, but by the necessary measures of national defence and the politic aid which she had extended to the United Provinces and to the French Hugonots, now threatened to place her in a painful dilemma. She must either desert her allies, and suffer her navy to relapse into the dangerous state of weakness from which she had exerted all her efforts to raise it, or summon a new parliament for the purpose of making fresh demands upon the purses of her people; and this at ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... red and angry, cried: "It's nothing to me; hang him and be damned—if you don't want the truth. I'm not looking for trouble." He turned away but the prisoner called to him piteously. "Don't desert me. Find Jones or Murphy down at the long wharf. They'll identify me.... Hurry! Hurry! ... or ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... with the terror which had swooped so suddenly upon her. She had maintained her self-control admirably a few hours before in the face of frightful danger, but now in this awful silence it threatened to desert her. Desperately, determinedly, she brought it back inch by inch, till the panic in her vanished and her heart began to beat ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... it better than ever, for the others I've seen!" He frowned and shook his head. "I'm quite likely to stick to first conclusions," he finished, "and your inference is basically wrong. I do not need to look at other women to make me surer of the wonder of you. A man doesn't have to live in a desert all his life to know what thirst is, you know. And it's not bad—not bad ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... them and into the houses. If there are any yet left in Rome who can by any possibility take themselves out of it, they are not long in going. Till that moment, there has been only suffering to be borne; now, there is danger of something worse. Now, indeed, the city becomes a desert inhabited by white-faced ghosts. Now, if it be a year of cholera, the dead carts rattle through the streets all night on their way to the gate of Saint Lawrence, and the workmen count their numbers when they meet at dawn. But the bad days are not many, if ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... appeared. He was seized with deadly sickness, and insisted upon leaving the carriage, whose movements shocked his stomach and head to an insupportable degree. His companion was not void of apprehensions on his own account, but was unwilling to desert him, and endeavoured to encourage him. His efforts were vain. Though the nearest house was at the distance of some hundred yards, and though it was probable that the inhabitants of this house would refuse to accommodate one in his condition, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... caused to be enacted certain statutes and ordinances, by authority of parliaments lawfully called for that purpose." "Now, however," he continued, "we fearing that his Holyness the Pope ... having in our said cause treated us far otherwise than either respect for our dignity and desert, or the duty of his own office required at his hands, and having done us many injuries which we now of design do suppress, but which hereafter we shall be ready, should circumstances so require, to divulge ... may now proceed to acts of further injustice, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... the perfidious Learn at thy name to tremble, Nor triumph o'er the ruinous Place of thy vanished altars. Oh, brief be their days and uncertain; In the desert their wandering footsteps, Every tremulous ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... the child; always more easily won by these methods than by any severe exercise of authority. And his delight in our walks was to tell Harry of the glories of his order, of its martyrs and heroes, of its brethren converting the heathen by myriads, traversing the desert, facing the stake, ruling the courts and councils, or braving the tortures of kings; so that Harry Esmond thought that to belong to the Jesuits was the greatest prize of life and bravest end of ambition; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... at that moment that they alone were the only human living creatures on that uncanny island. A sense of desolation came upon them and made them feel as if they were far, far from human beings, buried as in the heart of a mighty desert. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish

... milieu and environment, the control and subjugation of which required faculties and abilities they did not possess, we see, as it were, ethnic children; that in the nursery, the asylum, the jail, the mountain fastnesses of earth, or the desert plains, peopled by races whose ways are not our ways, whose criteria of culture are far below ours, we have a panorama of what has transpired since, alone and face to face with a new existence, the first human beings partook of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... remarked the soldier with the black hair, 'that you are a deserter.' 'No,' replied the Exceptional Pedestrian, 'I did not desert my army; it deserted me. And now I wish to say that I have become very much interested in you all, and, if there is no objection, I should like to join your company for the present.' 'I have no objection myself,' ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton

... to leave the valley of the great southern branch of the Columbia river, to which the absence of timber, and the scarcity of water, give the appearance of a desert, to enter a mountainous region, where the soil is good, and in which the face of the country is covered with nutritious grasses and dense forest—land embracing many varieties of trees peculiar to the country, and on which the timber exhibits a luxuriance of growth unknown to ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... few inches, were spread out over a bed of yellowish white sand 600 yards wide. With the exception of one or two distant and detached groves, no timber of any kind was to be seen; and the features of the country assumed a desert character, with which the broad river, struggling for existence among the quicksands along the treeless banks, was strikingly in keeping. On the opposite side, the broken ridges assumed almost a mountainous appearance; and fording the ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... Whoever shall steal from the company, or game up to the value of a piece of eight, (piastre, translated ecu by the French,—rated by the English of that day at not quite five shillings sterling,—about a dollar,) shall be landed on a desert place, with a bottle of water, gun, powder, and lead. Whoever shall maltreat or assault another, while the articles subsist, shall receive the Law of Moses: this was the infliction of forty consecutive strokes upon the back, a whimsical memento of the dispensation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... should say that Adam, the first man, was created mortal, so that whether he had sinned or not, he would have died in the body—that is, he would have gone forth of the body, not because of the desert [or merit] of sin, but by natural ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... I exclaimed, rushing on with eager haste, like the pilgrim in the desert, towards the longed-for oasis, even fancying that I saw the shining surface through the trees. I reached the spot; I looked about; there were the rushes sure enough, and there had been the water, but it was dried-up. Oh, how thirsty I felt! I thought I might find some moisture ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston

... Climate: mostly desert; hot, dry, sunny summers (June to August) and mild, rainy winters (December to February) along coast; cold weather with snow ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... step in associated life taken by women was a simple protest against the use and abuse of power on the part of men, wrought up by fear or loathing to the point of desperation. Women, usually of rank, fled to the desert with one or two companions, and encountered unheard-of hardships rather than submit to the fate to which they had been condemned by father, brother, or some other man who could exercise authority over them. The first ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various

... sanatoriums in mountain and desert, day or night camps within and near cities, milk and egg clinics, home visiting, change of air and rest for those who are known to be tuberculous, their importance is infinitesimal compared with the protection that comes from clean, healthy environment and natural living for those not known to be ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... system. Want of time as well as a wish to see the less vaunted parts of the country took me southwestward from Battleford, over land which in many of the maps is variously marked as consisting of arid plains or as a continuation of the "American Desert." The newer maps, especially those containing the explorations of Professor Macoun, have corrected this wholly erroneous idea. For two days' march—that is to say, for about 60 or 70 miles south of Battleford—we passed over land whose excellence could ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell

... poetry at all? Some people ask that question, and for them the case may be hopeless. If the lyric sense is utterly lacking, then it is their sad lot to live in the desert of the practical world. Art is not for them: neither music nor poetry nor painting nor sculpture nor architecture; for something of the lyric impulse lives in all of these. But many ask that question who some day will see, and for them ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various

... seemed doomed to a renewal of the Moslem sway. Ibrahim Pacha landed there with the troops from Egypt in 1825. He annihilated rather than subjugated its population, and changed the country, as he himself said, into a desert waste; but at least he took possession of it, step by step, and everywhere set up ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... religious there of pure virtue, who were imitating the virtues of the dwellers in the desert. From those missions went forth our father Fray Bartolome de la Santisima Trinidad, son of the convent of Madrid. He lived much retired from intercourse with men; and when he was elected provincial, in the year one thousand seven hundred and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various

... common conflagration. On the 22d of January, 1794, he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of the National Convention: "Citizen Representatives!—A country of sixty leagues extent, I have the happiness to inform you, is now a perfect desert; not a dwelling, not a bush, but is reduced to ashes; and of one hundred and eighty thousand worthless inhabitants, not a soul breathes any longer. Men and women, old men and children, have all experienced the national vengeance, and are no more. It was a pleasure to a true republican ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... than Christianity are these customs; the megalithic monuments of the pagan witness similar practices in remote corners of the earth; rag-trees, burdened with the tattered offerings of the devout, yet stud the desert of Suez, and those who seek shall surely find some holy well or grave hard at hand in every case. To mark and examine the junction of these venerable fancies with Christian superstition is no part of our present purpose, but that ideas, pagan in their birth, have lent themselves ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... wrath. The fellow's coolness seemed never to desert him. "You are Colonel Clay!" he muttered. "You have the unspeakable effrontery to stand ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... get up to do it from the hollow of your bed here. As you were saying, the wonder about these elderly widows who keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation they fall into. If they've ever known how to cook a meal or sweep a room or make a bed, these arts desert them in the presence of their boarders. Their only aim in life seems to be preventing the escape of their victims, and they either let them get into debt for their board or borrow money from them. But why do they always have daughters, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... name as notorious, though perhaps not much more reputable, than those of your associates; but the man who, like 'the youth that fired the Ephesian dome,' aims at celebrity alone, in frequenting the purlieus of the gaming-house only 'wastes his sweetness on the desert air.' Moreover, the members of the Ebony Clubs being compelled to assume the appearance, and adopt the manners, insensibly imbibe too much of the feelings of gentlemen, to be likely to pay, to the most passive pigeon that ever submitted to rooking, the cap in hand ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... shore and will go to pieces before daylight, but I will not desert you, my boy," he said. "As I came aft I made out a rock close aboard of us, and as the masts are sure to go over we may manage to gain it if we take the proper time. I wish I could help Mynheer and the Frau, but I must look ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston

... is clear as to essentials.' JOHNSON. 'But not as to controversial points. The heathens were easily converted, because they had nothing to give up; but we ought not, without very strong conviction indeed, to desert the religion in which we have been educated. That is the religion given you, the religion in which it may be said Providence has placed you. If you live conscientiously in that religion, you may be safe. But errour is dangerous indeed, if you err when you choose a religion ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... burst upon Smith the Silent all at once, like a rainbow or a sunrise in the desert. He would never say she had been thrust upon him. She was acquired, he ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman

... Alexandrian coins. The Greeks, who had been masters of Egypt for six hundred years, either in their own name or in that of the Roman emperors, were then for the first time governed by an Asiatic. Palmyra in the desert was then ornamented with the spoils of Egypt; and travellers yet admire the remains of eight large columns of red porphyry, each thirty feet high, which stood in front of the two gates to the great temple. They speak for themselves, and tell their own history. From their material and form ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... "Disasters at Sea"; and the page contained the narrative of a shipwreck. On evidence apparently irresistible, the drowning of every soul on board the lost vessel had been taken for granted—when a remnant of the passengers and crew had been discovered on a desert island, and had been safely restored to their friends. Having read this record of suffering and suspense, Catherine looked at her mother, ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins

... abundance of them! in all the pristine splendor of fifty-three years ago, was ours upon that spring morning. This, then, was the land which in later years was called the "Great American Desert." I have now lived in Nebraska for a quarter of a century and know whereof I speak when I say that in those days the grass was as green and luxuriant as it is today; the rivers were fringed with willow green as they are today; the prairie roses, like pink stars, dotted the trail sides through ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole

... you don't know what it is you are asking. How could I give it up when it would be to break my oath and to desert my comrades? If you could see how things stand with me you could never ask it of me. Besides, if I wanted to, how could I do it? You don't suppose that the lodge would let a man go free with all ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... Thereupon Francia executed the decorations right round one part of that cloister, and finished two of the scenes, which he painted with great diligence. These are, first S. John the Baptist obtaining leave from his father Zacharias to go into the desert, and then the meeting of Christ and S. John on the way, with Joseph and Mary standing there and beholding them embrace one another. But more than this he did not do, on account of the return of Andrea, who then went on to finish the rest ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari

... of the year, at exactly eight o'clock, a new and almost tenantless house in a remote quarter of Paris, echoed to cries, calls, merry laughter, ringing clear in the desert of the staircase: ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... in the distance as if fire had been set to many buildings; but apart from these marching troops there was not a living soul to be seen. The ruins and the houses had become mere landmarks and the city a veritable desert. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... as still another offence. He was neglecting her, and she would not stand it. Like a flash of inspiration it darted into her head that she would free herself from this entanglement while there was still time. It would seem unwomanly to desert a man in the hour of misfortune, but she would act at once, and not wait until the worst happened. She would tell her mother that she was not happy; and though Mrs Rendell might disapprove her past promise, she would never persuade her to keep it in the circumstances. Yes, yes! she would ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... his long and peaceful but brilliant reign. Then he dwelt on his death and burial. They had made a mummy of him, of course. Somewhere that very night, at that very instant, his lifeless form reposed beneath the desert sands. Perhaps the face had changed but little during the centuries. He, Bunker Bean, lay there in royal robes, hands folded upon his breast, as lamenting subjects ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... it shall be given to thee. Wilt thou ruin a city or raise a capital or kill a king? Whatso thou seekest, I will do for thee, sans fail." The Wazir pointed to Ma'aruf and said, "Take up yonder wretch and cast him down in the most desolate of desert lands, where he shall find nothing to eat nor drink, so he may die of hunger and perish miserably, and none know of him." Accordingly, the Jinni snatched him up and flew with him betwixt heaven and earth, which when Ma'aruf saw, he made sure ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... up in the shimmering white of the desert sky an eagle swam on slow wing, shaping his winding course toward the timber clump that fringed a river. Besides the eagle, the pony, and Calumet, no living thing stirred in the desert or above it. In the shade of a ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... here, and until he reached near home, was, indeed, solemn-looking and lonely, not a habitation except the haunted house being visible for upwards of two miles, he proceeded on his way, thinking of his interview with Grace Davoren. The country on each side of him was nearly a desert; a gray ruin, some of whose standing and isolated fragments assumed, to the excited imagination of the terrified peasants as they passed it by night, the appearance of supernatural beings, stood to the left, in the centre of an antiquated church-yard, in which there ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden intrusion of this old savage. They looked more secular and critical as then listened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round his loins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert. After that there was a general sound of pages being turned as if they were in class, and then they read a little bit of the Old Testament about making a well, very much as school boys translate an easy passage from the Anabasis when they have shut up their French grammar. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... particulars, and diffuse its attention to distinct objects. The enumeration of the choughs and crows, the samphire-man, and the fishers, counteracts the great effect of the prospect, as it peoples the desert of intermediate vacuity, and stops the mind in the rapidity of its descent through ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson

... to hum with secret and, to judge by the pitch of its rumour, well-nigh panic activity. One divined a scurrying as of rats about to desert a sinking ship. Untoward events had thrown this establishment into a state of excited confusion: their nature Lanyard could not surmise, but their conjunction with his designs was exasperatingly inopportune. To search this place and find ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... his ears. He roams the city from the Lateran to the Tiber, from the Tiber to the Vatican, finding himself now and then before some building once familiar in another aspect, losing himself perpetually in unprofitable wastes made more monotonous than the sandy desert by the modern builder's art. Where once he lingered in old days to glance at the river, or to dream of days yet older and long gone, scarce conscious of the beggar at his elbow and hardly seeing the ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... precipices of Dunnet, with their broad decaying fronts of red and yellow; but in vain may we ply hammer and chisel among them: not a scale, not a plate, not even the stain of an imperfect fucoid appears. We have reached the upper boundary of the Lower Old Red formation, and find it bordered by a desert devoid of all trace of life. Some of the characteristic types of the formation re-appear in the upper deposits; but though there is a reproduction of the original works in their more characteristic passages, if I may so speak, many of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... is so true to life that I feel as if I had known her; and thus the sort of comparison between her and Marguerite gave me an unusual inclination to read it, and my indulgence passed into pity, almost into a kind of love for the poor girl to whom I owed the volume. Manon died in the desert, it is true, but in the arms of the man who loved her with the whole energy of his soul; who, when she was dead, dug a grave for her, and watered it with his tears, and buried his heart in it; while Marguerite, a sinner like Manon, and perhaps converted ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils

... saying to himself "It won't do. It's playing it too low down to try and get that child, when I know that, but for her trouble, I shouldn't have a chance." He had never had much opinion of his looks, but now he seemed to himself absurdly old and dried-up in this desert of a London. He loathed the Office job to which they had put him, and the whole atmosphere of officialdom. Another year of it, and he would shrivel like an old apple! He began to look at himself anxiously, taking stock of his physical assets now that he had this dream of young beauty. He would ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... alarming manner in which he had been awakened from it, had produced a decided change for the worst in him. As he slowly recovered what little sense he had left to make use of, all his talkativeness and cordiality seemed to desert him. He shook his head mournfully; refused to eat or drink anything; declared with sullen solemnity, that his digestion was "a perfect wreck in consequence of his keeping drunken society;" and insisted on going home directly, in spite ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... THE WAR ZONE, describes their trip toward the Persian Gulf. They go by way of the River Euphrates and pass the supposed site of the Garden of Eden, and manage to connect themselves with a caravan through the Great Syrian Desert. After traversing the Holy Land, where they visit the Dead Sea, they arrive at the Mediterranean port of Joppa, and their experiences thereafter within the war zone ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... showed their valor in the way of mischief, plotting bold things, but never doing them. They encouraged soldiers to desert; occasionally they assassinated an enrolling officer; they maintained communications with the Confederates, to whom they gave information and occasionally also material aid; they were tireless in caucus work and wire-pulling; in Indiana, in 1863, they got sufficient control of the legislature ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse

... a province at the verge of the Desert, and lying between north-west and north. It has an extent of sixteen days' journey, and belongs to the Great Kaan, and contains numerous towns and villages. There are three different races of people in it—Idolaters, Saracens, and some Nestorian Christians.[NOTE ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... 'gainst the world's gray Prime, Lost in some desert, far from Time, Where noiseless Ages, gliding through, Have only sifted sands and dew, Were not more lone to one who first Upon its giant silence burst, Than this strange quiet, where the tide Of life, upheaved on either ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... be the one to desert me," said Rose with a reproachful look, thinking it best not to relent too soon, though she was quite ready to do it when she saw how sincerely ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... remained. A long dark statue, he peered through the woven grasses steadily, admiringly; with an instinctive companionship, a mute forbearance, that was haunting in its revelation. Lonely as death itself were the surrounding unbroken prairies. Lonely as a desert of sand, their absolute isolation. Lonely beyond comparison, beyond the suggestion of language, was that silent human in their midst ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... ring; he no longer heard it. Let the drone of prayers and praises rise in a monotonous music by day and by night; he no longer had the will to heed them. For there was another music in his ears. Soon it would be in his heart. Imagine a Trappist suddenly transported from the desert of his long silence to a gay plage on which a brass band was playing. Julian was that Trappist in mind. And though he knew Cuckoo was sobbing at his back, and though his heart held a sense of pity for her trouble, yet ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... plunged down into a gorge, and followed for miles, crossing and re-crossing, a mountain brook, between cliffs of red rocks, by fields of mauve anemones, in the shadow and fragrance of pines; till suddenly, after hours of rough going, I was confronted by a notice, set up, apparently, in the desert: ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... are two cages. In one is a lion, which my father's slaves brought from the desert of Ninavah; in the other ...
— The Madman • Kahlil Gibran

... the Children of their Husbandmen or Labourers: This Nation is very Necessitous and Indigent, Masters of very slender Possessions, and consequently, neither Haughty, nor Ambitious. They are parsimonious in their Diet, as the Holy Fathers were in their frugal life in the Desert, known by the name of Eremites. They go naked, having no other Covering but what conceals their Pudends from publick sight. An hairy Plad, or loose Coat, about an Ell, or a coarse woven Cloth at most Two Ells long ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas

... you have no plan that will interfere with coming with us," he said to the physician. "We have a big boat chartered down here at the beach, and we're going to loaf along out to one of the 'desert islands' and camp for ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock

... to time they eagerly scanned the expanse of sparkling sea that stretched before them; but it was as empty of life as a desert. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... says. 'Besides,' he says, 'I felt I was incompetent f'r to command a rig'mint raised be another,' he says. 'I detarmined to raise wan iv me own,' he says. 'I selected fr'm me acquaintances in th' West,' he says, 'men that had thravelled with me acrost th' desert an' th' storm-wreathed mountain,' he says, 'sharin' me burdens an' at times confrontin' perils almost as gr-reat as anny that beset me path,' he says. 'Together we had faced th' turrors iv th' large but vilent West,' he says, 'an' these brave men had seen me with ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne

... not boast of having surpassed the king in conferring benefits formerly, when thou didst to us good deeds and madest offer to do more of the same kind, so now that thou hast turned to shamelessness, thou shalt receive not thy desert but less than thou deservest: for thy gifts of hospitality shall rescue from death thyself and the four others of thy sons, but thou shalt pay the penalty with the life of the one to whom thou dost cling most." Having answered thus, he forthwith commanded those to whom it was appointed to do these ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus

... her as she ran away, and Demi's mind was so distracted by this event that when Franz asked him where the desert of Sahara was, he mournfully replied, "In the nursery," and the ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... even valour itself, with all other qualities which are good. Can we, for example, give the praise of valour to a man who should see his gods profaned, and should want the courage to defend them? to a man who should abandon his father, or desert his king, in ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... which should last long years. On this head she knew by prevision what most women learn only by experience: she had mentally walked round love, told the towers thereof, considered its palaces, and concluded that love was but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert would be ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... his own ambition or been influenced by any but the most unselfish motives, he would have accepted the call as the highest honor in the gift of the nation. But to do so he would have been obliged to surrender his private principles and desert his native state, and it is impossible to imagine that a man of his character would, even for an instant, consider such a course. Gravely and sadly he declined the mighty office, and two days later he tendered his resignation from the service he had honored ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill

... natural disposition, had been taught, from the time he was a pup, not to betray his presence unnecessarily by a bark; and it was seldom that his deep throat opened beneath the arches of the oaks. When it did, it told like the roaring of the lion in the desert. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... talks to a man, gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context. Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one of constant excitement. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... long hoped that a hero might come who would be brave enough to slay the dragon. I hoped it might be Siegmund. But now I must desert him in his time of need. Though it breaks my heart, I must give ...
— Opera Stories from Wagner • Florence Akin

... military expeditions. When the eventful day dawned which filled us with amazement and alarm, since the fate of the world was decided in our walks, even in those terrible hours toward which our friend's carefree life flowed on, fortune did not desert him, for he was saved first through the precaution of a young and resolute friend, and then through the attention of the French conquerors, who honored in him both the meritorious author, famed throughout the world, and a member of their own great ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... flycatcher from the Chorro del Agua and Diamante Pass. Miller (1955a:167) characterized E. hammondii as a common migrant, "chiefly in stands of low oaks in the pine-oak belt but also occasionally in the desert scrub" of the ...
— Birds from Coahuila, Mexico • Emil K. Urban

... made a good meal on what was left in the second tin of beans that I had opened for my breakfast; and when I was done I tried to get a light for my pipe by rubbing bits of wood together, but made nothing of it at all. I had read about castaways on desert islands getting fire that way—but they went at it with dry wood, I fancy, and in my mist-sodden desert all the wood ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier

... occur between exhaustion and renewed effort, effort at its height. The guns fell silent, the musketry died away, the gunboats ceased to throw those great shells. By contrast with the clangour that had prevailed, the stillness seemed that of a desert waste, a dead world. Over toward a cross-road there could be made out three figures on horseback. The captain of Edward's company was an old college mate; lying down with his men, he now drew himself over the ground and loaned Cary his field-glass. "It's ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... they trotted their donkeys ran through the fertile lowlands of the Fayum. They had just passed a village, amid an angry chorus from the pariah dogs, and were now following the track along the top of the embankment. Where the green carpet merged ahead into the grey ocean of sand the desert began, and out in that desert, resembling some weird work of Nature rather than anything wrought by the hand of man, stood the gloomy and lonely building ascribed by the Egyptologists to ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... stands in wonder On an icy Alpine height; Now pitches his tent in the desert Where the jackal ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... composition hardens like pucca masonry in a very short time, and secures the nest from all marauders except the oologist. The nest consists of a few dry leaves at the bottom of the cavity at no great depth, and upon this four eggs are laid. The birds sit close and do not easily desert their nests, as the following instance will show. In 1873 I found a Sitta's nest in a mango-tree, and after watching the birds for some days, when the eggs had been laid I took the nest, placing my handkerchief in the nest to prevent bits of mud falling in on ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume

... been perfectly righteous, and that they have given proofs of the most Christian virtue. Haggarty's wife is considered by her friends as a martyr to a savage husband, and her mother is the angel that has come to rescue her. All they did was to cheat him and desert him. And safe in that wonderful self-complacency with which the fools of this earth are endowed, they have not a single pang of conscience for their villany towards him, consider their heartlessness as a proof and consequence of their spotless ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... walls, the canal winds round the slope of the brown hill, marking a distinctive line between the outer desert and the green oasis of Saragossa. Just within the border line of the oasis, just below the canal, on the sunny slope, lies the long low house of the Convent School of the Sisters of the True Faith. Here, amid the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... war against bands of pirates who infested the coast of the West Indies. These robbers had small fast ships, and would attack unarmed merchantmen, seize all the valuables they could carry away or destroy, and sometimes kill the crew or put them ashore on some desert island. Ever since peace with England had been declared, Captain Porter had been a commissioner of the navy, and made no sea voyages, but now he offered to resign this position and attempt to drive the pirates away, only demanding that the government should give him a fleet of small vessels which ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... cannot explain why the sight should have seemed to prick like a sting through the wide weary disgust which Mick experienced as he stood in the twilit boreen waiting for Paddy to come out. He had scarcely a grunt to exchange for Peter's cheerful "Fine evenin'." What does it signify in a universal desert whether evenings be fine or foul? Altogether, it was a bad time; and Mick acted wisely in taking precautions against its recurrence, especially as the obstacles which had confronted him nearly two years back were now more hope-baffling ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various

... attachment subsisted for many years, and the couple had several children. The Shetlander's love for his merwife was unbounded, but his affection was coldly returned. The lady would often steal alone to the desert strand, and, on a signal being given, a large seal would make his appearance, with whom she would hold, in an unknown tongue, an anxious conference. Years had thus glided away, when it happened that one of the children, in the course of his play, found concealed beneath a stack of corn a ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous

... before him; creation trembles; and then from amid the trees of the garden comes the voice of God. And lo! in an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of prophecy begins. Victims bleed; altars smoke; the tabernacle arises amid the white tents of the desert; the temple ascends all glorious on the heights of Mount Zion; prophet after prophet declares his message. At length, in the fulness of time, the Messiah comes; and, in satisfying the law, and in fulfilling all righteousness, and in bringing life and immortality to light, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... grape-vines, its unknown mountains looming inland, and its great rivers flowing out of the realm of dream; but its present aspect is nearly as unfamiliar to us as to them. We know almost as little of the natives as Gosnold. Mr. Carter's voyage extends from Plymouth to Mount Desert, and he lands here and there to explore a fishing-village or seaport town, with all the interest of an outlandish man. He describes scenery with the warmth of a lover of Nature and the accuracy of a geographer. Acting as a kind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... it is only a mood—and that you will not, after putting your hand to the plough, turn back because of the aridness or ungratefulness of the soil,—that would not be like you. If one must needs perish, it is better to perish at one's post of duty than desert over ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... war, and occasionally they passed the charred ruin of a cabin and new graves. By and by they came to that deadly waste known as the Alkali Desert, strewn with the carcasses of dead beasts and with the heavy articles discarded by emigrants in their eagerness to reach water. All day and night they pushed through that choking, waterless plain to reach camp on the ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine

... usual to producing a novel. This narrative of his is less loosely constructed than any others except Robinson Crusoe and the Journal of the Plague Year, which it was easier to give structure to. In both of them—the story of a solitary on a desert island and the story of the visitation of a pestilence—the nature of the subject made the author's course tolerably plain; in The Fortunate Mistress, the proper course was by no means so well marked. The more credit is due Defoe, therefore, ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe

... about to place my honor, my daughter's life, the honor of all my family, in your hands. There is not another living being in whom to trust, and I must trust some one. I must, for my child's sake, have relief, or my reason, too, will desert me. Constance, that sick room holds a terrible secret—Sybil's secret. If you can share it with me, for Sybil's sake, I will try to brave this tempest, as I have braved others; if you refuse"—she paused a moment, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... in each household were centered that solid and constant moving force which made each man a hero and each woman a heroine in the struggle with hostile nature, with savage man more cruel than the storm or the wild beasts, with solitude which makes a desert in the soul; with famine, with pestilence, that "wasteth at noon-day,"—a struggle which has finally been victorious over all antagonisms, and has made us what we are in this centennial year of our existence as ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... which we owe to England. And what is the amount of this debt? Why, truly, it is the same that the young lion owes to the dam, which has brought it forth on the solitude of the mountain, or left it amid the winds and storms of the desert. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... the uninhabited wilderness, and left to perish there by hunger or wild beasts. This was no uncommon method of disposing of the Quakers, and they were accustomed to boast, that the inhabitants of the desert were more hospitable ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... the making of your hils, you shall vnderstand that although generally they are not made the first yeere, yet it is not amisse if you omit that scruple, and beginne to make your hils as soone as you haue placed your poales, for if your industry be answerable to the desert of the labour, you shall reape as good profit the first yeere, as either the second or the third. To beginne therefore to make your hils, you shall make you an instrument like a stubbing Hoe, which is a toole wherewith ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham

... killed. That's why all of our stock goes to Hoytville, and small country places. Oh, those big cities are awful places, Laura. It seems to me that it makes people wicked to huddle them together. I'd rather live in a desert than a city. There's Ch o. Every night since I've been there I pray to the Lord either to change the hearts of some of the wicked people in it, or to destroy them off the face of the earth. You know three years ago I got run down, and your uncle ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders

... however, and this is why he will bear through life a scar on his neck. Vexed, he throws away the belt, but the giant returns it to him, and consoles him by admitting that the trial was a superhuman one, that he himself is Bernlak de Haut-Desert, and that his guest has been the sport of "Morgan the fairy," ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... help us to beat the British this day, and give me a chance to empty my powder-horn before night. Thou hast been with General Washington and me ever since last year. Please don't desert us now." ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... prairies, in their verdant turn, become aggressors and push westward upon the plains. These last stretches, extending to the base of that bluff and sudden bulwark, the Rocky Mountains, can go no further. The Rockies hold the plains at bay and break, as it were, the teeth of the desert. As a result of this warfare of vegetations, the plains are to first disappear in favour of the prairies; and the prairies to give way before the trees. These mutations all wait on rain; and as the rain belt goes ever and ever westward, a strip ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis

... who conspire against the unity of the revolutionists, provoking rivalry between chiefs and forming divisions and armed bands. 2d. Those who solicit contributions without authority of the government and misappropriate the public funds. 3d. Those who desert to the enemy, or are guilty of cowardice in the presence of the enemy, being armed; and, 4th, those who seize the property of any person who has done no wrong to the revolution, violate women and assassinate or inflict ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... as firmly as I could. "I am not going away from this house without better reason. All this is too sudden and too new to me. If you have more knowledge than I, you have no right to desert me half-convinced of what ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram

... He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show; like the cactus in the desert, always plump, always taking in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He wrote many papers in the Repository and Monitor, an acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy, entitled Calm Answers to Angry Questions, and was the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... a charm as this Brandon did not seem indifferent. His usual self-abstraction seemed to desert him for a time. The part that he had taken in her rescue of itself formed a tie between them; but there was another bond in the fact that he alone of all on board could associate with her on equal terms, as a high-bred gentleman ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... succeeded in eluding his pursuers by means of forced marches across the Kalahari desert, and effected a junction with Maritz in German South West Africa; but after only a few weeks' taste of German rule he returned to the Union and surrendered with his commando and all arms, evidently satisfied with British rule. ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... black key border—all these things made part of a whole that told of a life reduced to its simplest terms. A triple candle-sconce of Egyptian design on the chimney-piece recalled the vast spaces of the desert and Montriveau's long wanderings; a huge sphinx-claw stood out beneath the folds of stuff at the bed-foot; and just beyond, a green curtain with a black and scarlet border was suspended by large rings from a spear handle ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... replied. "As I've heard the yarn, Benson and his two boy friends attracted attention even from the European governments. The Germans and some other powers even made them good offers to desert this country and go abroad as submarine experts. Our Navy folks thought enough of Benson and his chums to want to save them for this country. So the Secretary of the Navy offered all three the rank and command of officers without the actual commissions. As soon as these young men, the ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock

... the great Grand Duke was blown upon our shore, with a good deal less fuss than Jonah had when he took to his life-boat with fins and tail, and discharged cargo on a desert shore, without the first chance of an imperial reception, and nothing but an upstart guard to offer him ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... between the stone heaps and the Hermes pillars cf. Welcker, Griechische Goetterlehre, ii, 455, and Roscher, Lexikon, i, 2, col. 2382. With Hermes as guide of travelers cf. the Egyptian Khem (Min), of Coptos, as protector of wanderers in the desert, and perhaps Eshmun in the Sardinian trilingual inscription (see Roscher, Lexikon, article "Esmun"; ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... audible sin. The "still, small voice" 559:9 of scientific thought reaches over continent and ocean to the globe's remotest bound. The inaudible voice of Truth is, to the human mind, "as when a lion roareth." 559:12 It is heard in the desert and in dark places of fear. It arouses the "seven thunders" of evil, and stirs their latent forces to utter the full diapason of secret tones. Then is 559:15 the power of Truth demonstrated, - made manifest in the destruction of error. Then will a voice from harmony cry: "Go and take the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... at the very time when it was so necessary that her hands should be about him. What might be the fate of such a man if he had none to take care of him? No, this almost unexampled woman, rather than desert him in such circumstances, voluntarily partook in all the wretchedness, destitution, and incredible misery which his conduct inflicted on her, and did so patiently, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... themselves, for they should be on the other side before dark—that mountain is the meeting of the two ranges and beyond there are no more for many leagues. Then the senores must keep straight on, straight on—never turning to the left, for that way lies the terrible Mojave desert. By-and-by they will cross a river, and after that Los Angeles is not far. Between the mountain and the river is an hacienda, where they will find welcome for ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton

... with great spirit; "but that is what you will never do. You made a bargain that was unworthy of a gentleman; but you are a gentleman for all that, and you will never desert a man whom you have ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles... the country was almost a desert.... We had no cattle, hogs, sheep, or horse or anything else. The fences were all gone. Some of the orchards were very much injured, but the fruit trees had not been destroyed. The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... hovering over their thresholds. You persecute this girl. You are her tyrant. You hate her. I am a cripple. Providence has cast this lump upon my shoulders. But that is nothing. The camel, that is the salvation of the children of the desert, has been given his hump in order that he might bear his human burden better. This girl, who is homeless as the Arab, is my appointed load in life, and, please God, I will carry her on this back, hunched though it may be. I have come to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... everything which I am forced to give up should be his in hundred-fold measure? Love, friendship, fame, children, everything flows to him as the rivers to the sea, while my heart is parched like the desert. But I am king still. I can show him which is the stronger of us two, and I will, though his forehead may touch the heavens. In Persia there can be only one great man. He or I,—I or he. In a few ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... death. But he thought that her brother's family and friends had got hold of her in London; that Mr Rubb might very probably have done it; and that they were striving to obtain command of her money, and were influencing her to desert him. He thinking so, and being a man of good courage, took a resolution to follow his game, and to see whether even yet he might not obtain the good things which had made his eyes glisten and his mouth water. He knew that there was very much against him in the race that he was desirous ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope

... induce volunteering brought into existence "bounty-jumping," a new crime analogous to that of "repeating" at elections. A man would enlist and receive the bounty, frequently several hundred dollars, but varying somewhat in different places and periods. He would take an early opportunity to desert, as he had intended to do from the first. Changing his name, he would go to some new locality and enlist again, repeating the fraud as often as he could escape detection. The urgency to get recruits and forward them at once to the field, and the wide country which was ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... twenty-four hours, and he thought that forty-eight hours should be allowed. I was obstinate, and he was obstinate; and for a long time we could come to no agreement. At last his oriental tranquillity seemed to desert him, and he took upon himself to assure me, with almost more than British energy, that, if I insisted on the quick transit, a terrible responsibility would rest on my head. I made this mistake, he ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope

... and go away and get wrecked on a desert island, like Robinson Crusoe," responded Johnnie glibly, at the same time hitching the hen up ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham

... chapel it can afford but three floors. The spaciousness of some of those ancient drawing-rooms is that of a Russian steppe. The "family circle," gathered anywhere within speaking distance, must resemble a group of pilgrims encamped in the desert on a little oasis of carpet. Madame Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house in that dusky, tortuous old Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening most good- naturedly, lamp in hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her apartment. Such quarters seem a translation ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... valley of the Jordan, and for harbour works at Beyrout, exercised my mind in succession; and during my frequent walks in the beautiful Esbekieh my thoughts were more particularly occupied with the overland route between Syria and Egypt. Since the wanderings of the Israelites through the desert, and the flight of the child Jesus, of how many great events have these countries been the scenes, and what various recollections are awakened by ...
— The Caravan Route between Egypt and Syria • Ludwig Salvator

... make her strong to do this unnatural thing. Well, perhaps it was natural enough that that hour should seem most real to him, for it was then that he had found out their real relationship. To him it had seemed as if they were two children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and unkindness. But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his comrade. She had thought of him as an external power, like the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... no longer. She made her way to the gate of the garden, passed out to the deserted track beyond, and disappeared into the darkness, going blindly towards the distant hills that keep the Arabian desert. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... no human creature gave life to the white desert where Boreas reigned, his voice alone resounding at distant intervals. The sky, nearly always gray, gave tones of polished steel to the ice of the fiord. Perchance some ancient eider-duck crossed the expanse, trusting to the warm down beneath which dream, in other lands, the luxurious ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... social mockeries becomes most thoroughly obvious, it is the situation presented by an attempt to imitate the conventional society life in a woman's college. And yet—she had gone over the whole question so often—what a desert of awkwardness and learned provincialism such a college would be without the attempt! How often she had cordially agreed to the statement that it was precisely because of its insistence upon this connection with the forms and relations of normal life that her college was so successfully free ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam

... know that there Sarah Desert over in Africa somewhere? Well, sir, that there Sarah is a reg'lar flower-garden, with fountains a-squirting and the band playing 'Hail Columbia,' 'longside o' the Newbraska Sand Hills. You'll go through 'em for a hundred miles, and you'll ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth

... in plain sight of our camp, the one camp in Marble Canyon where our sleep was undisturbed by the roar of a rapid. But instead of the roar of a rapid, a howling wind swept down from the Painted Desert above, piling the mingled desert sands and river sands about our beds, scattering our camp material over the bottom of ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... all the tribe as well. I have said so much about 'luck' and about its naturalness before, that I ought to say nothing again. But I must add that the contagiousness of the idea of 'luck' is remarkable. It does not at all, like the notion of desert, cleave to the doer. There are people to this day who would not permit in their house people to sit down thirteen to dinner. They do not expect any evil to themselves particularly for permitting it or sharing ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot

... the outer "fly" is open, and men pass and repass, a chattering throng. I think of Emerson's Saadi, "As thou sittest at thy door, on the desert's yellow floor,"—for these bare sand-plains, gray above, are always yellow when upturned, and there seems a tinge of ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... arm. As the fight proceeded and he knew that his face was bleeding and that the end of his nose had no sensation in it at all he kicked with his feet and was conscious of cries that he was not playing the game. Infuriated that his recent supporters should so easily desert him, he now flung himself upon Peter, who at once gave way beneath the bigger boy's weight. Comber then began to bite and tear and scratch, uttering shrill screams of rage and kicking on the floor with his feet. He was at once pulled ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... or passive, in the proceedings at Bayreuth, already feel altered and rejuvenated, and ready to introduce reforms and to effect renovations in other spheres of life? Has not a haven been found for all wanderers on high and desert seas, and has not peace settled over the face of the waters? Must not he who leaves these spheres of ruling profundity and loneliness for the very differently ordered world with its plains and lower levels, cry continually like Isolde: "Oh, how could ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... while the Israelites were traveling in the desert God sent them manna—a miraculous food that fell every morning. It was white, and looked something like fine rice. It had any taste they wished it to have. For instance, if they wished it to taste like fruit, it did taste so to them; but its usual taste was like that of ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead

... spirit, come not near Now—not this time desert thy cloudy place To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face! I need not fear this audience, I make free With them, but then this is no place for thee! The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown Up out of memories ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... est ma belle, Prenez, s'il vous plait, ma selle, Et ma bride, et mon cheval incomparable; Car il ne faut rien dire, Mais vite, vite m'ensevelir Dans un desert ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell



Words linked to "Desert" :   parcel of land, parcel, flee, biome, maroon, Qizil Qum, Kyzyl Kum, Ar Rimsal, Qara Qum, oasis, Kizil Kum, Sahara, Sinai, Death Valley, strand, Kara Kum, Gobi, An Nefud, desolate, take flight, Dasht-e-Lut, rat, Chihuahuan Desert, Dasht-e-Kavir, protest, piece of ground, Negev, Kalahari, ditch, expose, Mojave, walk out, fly, Rub al-Khali, tract, Nafud, resist, Dahna, go away, go forth, An Nafud, Nefud, leave, dissent, piece of land, Gibson Desert, Mohave, desert iguana



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