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More "Tortuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for it was here that Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated, as he attended High Mass, on April 26th, 1478, with the connivance, if not actually at the instigation, of Christ's Vicar himself, Pope Sixtus IV. Florentine history is so eventful and so tortuous that beyond the bare outline given in chapter V, I shall make in these pages but little effort to follow it, assuming a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the reader; but it must be stated here that periodical revolts against the power and prestige of the Medici often occurred, and none ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... peculiar emotions. This party had suddenly sprung up in opposition to the ease with which foreigners secured suffrage and office; and, although it shrewdly avoided nominations for governor and President, it demoralised both parties by the strange and tortuous manoeuvres that had ended in the election of a mayor of New York in the preceding spring. It operated, for the most part, in that city, but its sympathisers covered the whole State. Then, there was the anti-rent party, confined to Delaware and three or four adjoining counties, where long leases ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... was lifting his hand toward a tortuous brass knocker the door opened and Barbara, carrying a book and pencil in one hand, while the other held down her hat-brim, tripped ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... tortuous hours in which the souls of those who watched and waited for his return were tried to the utmost. A restless, uncanny feeling prevailed: as if they were prisoners waiting in dead silence for the sickening news ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... northwest and directing his steps towards the interior of the island, the traveller will notice that the land rises rapidly, and after three hours' walking over tortuous paths obstructed by great masses of rock and sometimes cut by ravines, he will find himself on the border of a great maquis. The maquis is the domain of the Corsican shepherds and of those who are at ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... literary labors—that were like crowding the Bard of Avon into a magazine article. For 300 years the world has been studying the latter, and is not yet sure that it understands him; yet Shakespeare is to Carlyle what a graded turnpike is to a tortuous mountain path. The former deals chiefly with the visible; the latter with the intangible. The first tells us what men did; the last seeks to learn why they did it. Carlyle is the prince of critics. He is often lenient to a fault, but seldom deceived—"looks ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in a way, that his decision had already been forced upon him, that the dice had been cast and counted. He had been trying to sweep back the rising sea with a broom; he had been trying to fight down that tangled and tortuous past which still claimed him as its own. And now all that remained for him was to slip quietly and unprotestingly into the current which clawed and gnawed at his feet. He had been tried too long; the test, from the first, had been too crucial. He might, in time, even find ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... dressing-room. She must get away before her admirers demanded her reappearance on the platform. The old man quitted the establishment. Stepping out of the vestibule, dimly lighted by a flickering jet of gas, he strode along the narrow and tortuous streets of Chalons at a great pace. This pedestrian seemed out of humour: he marched along, bent beneath the weight of his accordion, tapping the road violently with the point of his long climbing stick. Taking a circuitous route, ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets, its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... fancies and romantic thoughts, I lost count of streets and passages, turning this way, that and the other, through many narrow and tortuous byways and alleys, until I realized I was hopelessly lost. With my fair guide in front and my good sword by my side, lightly I recked of streets or houses. Yet I dared not forget I was on an errand for the Governor and must not expose myself to ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... thin and squalid, fit emblem of the sterility of the country. We could gain no information from her, she was so much alarmed, but not long after parting with her we came to a puddle of water in the plains, and encamped for the night. Our stage had been a tortuous, but not a long one, and we halted early in the day, the latitude was 30 degrees 58 minutes S. by an altitude ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... followed by perceptions; that he should have observed the antecedent separate from the consequent: otherwise his statement, instead of being complimented as a plain statement of fact, must be condemned as a tortuous statement of hypothesis. Unless he has observed No. 1 and No. 2 in sequence, he is not entitled to declare that this is an observed sequence. Now, did Reid, or did any man ever observe matter anterior to his perception of it? Had Reid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the grim, consuming pestilence of gaming claim more victims than in the Ghetto. The ravages of drink and debauchery are slight indeed; but the tortuous streets can show too many a humble home haunted by the spectres of ruin and misery which stalked across the threshold when the FIRST CARD ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... scourge of the flaming sun, tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red plain stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over which writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing its tortuous way over the red world. Sometimes it was as unreal as a fever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen, perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper's bed. Sometimes the dragon curled itself into a ball, and the ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... to Johnson's position at West View; one through Harrisonburg; the second by Port Republic, Cross Keys, and Mount Sidney; the third, the river road, by Port Republic and Staunton. The first of these was already occupied by the Federals; the second was tortuous, and at places almost within view of the enemy's camps; while the third, though it was nowhere less than ten miles distant, ran obliquely across their front. In fact, to all appearance, Banks with his superior force blocked Jackson's march on Staunton more ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... enough for the lichen and the moss, or for these, in their turns, to become the receptacle of the seeds of forest trees, blown from some distant region—is a problem. In threading these islands, sometimes our vessel passed through tortuous passages apparently blocked up at the end, and within a few yards of land, but by a sudden turn emerged into fine large basins, and so wound and twined its way along. As the sun declined, every island made a full, clear reflection in the glassy surface of the water; and the boughs ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... bells were ringing the procession gradually formed;—a dozen or more priests leading,—incense-bearers and acolytes walking next,— and then the long train of little children and girls carrying their symbolic banners, following after. The way they had to walk was a steep, winding ascent, through tortuous streets, to the Cathedral, which stood in the centre of a great square on an eminence which overlooked the whole city, and as soon as they started they began to sing,—softly at first, then more clearly and sweetly, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... fro until he had the proper focus and might obtain the sun's altitude; whereby he had presently found our present position, the which he duly pricked upon the chart. He now showed me how, by standing out on direct course instead of following the tortuous windings of the coast, we could shorten our passage by very many miles. Hereupon we shaped our course accordingly and, the wind freshening somewhat, by afternoon the high coast had faded to a faint blur of distant mountain peaks, and by sunset we had ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... they now turned from the broad highway into a narrower road, on which they traveled for a long time in silence on account of its tortuous course, and because in some places the snow formed drifts difficult to traverse. In the spring or summer, on rainy days, this road must have ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Tullianum or Prison of St. Peter, we were led through a tortuous subterranean passage of Etruscan character, a hundred yards long, cut out of the rock. It was so low that we had to stoop all the way, and in some places almost to creep, and so narrow that a very stout person would have some ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... made attractive, or insidiously alluring. The shadow of expiation, remorse, punishment, retribution is ever present, like a death's-head at a feast. The day of reckoning comes, and bitterly do the culprits realize that the tortuous game of vice is not worth the candle. Casuistical theologians may attempt to explain away the notions of punishment in the life to come, of retribution beyond the grave. But the shallowest thinker will not ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... Few of his promises to them were performed. They worshipped a bankrupt deity. The land of promise was a Tantalus cup ever held to their lips, and ever mocking them when they essayed to drink. God was their greatest enemy instead of their best friend. Their tortuous path across the wilderness was marked by a track of bleaching bones. All the evils which imagination can conceive fell on their devoted heads. Bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, cursed with famine and drought, swallowed by earthquake, slain by war, ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... a third party, the neutral; and it therefore appears desirable, before tracing the progress of this warfare, to outline briefly the principles of international law which, by a slow and tortuous process, have grown up defining the respective rights of neutrals and belligerents in naval war. Blockade is among the most fundamental of these rights accorded to the belligerent, upon the conditions that the blockade shall be limited to enemy ports or coasts, ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... into the tortuous twists of streets that stamp the old Greenwich village with a character all its own, the worse it seemed to get. Decrepit relics of every style of architecture from almost the earliest times in the city stood out in the darkness, like so ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... puerile, jesuitical, and made unintelligible, as I think, from design, to conceal the palpaple contradictions and absurdities of which it is full. I can compare it to nothing better than to a serpent, which hides its ugly head under the tortuous folds of its horrible body. The protest, on the contrary, is the finest document of its kind, that I remember to have seen. As precise as it is luminous, it presents at once, and gathers, so to speak, into a single focus, all the reasons for the opposite ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... he passed. With slow and careful steps, his sagacious steed moved on, obedient to the rein, at one time topping the crest of a rugged hill, and then winding at a snail's pace down the steep declivity, or following the tortuous course of the streamlet through deep ravines, whose jagged and bush-clad sides frowned down upon them on either side, deepening ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... exceedingly narrow and tortuous, but a rapid survey of it satisfied me that the wind was free enough to allow the ship to traverse it, and I at once determined to make the attempt. There was no time for hesitation; whatever was to be done must be done at once. I therefore ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... too numerous to conduct with sufficient secresy and dispatch the affairs of a state that pursued a policy alike tortuous and complicated, the most general of its important interests were intrusted to a council composed of three hundred of its members. In order to avoid the publicity and delay of a body large even as this, a second selection was made, which was known as the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Siskiyous. It there meets the Trinity, which flows northwest. The combined rivers take the direction of the Trinity, but the name of the Klamath prevails. It enters the ocean about thirty miles south of the Oregon line. The whole region is extremely mountainous. The course of the river is tortuous, winding among ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... maiden voyage commenced. With Mr. Stanley Spencer in the car, she sailed gracefully down the football field, wheeled round in a circle—a small circle, too—and for perhaps a quarter of an hour sailed a tortuous course over the heads of a small but enthusiastic crowd of spectators. The ship was handicapped to some extent by the fact that in their anxiety to make the trial the aeronauts had not waited to inflate it fully, but still it did its work well, answered ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... and the range of Heights running south from it. And there, I think, the King is mainly to be found, looking now at the Austrians, now at his own people, for some three hours to come. His plan of Battle is soon clear to him: Nypern, with its bogs and scrags, on the Austrian right wing, is tortuous impossible ground, as he well remembers, no good prospect for us there: better ground for us on their left yonder, at Leuthen, even at Sagschutz farther south, whither they are stretching themselves. Attempt their left wing; try our "Oblique Order" upon that, with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... is especially ver. 1 which attracts our attention: "In that day the Lord with His sword, hard, great, and strong, shall visit the leviathan, the tortuous serpent, and killeth the dragon that is ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... turbulence on the level beach between Colombo and Point-de-Galle, as in a great degree to disperse the accumulations of sand brought down by the rivers, or heaped up by the tide, when the wind is off the land. Still, many of the rivers are thrown back by embankments, and after forming tortuous lakes flow for a long distance parallel to the shore, before finding an escape for their waters. Examples of this occur at Pantura, to the south of Colombo, and at Negombo, Chilaw, and elsewhere to the north ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... running with all sorts of lists and bends, going on and on endlessly, according to the belief of the boys of Waddy. The road was overhung by tall gums and nourished many clumps of fresh green saplings, about which the tortuous cart-track wound in deep yellow ruts, baked hard in summer, washed into treacherous bog in winter. Here caution was not necessary, and there were divers fierce hand-to-hand attacks on clumps of scrub representing a vindictive and merciless police, out of which Moonlighter ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... of the entrances to the great building, the girls went in. After following devious directions and tortuous ways, they found the perfumery counter, and as they had now sufficient command of the French language to make their wants accurately known, they inquired for the precious Cyclamen. The affable salesman was at first quite sure he could supply it, but an exhaustive search ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... the hills had grown higher and higher upon either side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine that forbid a passage south. Up through these the main road has been pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of India watered by the Ganges and Jumna. The country is for the most part perfectly flat, and cut up into little fields, divided by shallow ditches. Here and there nullahs, or deep watercourses, with tortuous channels and perpendicular sides, wind through the fields to the nearest stream. These nullahs constitute the great danger of hunting in the country. In the fields men may be noticed, in the scantiest of attire, working with hoes among their springing crops; women, wrapped ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... the sea; its rocky, wave-worn base is whitened by a long line of snowy breakers; its deep, wild ravines are filled with soft blue summer haze; and down from the clouds which shroud its higher peaks tumble in white, tortuous streaks the foaming waters of unnamed and almost unknown mountain torrents. As one sails, at a distance of two or three miles, along this wild, beautiful coast, the picture presented by the fringe of feathery palms over ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... discovered something else. She had changed her course. The boat seemed to be drawing away from him! His heart sank, but almost at once, the boat turned again, following the tortuous ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... "I am enjoying this brief interchange of confidences. Circumstances have made me, as you see, a politician, a schemer if you like. Nature meant me to be one of the frankest, the most truthful, the best-hearted of men. I detest the tortuous ways of the old diplomacy. The spoken word pleases me best. That is why I like a few minutes' conversation with the enemy, why I love to stand here and talk to you with the buttons off our foils. We are scheming against you and your country, and you know it, and we ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Taal making this appointment, causing his pachydermatous hide to know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only last Sabbath she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young woman capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might be made useful in a variety of ways—some of them tortuous, all of them secret, as the Slabbertian ways ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... usual with his tribe, had two entrances to his lodge, one a tortuous passage opening under water and leading inward about a foot, then slanting upward five or six feet, the other leading to the open air, its exit cleverly concealed by a tussock of coarse grass. Here he lived a life of ease and also of adventure, feasting on sweet-flag ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... exertions of that last bitter hour; his body labored mechanically, without cognizance of the strain put upon it. He had traversed fifteen miles of the blackest of forests and by way of the most tortuous of roads. A subconscious triumph now inspired him, born of the certainty that he had left his enemies far behind. It was this oddly jubilant spur that drove him safely, almost instinctively, into the heart of S——. The music of a band both attracted ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... out to be long and tortuous, leading at last to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Duke of Lotzen was only a means to an end: money and exquisite ease. Left with ample wealth on his decease, she, for her excitement and to be in affairs, had mixed in diplomacy, and had quickly become an expert in tortuous moves ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... low one. Another, narrow and high, protected it in the street. The sun shone upon and brightened the chimney-tops. The tortuous Rue Saint Antoine wound before ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... by General Lee was shrouded in fog, and, as morning had dawned without the expected signal, he concluded that some mishap had befallen the force which was to make it. By a tortuous path he went down the side of the mountain low enough to have a distinct view of the camp. He saw the men, unconscious of the near presence of an enemy, engaged in cleaning their arms, cooking, and other morning occupations; ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... you may enter a narrow and very tortuous path, called the Labyrinth, which leads to an immense split, or chasm, in the rocks. Here is placed a ladder, down which you descend twenty-five or thirty feet, and enter a narrow cave below, which brings you to a combination of rock called the Gothic Window. You stand in this recess, while ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... before I espied him descending the Gusedub by that tortuous path, marking so strongly the character of a Scottish glen. He was easily distinguished, indeed, at some distance, by his jaunty swagger, in which he presented to you the flat of his leg, like the manly knave of clubs, apparently with the most perfect contentment, not only ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Reviews" has answered the book: for what signify the details, if the fundamental lie has been detected, and unrelentingly exposed? The man who plants his heel on the serpent's head, and refuses to withdraw it, can afford to disregard the tortuous writhings of the long supple body.—Again. These attacks are seven. Must seven men with "concert and comparison,"—with leisure and inclination too,—be procured to demolish this flimsy compound of dogmatism and unbelief? to disperse ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... these men wriggled themselves down the tortuous path, keeping always under cover of the bushes; and even when the open ground below was reached, they slipped so silently along beneath the cover of the hedges that not an eye saw them, not even the sharp ears of the Indians ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... reaches over and quite on to the sound parts. When the glue has hardened perfectly and the cramps have been removed, the careful shaving down and finishing of both the inner and outer blocks or slices may be proceeded with. If the burrowings and tortuous course of the obnoxious depredator give indication of its having been of huge proportions for its species, for these creatures vary in size from a small pin to nearly an eighth of an inch in diameter, and the tunnellings are not very close together, then pieces ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... soon, for scarcely had he drawn himself to the safety of the limb than two gaping mouths snapped venomously below him. For a few minutes Tarzan rested in the tree that had proved the means of his salvation. His eyes scanned the river as far down-stream as the tortuous channel would permit, but there was no sign of the Russian ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be intercepted. The build of the boats also is peculiar; they are very wide and flat bottomed, and the rudders are unusually large, so as to enable them to turn quickly in the narrow channels, which are often tortuous. The bow rises in a splendid curve high out of the water, and throws the spray clear of its low body, for the Egyptian loads his boat very heavily, and I have often seen them so deep in the water that a little wall of mud has been added to the gunwale ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... dealings with the world, and under any other circumstances he would in all likelihood have made a determined effort to gain his brother's sympathy. But in the refusal of his application for a pardon he had believed certain, he had suffered a severe blow. Deep in his tortuous nature there existed at least one sincere and good quality, which was his passionate love for his native country. It had been distorted indeed, through the influence of another strong affection, the love for his wife while she had lived, and, being misdirected by her agency, the very strength ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... but missed the ford. It has been said that the enemy, by building a dam below, had raised the water to seven feet. Be that as it may, a few venturing in with musket and ammunition belts were drowned. Groping for the way, and apparently confused between the tortuous courses of the river itself and a tributary which enters near by, the mass of the troops blundered into a sharp bend curving to the northward, thus coming under a cross fire from the two enclosing banks. Here they ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... may be conveniently classed as four separate chains: the Smoky, forming the western boundary of the State; the Blue Ridge, running across the State in a very tortuous course, and shooting out spurs of great elevation; the Brushy (which divides, for the greater part of its course, the waters of the Catawba and Yadkin), beginning at a point near Lenoir and terminating in the Pilot and Sauratown Mountains; ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... from Jerusalem, with a troop of cavalry and Kavasses in gorgeous array. The office lasts from 10 o'clock on Christmas Eve until long after midnight. "At the reading of the Gospel the clergy and as many of the congregation as can follow leave the church, and proceed by a flight of steps and a tortuous rock-hewn passage to the Grotto of the Nativity, an irregular subterranean chamber, long and narrow. They carry with them a waxen image of an infant—the bambino—wrap it in swaddling bands and lay it on the site which is said to ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... more, but Mrs. Brook preferred none the less to treat the question as between themselves. She WAS, as the others said, wonderful. "You can't help thinking me"—she spoke to him straight—"rather tortuous." The pause she thus momentarily produced was so intense as to give a sharpness that was almost vulgar to the little "Oh!" by which it was presently broken and the source of which neither of her three companions could ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... could not rest. In and out the tortuous streets of Paris he roamed during the better part of that night. He was now only awaiting the dawn to publicly demand the right to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... somewhere else for modern improvements. It is a shame, when Quebec placed herself far out of the way, up in the very neighbourhood of Hudson's Bay, that it should be hunted and harassed with new-fangled notions, and that all the charming inconveniences and irregularities of narrow and tortuous streets, that so delight a traveller's eyes, should be altered to suit the fantastic notions ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... started along a tortuous and narrow path and Gus followed for more than half a mile. They were just off the thoroughfare when they started, but the youth could hear the distant booming of the ocean waves on the beach ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... melo-tragedy is Don Juan, the hero of unlimited desire, pursuing the unattainable through tortuous interminable labyrinths, eager in appetite yet never satisfied, 'for ever following and for ever foiled.' He is the incarnation of lust that has become a habit of the soul—rebellious, licentious, selfish, even cruel. His nature, originally noble ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... upon either side or down the center of long and tortuous Grand Avenue to arouse enthusiasm, nor was Billy particularly enthusiastic about that more or ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... watched him as he moved round the table ore in curiosity now than in fright. He puzzled her, and she still had a feeling at the back of her mind that there must be something more definite and more evil lurking at the back of that tortuous brain. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... came down on one side, they went not up on the other. Instead, having reached the nether bluff, they turned sharp along its base, by another and still narrower trace, which they knew would take them up to the mission-building. A route tortuous, the path beset with many obstacles; hence their having spent several hours in passing from the ford to the mission-house, though the distance between is ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... The street was tortuous and narrow, paved with rough cobbles; and it rose steeply, so that the porter bent lower beneath his burden, panting. With the bag on his shoulders he looked like some hunchbacked gnome, a creature of nightmare. On either ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... promiscuous one. It had more tortuous relationships than most families have, although there were only four in it, ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... alabaster. In the midst of the plain of snow lie these chasms; the vertical walls, the bold headlands, the turrets and spires and obelisks, the rounded and towering capes, the carved and buttressed precipices, the branch valleys and canons, and the winding and tortuous course of the main channel are all here,—all that the Yosemite or Yellowstone have to show, except the terraces and the cascades. Sometimes my canon is bridged, and one's fancy runs nimbly across a vast arch of Parian marble, and that makes up for the falls and the terraces. Where the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... Garden—spot beloved of the people for its welcome shades, where artificial waterfalls, from the "Isar rolling rapidly," add chill to the natural dampness; where unwilling streamlets creep slowly through tortuous channels toward a stagnant pond, and pestiferous miasma, rising like incense at the going down of the sun, broods over the meadows until his rising again. It was in one of the streets bordering this park that the cholera broke out in 1873, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... effect of all these disturbing causes, primary and secondary, is seen in that irregular distribution of climates, which the tortuous isothermal lines and the mottled raincharts illustrate. The isothermal lines may be regarded as the topographical delineations of that bed of temperatures down which the upper atmosphere flows from the equator toward the poles, till its downward tendency is balanced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... desert—is there found, as also its enemy, the Mexican jackal, or coyote. To the rattlesnake and horned lizard (agama) it is a congenial home; and the singular snake-bird (paisano) may frequently be seen running over the arid waste, or skulking through the tortuous stems of the nopals. In the canons of the stream the grizzly bear makes his haunt, and in times not long gone by it was ascended and traversed by the unwieldy buffalo. The wild horse (musteno) still occasionally ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... bow and arrow on the ground beside him and lighted eagerly, for she knew then that the fishingpole was for her. Without a word they slipped through the bushes and down the steep side of the spur to a little branch which ran down into a creek that wound a tortuous way into ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... and tortuous streets where the moon's frosty brilliance was almost completely hidden, I came at last to the waterman's door and knocked. He was in bed and for some time my summons was in vain. At last I heard a sound in the room ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tossed it into the rickshaw and silently pointing toward the north, climbed in. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. The men sprang away in a quick dog-trot along the Bund, and then started to climb the hillside at the back of the town. They wound slowly up the narrow tortuous roads, past numberless villas, hung with lights, from which voices floated ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... perfect in their whole circuit, and give one a very clear idea of the complicated arrangements for the defence of a mediaeval town, by the many gateways and tortuous roads by which the town is entered, while the ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... provocation. The appearance of the Remarks on Cato gave the irritable poet an opportunity of venting his malice under the show of friendship; and such an opportunity could not but be welcome to a nature which was implacable in enmity, and which always preferred the tortuous to the straight path. He published, accordingly, the Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis. But Pope had mistaken his powers. He was a great master of invective and sarcasm: he could dissect a character in terse and sonorous ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... attained such a knowledge of affairs and such an ability to cope with intricate problems as to make them efficient leaders—leaders capable of guiding aright the noble ship of state thru difficult and tortuous channels beset, on every side, by dangerous rocks and calamitous whirlpools. And among that class of efficient leaders you, young men and young women of the University of North Dakota, will soon be numbered. How shall you respond to the call of duty? Your State, by virtue of what she ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... suddenly. A sad-looking group of men trailed in and made for a corner where certain bulky, shapeless bundles were soon revealed as those glittering and tortuous instruments which go to make a ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... therefore confers upon them at once the security and commercial accessibility which result from contact with the sea. Other countries, like Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungary, chiefly central in location, have the strategic and even the commercial value of their coasts reduced by the long, tortuous course which connects them with the open ocean. Therefore, we find Russia planning to make a great port at Ekaterina Harbor on the northernmost point of her Lapland coast, where an out-runner from the Gulf Stream ensures an ice-free port on the open sea.[250] ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... his ambition looks beyond himself to the future of his descendants. Measured by our modern standards, his religious professions seem only hypocrisy; but as we analyze his character we find that a faith in Jehovah, narrow and selfish though it be, was ever his guiding star. Out of the tortuous windings of his earlier years it ultimately led him to a calm old age. Imperfect though his character was, like that of the race which he represented, the significant fact is that God ever cared for him and was able to utilize him as an agent ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... was built in 1683. William Pitt came to live here in 1801. St. James's Place is a medley of old and modern buildings, some having been built in the last decade. Wheatley speaks of it because of its tortuous course, as "one of the oddest built streets in London." Wilkes and Addison, and Mrs. Delaney, at whose house Miss Burney stayed, have been among the residents. Samuel Rogers lived for fifty years at No. 22, which looked out over ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... present world only a small minority can have that direct and honourable relation of public service in the work they do; most of the important business of the community is done upon the older and more tortuous private ownership system, and the great mass of men in socially useful employment find themselves working only indirectly for the community and directly for the profit of a private owner, or they themselves are private owners. Every man ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... however, to walk in single file, with much care to their steps, for the obstacles were ceaseless in the way of trailing vines, saplings, and fallen trees. The narrow and tortuous avenue they threaded was gloomy in the extreme, affording scarcely any glimpse of the sky, and opening out no vistas between the serried ranks of steins, each clothed in a covering of velvet moss, and all looped together by the parasitical ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... no more. Is there not something drearily monotonous in those interminable perspectives? How frightfully the way lengthens before one's eyes! In the twists and curves of the old Paris one was relieved from the pain of seeing how far one had to go from one spot to another,—each tortuous street had a separate idiosyncrasy; what picturesque diversities, what interesting recollections,—all swept away! Mon Dieu! and what for,—miles of florid facades staring and glaring at one with goggle-eyed pitiless windows; house-rents ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as it passed along the edge of a deep precipice, and was only a foot wide and considerably out of the horizontal, so that a single false step would have been fatal. Road continued same character all the way along, though much above the tortuous and noisy Jhelum, and its ups and downs were the roughest, longest, and most trying, I have yet experienced. I am pleased to know that the remaining two marches will be, in the words of my Coolies ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... him time to reflect upon his coming interview with Rosey. He had resolved to begin by confessing all; the attempt of last night had released him from any sense of duty to Sleight. Besides, he did not doubt that Nott's letter contained some reference to this affair only known to Nott's dark and tortuous intelligence. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... dolts and dullards who declare that women who are witty and accomplished, generally make bad housewives. They are said to lie on sofas all day through, reading hooks they cannot understand; playing all kinds of tortuous music; and painting moss roses upon velvet. I am not an old married man (twenty days old only), but I am ready to wager, from what I have already seen of my Carrie, that there is not the slightest ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... marshes and fens—all country that is hard to traverse: this is difficult ground. 9. Ground which is reached through narrow gorges, and from which we can only retire by tortuous paths, so that a small number of the enemy would suffice to crush a large body of our men: this is hemmed in ground. 10. Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... ever known of the liturgies of ages came crowding into his mind. He could hear the sounding of matin invitatories; chimes telling a rosary of harmony over tortuous labyrinths of narrow streets, over cornet towers, over pepper-box pignons, over dentelated walls; the chimes chanting the canonical hours, prime and tierce, sexte and none, vespers and compline; celebrating the joy of a city with the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... bank, where the streams setting over the sandy ridges make a confusing perilous sea to mariners in bad weather. Else, he must sail north between the Ecrehos and the Dirouilles, in the channel called Etoc, a tortuous and dangerous passage save in good weather, and then safe only to the mariner who knows the floor of that strait like his own hand. De la Foret was wholly in the hands of Buonespoir, for he knew nothing of these waters and coasts; also he was a soldier ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the arteries depends on the stage of the disease, and when the disease is actually present, the palpable arteries do not collapse on pressure. They soon lose their elasticity, and if this occurs in parts which are soft and flexible, the arteries become more or less tortuous by the force of the blood current twisting and bending them, owing to the irregularity of their hardening. The extremities readily become numb, or the part "goes to sleep," as it is termed. This occurs frequently at night. Sooner or later some edema of the feet and legs occurs in the ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... had throughout been tortuous and immoral, and she thought she could treat Russia with defiance, secure in the support of her German ally. Similarly the policy of Germany had been an equivocal and double-faced policy, and it mattered little whether the German Government knew or did not know the terms of the Austrian ultimatum; ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... streets—much dirtier than usual, for the best public thoroughfares remained uncleansed in those times of terror—he stopped at a chemist's shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands. A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill thoroughfare, by a small, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... secret passage. It was a narrow cleft, splitting the canyon wall, rough, uneven, tortuous and choked with fallen rocks—no more than a wonderful crack in solid stone, opening into another canyon. Above us the sky seemed a winding, flowing stream of blue. The walls were so close in places ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... was riding above a large city, for he saw spires and house roofs rising from the clouds in every direction. Sometimes an opening was made in the circling mists, and he looked down into a running, tortuous stream; but no land could he see. All this was beautiful to look upon, but he felt quite distraught—as one does when happening ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... creeks, you know nothing, you see and hear nothing, and, if you change your course, must do so by mere guess. But the most annoying thing is, after an apparent advance of a quarter of a mile, to find yourself not twenty yards from your starting-point, so tortuous are the windings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... with exalted virtue, can never constitute greatness. In whatever position placed, or whatever inducements persuade, virtue and a conscientious conviction of right must regulate the mind and conduct of man to make him great. The tortuous course of politics, made so by unprincipled men, renders the truly upright man usually a poor politician. He who possesses the capacity to discern the true interests of a country, and who will virtuously labor to secure and promote those interests, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... street, and, of course, a dirty one, ill-lit, and, apparently, at the moment of my appearance, deserted. I had gone, perhaps, half-way down its tortuous length, blundering more than once into the kennel, wondering what fantastic whim had brought me into such unsavoury quarters, and what would happen to me if, as seemed extremely possible, I lost my way. On a sudden my ears were saluted by sounds which proceeded from a house ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... not betrayed his knowledge of the Colonel's house; and when, on his return to barracks, he discovered that no cheroot-case had been left behind, he beamed with delight. Here was a man after his own heart—a tortuous and indirect person playing a hidden game. Well, if he could be ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... teeming with fishes and sharks. O king! she directing her course towards the sea, separated herself, into three streams; and her water was bestrewn with piles of froth, which looked like so many rows of (white) ganders. And crooked and tortuous in the movement of her body, at places; and at others stumbling at it were; and covered with foam as with a robe: she went forward like a woman drunk. And elsewhere, by virtue of the roar of her waters, she uttered loud sounds. Thus assuming very many different ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to-day. Here, in a vessel too old for service, most of Drake's eleven brothers were born to a life as nearly amphibious as the life of any boy could be. The tide runs in with a rush from the sea at Sheerness, only ten miles away; and so, among the creeks and marshes, points and bends, through tortuous channels and hurrying waters lashed by the keen east wind of England, Drake reveled in the kind of playground that a sea-dog's son ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... hearing—not even the distant lights of one. The current was so strong that the Cameron twins went back among the islands where the water was smoother. Besides, it was much more romantic, Helen said wickedly, among the islands, and Chess and Ruth were more likely to remain in the tortuous passages. ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... special manner with sagacity or reason. The fact is, the epithet "subtil" is applied to the serpent with reference to its form and movements, which convey the abstract idea of subtlety on the same principle that the words "tortuous" and "twisting" have an abstract meaning when we speak of "tortuous policy," {12} or "twisting the meaning of a sentence." Now this subtle entity—this serpent—although presented to Eve in bodily form, ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... I took one or two rides along the southern slopes of the mountain on the old pretext of shooting for the pot. Hans accompanied me on these occasions, but was, I noted, very silent and thoughtful, as though he were hunting something up and down his tortuous intelligence. Once we got quite near to the mouth of the cave or tunnel where poor Savage had met his horrid end. As we stood studying it a white-robed man whose head was shaved, which made me think he must be a priest, came up and asked me mockingly why we did not go through the tunnel and see ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... and at the other side of the world seven ships, fitted out from Holland by private enterprise, were forcing their way to the South Sea through the terrible strait between Patagonia and Fire Land; then supposed the only path around the globe. For the tortuous mountain channel, filled with whirlpools and reefs, and the home of perpetual tempest, which had been discovered in the early part of the century by Magellan, was deemed the sole opening pierced by ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... during pregnancy the veins in the legs become somewhat enlarged. This is due to the pressure of the womb, which interferes with the circulation. If the veins become very prominent, swollen and tortuous, they are called varicose. This condition should be prevented, because it often and to some degree always persists permanently even after the pregnancy is over. The best precautionary measure is for the woman to wear a well-fitting abdominal belt or maternity corset, which supports ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Orleans was can not be found twice in the same age and country; and one of the most mournful spectacles of our time is, the fate of the man and his family, for whom all these violent, and we must add, tortuous exertions, were made twenty years ago. Talleyrand's share in these transactions can not be gainsaid. Though a revolutionist, in so far as the elder branch of the Bourbons was concerned, he was not, however, a Republican in 1830; and had, probably, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the universal train already prepared in thought, and the selfish ambition of Aristagoras forwarded the march of a revolution in favour of liberty that embraced all the cities of Ionia. But Aristagoras, evidently a man of a profound, though tortuous policy, was desirous of engaging not only the colonies of Greece, but the mother country also, in the great and perilous attempt to resist the Persian. High above all the states of the elder Greece soared the military fame of Sparta; and that people ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... south-east coast of America with great rapidity. The 3rd of July we were at the opening of the Straits of Magellan, level with Cape Vierges. But Commander Farragut would not take a tortuous passage, but doubled ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... springing roan under him he felt little care or uneasiness. After a five-mile gallop he drew in to the plainsman's jogging trot, and rode northeastward toward the Nueces River bottoms. He knew the country well—its most tortuous and obscure trails through the great wilderness of brush and pear, and its camps and lonesome ranches where one might find safe entertainment. Always he bore to the east; for the Kid had never seen the ocean, and he had a fancy to lay ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... its compact and restricted area, was aptly suited for government from one centre; the Nile valley proper, narrow, tortuous, and stretching like a thin strip on either bank of the river, did not lend itself to so complete a unity. It, too, represented a single kingdom, having the reed and the lotus for its emblems; but its component parts were more loosely ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... Nello's steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in the town, save where some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices of house-shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting drinking-songs. The streets were ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise to reach a designated [spot], even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... of the Greek army led to a Greek revolution which broke out at Saloniki on the 30th of August. The King pursued a tortuous policy, professing neutrality and yet constantly bringing himself under suspicion. The Revolutionists organized an army and finally M. Venizelos, after strong efforts to induce the King to act, became the head of the Provisional Government of the Revolutionists. The Allies pursued ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... length approached, but the crowd had increased so enormously that the road was completely blocked. Tradesmen with their portable workshops, pedlars with their cumbersome gear and pack-horses could not pass, but had to wait for their turn; there were not even any tortuous by-streets in this place whereby they might reach their destination. Children lost themselves in the crush, and went about crying for their mothers. A party of travelers, newly arrived from the south by caravan route, got wedged with their worn-out horses ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... high-pressure boat is very great in the longer "reaches;" but, the Alabama is a most tortuous stream. Often you stand by the pilot-house and see, right under the quarter, a gleaming streak of water across a neck of land over which you might toss a stone; and yet you may steam on miles around the point that juts ahead, before you ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... temporary scoop-net; huge, unwieldy, wood barks, put together with wooden pegs, and steered with long, clumsy rudders, which the poor peasants have painfully poled —tramp, tramp, tramp, along the sides—through four hundred miles of tortuous waterways from that province of the former haughty republic, "Lord Novgorod the Great," where Prince Rurik ruled and laid the foundations of the present imperial empire, and whence came Prince-Saint Alexander, to win his surname of Nevsky, as we ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... lands,—and what device the Indian does not know is little worth knowing. Under a dripping leaden sky the earth lay desolate and repulsive. Miles away to the north the dim, castellated buttes and pinnacles of the range were still faintly visible, and the tortuous trail of the column of twos winding its way over wave after wave of barren prairie like the wake of some terrestrial bark in a sea of mud. Far to the westward a jagged line of hills, sharply defined, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... without either of those two requisites for a manufacturing point. The Cuyahoga river, though giving abundant water power along a considerable portion of its course, enters Cleveland as a slow moving stream, winding its sluggish way in so tortuous a course that it seems reluctant to lose its identity in the waters of the lake. Water power, under such circumstances, is out of the question, and, as with no coal, and a rapidly decreasing supply ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... conversation in "Hamlet," is by no means obsolete. But who can write such a colloquy? It would be easier, we fancy, for a clever man to give a sketch of Lord Bacon, with all his rapid and profound generalization, than to follow the slow and tortuous mental processes of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... gates. In half an hour they were wending their way down the north side of the peak by gradually declining roads, headed for the much-talked-of home of the Witch in Ganlook Gap, some six miles from Edelweiss as the crow flies, but twice that distance over the tortuous bridle paths ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the tabu from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and grave from her leisurely ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... gardens and grounds. Somewhere upon these grounds the story was that Henry kept Rosamond in a concealed cottage. The entrance to the cottage was hidden in the depths of an almost impenetrable thicket, and could only be approached through a tortuous and intricate path, which led this way and that by an infinite number of turns, forming a sort of maze, made purposely to bewilder those attempting to pass in and out. Such a place was often made in those days in palace-grounds as a sort of ornament, or, rather, as an amusing ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the tortuous and rocky road that we had taken from Ras el 'Ain was the best and nearest that we could ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... but the consciousness that he was subsisting on money not his own would have kept him from his vice. As it was, he had lived through the months between Winter and Spring, like one threading his way through the tortuous lengths of a cavern; never coming to the light, but coming upon absurd mishaps in his effort to reach it. His adventures in London partook somewhat of the character of those in Warbeach, minus the victim; for whom two or three gentlemen in public thoroughfares ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... display of goodwill towards England, the apparent complacency with which the French nation acquiesced in his rule, and the outward prosperity accompanying it, did their natural work in conciliating approval, and in making men willing to forget the obscure and tortuous steps by which he had climbed to power. One day he and France were to pay for these things; but meanwhile he was a popular ruler, accepted and approved by the nation he governed, anxious for its prosperity, and earnest in keeping it friendly ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... truth then dawned on me, and as I withdrew my clammy finger-tips from my ears, the faint fluttering of wings reached me, through an open skylight. Once again I moved on; the gallery was left behind, and I was well on my way down the tortuous passage leading to my goal, when a luminous object, of vast height and cylindrical shape, suddenly barred ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... after his release the Secretary engaged in a series of tortuous intrigues to gain the favour of the Medici. Many of the stories may be exaggerated, but none make pleasant reading, and nothing proved successful. His position was miserable. Temporarily crippled by torture, out of favour with ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the goal of his ambition could be reached. Throughout his career his main object was to rule his countrymen, and that object he attained by the adoption of methods which, whether they be regarded as tortuous or straightforward, morally justifiable or worthy of condemnation, were of a ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... good can be arrived at by a crooked path that cannot be attained by a straight and open way? Who has advised a tortuous policy and the concealment of the real sentiments and intentions of Government? Has an intriguing spirit dictated the refusal of pay to the Chilian navy, whilst the army is doubly paid? Is it proposed thus to alienate the minds ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... the branches grow; but how beauteous the blossom blooms! The maidens try with profuse show to compete in their spring head-dress. No snow remains on the vacant pavilion and the tortuous rails. Upon the running stream and desolate hills descend the russet clouds. When cold prevails one can in a still dream follow the lass-blown fife. The wandering elf roweth in fragrant spring, the boat in the red stream. In a previous existence, it must sure have ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... door of their prison cabin opened and a seaman informed them that their breakfast was ready. They passed through the narrow door, and edged their way along a tortuous path that led to the rear, where they entered what might be called a miniature galley, on one side of which was a narrow shelf containing food of ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... was in the trees, waving their bare limbs as in fantastic grief against the dull clouds. There was no comfort in youth and health and prettiness of face and form; no pride in possession of lands and money, when a hot and tortuous thing like conscience was lying so ill-concealed behind the thin wall ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... on the same plane with the rest: composition quite futile, but will translate well and appreciate what he reads. Not a quick brain, but possessed by a slowly moving tortuous imagination. Conduct ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Nietsche has frankly confessed the real grievance of his class of mischief makers. They are impatient and easily bored; while the business of establishing a healthful and vigorous society is complicated, tortuous, and slow. Their talent for letters, their love of vivid pictures, sharp contrasts, and concise dramatic situations, cannot adapt itself to the real bulk and complexity of life. Civilization is too promiscuous, too prolonged and monotonous, ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... clear—water-courses here and there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks. Towards afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the range comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge, tortuous buttresses standing edged with sun. At all hours of the day they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the reddest chapter in the Indian wars of the Western plains. Out amid the dirge of landscape, framed within the valley of the Little Big Horn, where that historic river winds its tortuous way through the sagebrush and cactus of Montana, a weather-beaten cross stands on a lonely hillside, surrounded by a cluster of white marble slabs, and all marking the final resting-place of the heroes of the ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... or hurricane deck (as it is called) was very attractive. Flowing, as the river Hudson does, through a fine mountainous country, the magnificent scenery on the banks strikes the observer with feelings allied to awe. The stream being broad and tortuous, beetling crags, high mountains and bluffs, and dense forests, burst suddenly and unexpectedly into view; fearful precipices abound here and there, amidst luxuriant groves and uncouth pine barrens, forming altogether a diversity that ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... even some learned native Pundits—believe they can. The claim, however, is pronounced unworthy of attention. Of the late Smriti (traditional history) which, for those who know how to interpret its allegories, is full of unimpeachable historical records, an Ariadne's thread through the tortuous labyrinth of the Past—has come to be unanimously regarded as a tissue of exaggerations, monstrous fables, "clumsy forgeries of the first centuries A.D." It is now openly declared as worthless not only for exact chronological but even for general historical ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... his side rode Macnaghten and Burnes; in the pageant were the principal officers of the British army. Sabres flashed in front of the procession, bayonets sparkled in its rear, as it wended its way through the great bazaar which Pollock was to destroy three years later, and along the tortuous street to the gate of the Balla Hissar. But neither the monarch nor his pageant kindled the enthusiasm in the Cabulees. There was no voice of welcome; the citizens did not care to trouble themselves so much as to make him a salaam, and ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... Tortuous little streets lead through the town of Coucy into a great green space which commands the castle. It is approached from the new and rather pretentious lodge in which the keeper of the castle now resides, through one of the finest and loftiest avenues in France. But the tallest ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... rivers, the clear and swiftly-flowing Angara (which rises in Lake Baikal to join the river Yenisei just below Yeniseisk), and the small and unimportant Irkut river. It is an unfinished, slipshod city, a strange mixture of squalor and grandeur, with tortuous, ill-paved streets, where the wayfarer looks instinctively for the "No-thoroughfare" board. There is one long straggling main street with fairly good shops and buildings, but beyond this Irkutsk remains much the same dull, dreary-looking place that I remember in the early nineties, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... rest. In and out the tortuous streets of Paris he roamed during the better part of that night. He was now only awaiting the dawn to publicly demand the right to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... chief aide-de-camp, was entitled to the place) on my left. The city of Strelsau is partly old and partly new. Spacious modern boulevards and residential quarters surround and embrace the narrow, tortuous, and picturesque streets of the original town. In the outer circles the upper classes live; in the inner the shops are situated; and, behind their prosperous fronts, lie hidden populous but wretched lanes and alleys, filled with a poverty-stricken, turbulent, ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... eddies with the purple blend; The Chyle's white trunk, diverging from its source, 550 Seeks through the vital mass its shining course; O'er each red cell, and tissued membrane spreads In living net-work all its branching threads; Maze within maze its tortuous path pursues, Winds into glands, inextricable clues; 555 Steals through the stomach's velvet sides, and sips The silver surges with a thousand lips; Fills each fine pore, pervades each slender hair, And drinks ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... surrounding trees like an inverted forest. In the direction from which we had come we could see the high blue hills beyond the Nascaupee, very dim in the far distance. Below us the Crooked River lost itself as it wound its tortuous way through the wooded valley that we had traversed. Somewhere down there Duncan was bivouacked, and we wondered if his fire was burning at one ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... lake, and again entering the narrow, tortuous course of the river, we bade adieu to everything like scenery, until we should reach ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... mistake. We are too prone to scorn the simple and the obvious. We forsake the fountain of living water, and hew out to ourselves clumsy cisterns. We neglect the majestic simplicities of the gospel, and involve our tired brains and hungry hearts in tortuous systems that lead us a long, long way from home. The landlord is right. The simplest course ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... other of the day, inevitably gravitate. Lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, merchants, lovers, soldiers, market-women, loafers, horses, dogs, wagons, all crowd in a noisy medley the narrow cobble-paved streets around the Loge. Of course there are other streets, tortuous, odorous and cool, intersecting the old town, and there are various open spaces, one of which is the broad market square on one side flanked ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... call to life from out the tomb; Death's bands thus swiftly rent, Life's tidal force Undammed, had rushed with too impetuous vent, Did not a tortuous cave arrest its course, Ere he at length emerged ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... of it. But the forest, even at its entrance, was very dark and gloomy indeed. Thick trees crossed each other overhead, and shut out the bright, cheerful daylight. He could hardly see his way along the narrow, tortuous paths, and the thorns which the peasant had spoken of ran into him continually, for they grew high as well as thick, and crossed the path in every direction. He began heartily to repent that he had quitted the palace of Prosperity, and wished himself back again with all his ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... dominated by a great castle upon an overlooking height whose name I knew, but could not speak. I walked through many streets, some broad and straight with high, modern buildings, some narrow, gloomy, and tortuous, between the gables of quaint old houses whose overhanging stories, elaborately ornamented with carvings in wood and stone, almost ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... weakly, but which, in the words of an old physician at Tours, was undergoing its final fusion into a temperament of iron. Child in body and old in mind, I had read and thought so much that I knew life metaphysically at its highest reaches at the moment when I was about to enter the tortuous difficulties of its defiles and the sandy roads of its plains. A strange chance had held me long in that delightful period when the soul awakes to its first tumults, to its desires for joy, and the savor ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... as in the majority of Greek cities, the houses of individuals were small, low, packed closely together, forming narrow streets, tortuous and ill paved. The Athenians reserved their display for their public monuments. Ever after they levied heavy war taxes on their allies they had large sums of money to expend, and these were employed in erecting beautiful edifices. In the market-place ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... hope they will be by "His own arm," (as dear J.T. said,) their presence will not be laid to my charge. Alas, that I am so often guilty of dallying with them! What wonder that the wilderness is so long and tortuous, when I reckon the molten calves, ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... here, he started reciting his verses to the cheats, cut-purses, parricides, and brigands, who abound in Hades; his supple and tortuous reasonings filled them with enthusiasm, and they pronounced him the cleverest by far. So Euripides, elated with pride, took possession of the throne ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and events. This was the particular shape taken by his inspiration; it came to him directly, honestly in the light of his day, not on the tortuous, dark roads of meditation. His realities came to him from a genuine source, from this universe of vain appearances wherein we men have found everything to make us proud, sorry, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... This contains some finely carved panelling in a good state of preservation, and was evidently the chief room of the house. From it a passage extends to the back buildings. A narrow and particularly tortuous staircase leads from the front room to the upper rooms at the back of the house, to which access cannot be gained by the main stairs. On passing through the hall, the visitor finds himself in a large kitchen, where provision ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... her with hot hungry eyes. His brain in its feverish intensity took note of trifles—the tortuous pattern of the braid on her gown, the gold sleeve-links at her wrists, the specks of brine that glistened on her temples under the wind-woven strands of her black hair; it recorded these things and remembered them afterward. ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... bundled in robes in the bottom of the sled, idly watched the panorama of tree-trunks between which the road twisted in an endless succession of tortuous windings. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... the table after supper, his head sunk on his chest, revolving the various aspects of his position. One thing was definite—he must have Taou Yuen; it was unthinkable that she should continue with Gerrit Ammidon. It needed skillful planning, tortuous execution, but in the end he'd get his desire. He had no doubt of that. It was necessary. If she opposed him she would discover that he, too, could be subtle, Oriental, yes—dangerous. None of the stupid inhibitions that, for ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and there a wild hill-side rising as a contrast to both. The most remarkable variety, and not perhaps the least agreeable, was, however, to be found in the absence of the Wag-water; my guide having led me in a direction by which its tortuous course was avoided. ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... followed that conscientious bootmaker as he left the hotel. He did not proceed to the shop of Mr. Jarvis, but, crossing the Strand, mounted a city-bound motor bus and proceeded eastward upon it as far as the Law Courts. Here he dismounted and plunged into that maze of tortuous lanes which dissects the triangle formed by Chancery Lane ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... to assemble at Todgers's. Mr Jinkins, the only boarder invited, was on the ground first. He wore a white favour in his button-hole, and a bran new extra super double-milled blue saxony dress coat (that was its description in the bill), with a variety of tortuous embellishments about the pockets, invented by the artist to do honour to the day. The miserable Augustus no longer felt strongly even on the subject of Jinkins. He hadn't strength of mind enough to do it. 'Let him come!' he had said, in answer to Miss Pecksniff, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... absurd framework of Icarias or Phalansteries. His clear, bold, and thoroughly executive mind planned a magnificent scheme of commercial enterprise, which, having its centre of operations at Guaymas, should ramify through the golden wastes that stretch in silence and solitude along the tortuous banks of the Rio San Jose. This was to be the beginning and the ostensible end of the enterprise. Then he dreamed of the influence of American arts and American energy penetrating into the twilight of that decaying nationality, and saw the natural course of events leading on, first, Emigration, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... of a melancholy turn, used to say life was but a burden to her-that she could see nothing in the future that did not seem dark and tortuous. The lot into which she was cast of necessity others might have mistaken for that which she had chosen. It was not. The hard hand of necessity had forced her into this quicksand of death; the indifference of a naturally generous ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... formed;—a dozen or more priests leading,—incense-bearers and acolytes walking next,— and then the long train of little children and girls carrying their symbolic banners, following after. The way they had to walk was a steep, winding ascent, through tortuous streets, to the Cathedral, which stood in the centre of a great square on an eminence which overlooked the whole city, and as soon as they started they began to sing,—softly at first, then more clearly and sweetly, till gradually the air grew full ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... or three degrees. Captain Wickham and the surgeon visited an inlet near the ship to-day, which had indeed been looked into, but not explored before. They proceeded to the south-west for about three miles, through a very tortuous channel, dry in many parts at low-water, thickly studded with mangrove bushes, over and through which the tide made its way at high-water, giving to that part of the country the appearance of an extensive morass. A slightly elevated ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... handkerchiefs. They had rowed out thither, being determined to give us really the parting cheer, and till the shades of twilight fell we could see their white handkerchiefs fluttering, and hear their voices borne on the evening breeze, as we meandered slowly through the tortuous ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... In tortuous paths, with prompters blind, we trust One Guide—to lead us forth and set us free! Give us, Lord God! all merciful and just! The FAITH that is ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... away from the house, Dyce wondered why he had told that lie about the friend at Alverholme. Would it not have been better, from every point of view, to speak plainly of Connie Bride? Where was the harm? He recognised in himself a tortuous tendency, not to be overcome by reflection and moral or utilitarian resolve. He could not, much as he desired it, be an entirely honest man. His ideal was honesty, even as he had a strong prejudice in favour of personal cleanliness. But occasionally he shirked the cold ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... public,[6251] and only the sovereign alone has the right to talk in public. Between writer and readers, every communication is intercepted beforehand by a triple and quadruple line of defenses through which a long, tortuous and narrow wicket is the only passage, and where the manuscript, like a bundle of suspicious goods, is overhauled and repeatedly verified after having obtained its free certificate and its permit of circulation. Napoleon ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... far side of the camp a path led to the Agency. Its course was tortuous, winding in the shape of the letter S. It was at the second curve that an unexpected, and to Nevil, at least, unwelcome ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... good son of the Church, a faithful husband, a successfully-scheming father. What his priest thought of him is known only to his priest, but we may be sure he regretted him. A jury of his peers would have approved him in his every action. If the paths that he had followed were sometimes tortuous, along many of them he had been guided by the ankus of that mahout in whose directions his faith had taught him to confide. He had lived according to the light that he had received, and in his last act he took his life in his hand, and gave ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... undulations of the little river, a great line of poplars wound in and out. A fine mist, a white haze through which the moonbeams passed, silvering it and making it gleam, hung around and above the mountains, covering all the tortuous course of the water with a kind of light and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... sentiment, not of value. All the rest—acres of pasture, cleared and grassed, stretches of fertile ground, blocks of noble timber still uncut—had passed through the hands of mortgage holders, through bank transfers, by devious and tortuous ways, until the title rested in Horace Gower,—who had promptly built the showy summer house on Cradle Bay to flaunt in his face, so old Donald believed and ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... deep snows, grouped sombrely on the valley-ward slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts with the long-leafed Pinus jeffreyi, sighing its soul away upon the wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here begins the manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the sharp waste of boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek, ruddy, chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet, burnished laurel, and the million unregarded trumpets ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... immediately unloaded, drawn upon the shore, and in twenty-four hours was so repaired as to enable them to continue their journey. As they entered more southern latitudes the floating ice disappeared, and the voyage became more pleasant, as they rapidly floated down the tortuous stream, by forests and headlands, and every variety of wild, sublime, and beautiful scenery, until they reached New Orleans, on the ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... with fishes and sharks. O king! she directing her course towards the sea, separated herself, into three streams; and her water was bestrewn with piles of froth, which looked like so many rows of (white) ganders. And crooked and tortuous in the movement of her body, at places; and at others stumbling as it were; and covered with foam as with a robe: she went forward like a woman drunk. And elsewhere, by virtue of the roar of her waters, she uttered loud sounds. Thus assuming very many different aspects, ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... behind three tiny donkeys, we followed a tortuous, foaming stream in the bottom of a splendid valley, ever going upward. At night we slept in the open, and next day crossed the mountain into a forest of oak and pine sprinkled with silver birches. Hundreds of wood-cutters ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... necessary for the streets. Above the town the rock rises almost perpendicularly; but every spot which can be built upon is appropriated, and scattered buildings may be seen half way up the rock, only accessible by tortuous and narrow paths. The houses are built of white freestone; many of them are handsome erections, and on a fine day the town of Victoria has an ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... succession of granite arches jutting out, and still more contracting the passage. He had to stoop to pass under them. No speed was possible in that corridor. Any one trying to escape through it would have been compelled to move slowly. The passage twisted. All entrails are tortuous; those of a prison as well as those of a man. Here and there, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left, spaces in the wall, square and closed by large iron gratings, gave glimpses of flights of stairs, some descending ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Cornwall. The town occupies the western limb of the wide bay of St. Ives. On the narrow neck of land joining the promontory known as The Island to the mainland, most of the houses of the fishing town are packed away in picturesque confusion, while the streets are tortuous in the extreme. On either side of this isthmus the land rises; behind it thunder the waves on Porthmeor beach; in front are the deep green waters of the harbour, protected by two piers. The beach is of firm, hard sand, upon ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... of Derues' countenance and by this half answer, which appeared to hide a mystery and to aim at diverting attention by offering a bait to curiosity. He might have stopped Derues at the moment when he sought to plunge into a tortuous argument, and compelled him to answer with the same clearness and decision which distinguished Monsieur de Lamotte's question; but he reflected that the latter's inquiries, unforeseen, hasty, and passionate, were perhaps more likely to disconcert a prepared ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... lungs. The inspired air is often too dry, dusty and cold. The normal nose remedies all these defects. The mucous membrane in the nasal passages contains cilia, which catch the dust. The nasal passages are very tortuous so that during its journey through them the air is warmed and takes ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... find in London suburbs. You do not find it in the faces of men who sit at a desk and hire you and fire you. The momentary glimpse I had of that chief's face made clear to me many passages in history, many things in literature, many dark and tortuous riddles in the adventures of my own little tinpot soul. And in the light of this discovery I heard the Chief, our chief, saying, 'Yes, these chaps have power of life and death over their people, power of life ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... humming-bird building a nest. When at the end of three months her betrothed had fairly settled down to his correspondence—in which Mrs. Highmore was the only person, so far as we could discover, disappointed, even she moreover being in this particular tortuous and possibly jealous; when the situation had assumed such a comfortable shape it was quite time to prepare. I published at that moment my first volume, mere faded ink to-day, a little collection of literary impressions, odds and ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... preordained expression. And it was at such a time, when light and water were both fading, and the blackness of the Marsh was once more reasserting itself, that a small boat was creeping along one of the tortuous inlets, at times half hiding behind the bank like a wounded bird. As it slowly penetrated inland it seemed to be impelled by its solitary occupant in a hesitating uncertain way, as if to escape observation rather ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... said nothing more, but Mrs. Brook preferred none the less to treat the question as between themselves. She WAS, as the others said, wonderful. "You can't help thinking me"—she spoke to him straight—"rather tortuous." The pause she thus momentarily produced was so intense as to give a sharpness that was almost vulgar to the little "Oh!" by which it was presently broken and the source of which neither of her three companions could afterwards in the least have named. Neither would have ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... situation was a tortuous one must be apparent from this attempt to set forth the salient facts. The basic point was that there could be no blockade of Germany unless the neutral ports of contiguous countries were also blockaded, and Great Britain believed ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... very tortuous, extending in a general direction south nine miles. No events occurred worthy of any remark during our examination, except one of a trifling character: the mosquitoes taking advantage of the calm, between ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... storm of slaughter and rapine without; for century after century within raged no less fiercely the unending fury of the new theology. Filtered down through Byzantine epitomes, through Arabic translations, through every sort of strange and tortuous channel, a vague and distorted tradition of this great literature just survived long enough to kindle the imagination of the fifteenth century. The chance of history, fortunate perhaps for the whole world, swept the last Greek scholars away from Constantinople ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... course, that feeling is vastly stronger, and for my own sake as well as yours I should abstain from any action against him. Mind, at present I have only vague suspicions, but if those suspicions turn out true, it will be evident that your father has been pursuing a very tortuous policy, to put it no stronger, in order to gain possession of Fairclose. I cannot say definitely as yet what I shall do, but at present I incline to the opinion that I shall drop ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... hotels and the Casino of a thermal station, and the factories of a new world. The traveller finds that the broad upper boulevards are filled with tourists and smart English visitors; and in the narrow streets pert factory-hands come noisily from work. Still he climbs on toward the Cathedral, through tortuous streets and little alley-ways. And in the gloomiest of them all there is no odour of a stale antiquity, but the perfume of a garden-full of roses, of a thousand orange-blossoms, and of locusts, honey-sweet, and he begins to think himself enchanted. He feels the dark, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the most historic of Paris bridges, he threaded the narrow, tortuous thoroughfares dear to every lover of old Paris, till he reached the Place St. Sulpice. There, forming one of the corners of the square, was the house wherein was housed the Bibliotheque Cardinal, looking exactly as ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... left the party and wandered alone into one of those tortuous stream-beds that intersect the plain, searching for a certain kind of crystal which may be found in such places, washed out of the soil by wintry torrents. I specialized in minerals in those days—minerals and girls. Dangerous and unprofitable studies! Even at that tender ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... for ever—but she was led by tortuous ways, and left to work out her own salvation in very fear and trembling, till the dear human love was given to her in pity to help her to know something of that which is Divine. And then, I hope, above ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... us that he had seen the place. He had been hunting for honey in the almost inaccessible mountains of that wild spot, and had one day found himself in a narrow gorge, looking down into what appeared to be a large crater. The sides were precipitous except at one spot where a narrow and tortuous canon made it possible to enter. And here, he assured us, was the stronghold of the baboons. Huge ones bigger than men, he told us and hundreds of them. And for a new gun and some powder and shot he would take us to the place. But ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... miles, east and west, the depth never exceeded five feet. Mackenzie and 'English Chief,' his principal follower, ascended to the highest ground on the island, {85} from which they were able to command a wide view in all directions. To the south of them lay the tortuous and complicated channels of the broad river which they had descended; east and north were islands in great number; but on the westward side the eye could discern the broad field of solid ice that marked the ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... curious old chambers, it was to be expected that I should see some Wohlegemuths—as usual, with backgrounds in a blaze of gold, and figures with tortuous limbs, pinched-in waists, and caricatured countenances. In a room, pretty plentifully encumbered with rubbish, I saw a charming Snyders; being a dead stag, suspended from a pole. There is here a portrait of Albert Duerer, by ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... was being led by an old Jew, dressed in a Moslem robe and turban, through one of the most tortuous and crowded parts of Granada. It would seem that this Jew was known there, for his appearance, accompanied by a veiled woman, apparently caused no surprise to those followers of the Prophet that he met, some of whom, ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... width in this streamlet and its tortuous course were curious, especially as it must lead the floods of the Lachlan almost directly back from the general direction of their current to supply a lake. Thus the fluviatile process seemed to be reversed here, the tendency of this river being not to carry surface waters ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... a slave to take care of; and the third, expecting a like fate, shrieks out in fear of the impending vengeance. He pants for new victories, "Who will bring me into (the) strong city?" probably the yet unsubdued Petra, hidden away in its tortuous ravine, with but one perilous path through the gorge. And at last all the triumph of victory rises to a higher region of thought in the closing words, which lay bare the secret of his strength, and breathe the true spirit of the soldier of Jehovah. "In God we shall do valiantly; ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... of the surprises of Nepenthe. It lay somewhat out of the way, at the end of a narrow, gloomy and tortuous lane. Who would have dreamt of finding a house of this kind in such a situation? Who would have expected, on passing through that mouldy wooden gateway in the wall, to find himself in a courtyard that recalled ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... time. He was in no hurry. Speed was the least part of his programme. Far more important was secrecy. With that patience which the frontiersman has learned from the Indian he followed a tortuous course ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... the city, with the battery-room in the rear; behind which was the office of the agent of the Associated Press. The plastering was about one-third gone from the ceiling. A small stove, used occasionally in the winter, was connected to the chimney by a tortuous pipe. The office was never cleaned. The switchboard for manipulating the wires was about thirty-four inches square. The brass connections on it were black with age and with the arcing effects of lightning, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... It was here she housed her husband's manuscripts, which she knew, as she used to say, "as a shepherd knew his sheep." They lined three sides of the room, and filled many packing-cases on the floor. To this place she was wont to repair daily, ascending a tortuous staircase, and finally getting into the loft by means of a ladder. Later she had to abandon this steep ascent, but so long as it was possible she scaled the ladder daily, and would sit on a packing-case surrounded by her ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... with its weight of sorrow,—up the red, muddy, turbid current, through the abrupt tortuous windings of the Red river; and sad eyes gazed wearily on the steep red-clay banks, as they glided by in dreary sameness. At last the boat stopped at a small town, and Legree, with his ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was quite small in the Arkansas settlements, and at least a dozen times carrying on past the point where I left him at Nephi. It were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and so, without prejudice to the verity of my account, I shall skip much that is vague and tortuous and repetitional, and give the facts as I have assembled them out of the various times, in whole and part, as ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... suburbs of the large towns, there is no ambition beyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore. There is no such thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility of name, up or down the whole tortuous length of the Ohio. As yet the land is not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep it to themselves or come away to spend it in European travel, or pause to waste it unrecognized on the ungrateful Atlantic seaboard. The only distinctions that are ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... mighty walls of Moroccan cities. Underneath the tower the vaulted entrance turns, Arab fashion, at right angles, profiling its red arch against darkness and mystery. This bending of passages, so characteristic a device of the Moroccan builder, is like an architectural expression of the tortuous ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... his signal ere the amphibian turned a bend in the tortuous channel and saw Jack vanish from view; nor could he long detect any sound to indicate the presence of an airship since cautious Jack had again made use of that wonderful "silencer" which they had found so useful while conducting their search during the preceding night. Then the ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... is a tortuous and shifting impulse. It brings Age back from years of wandering to totter in the hamlet of its birth; and it scatters armies of ripe manhood to bleach far-away ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... to be worthier of trust than her beautiful namesake of the days of Ulysses, and she not only made her way safely out through the tortuous channel among the reefs, but led the yacht with the boys on board ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... after a beetle or "miller." He is hunting around in the dull grass now, I suspect, with the desire to indulge this favorite whim. There!—the opportunity is afforded him. Away goes a little cream-colored meadow-moth in the most tortuous course he is capable of, and away goes Socialis in pursuit. The contest is quite comical, though I dare say it is serious enough to the moth. The chase continues for a few yards, when there is a sudden rushing to cover in the grass,—then ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... could best supply—but he could write, and he did write, to the very great interest of Copley Banks. For hours they sat together over the map, and the dumb man pointed here and there to outlying reefs and tortuous inlets, while his companion sat smoking in silence, with his unvarying face and his ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an outlet or a current. Gondocori, who acted as pilot, quickly solved the mystery. A buttress of rock, which in the distance looked like a part of the mass, screened the entrance to a narrow waterway. Down this waterway the cacique navigated the canoe. It ran in tortuous course between rocks so high that at times we could see nothing save a strip of purple sky, studded with stars. Here and there the channel widened out, and we caught a glimpse of the sun; and at an immeasurable height above us towered the nevados ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... and he resolved to persevere in his original intention. As for General Forey, whether his dullness of perception failed to grasp the true drift of his master's mind, or whether he was unable to steer his way through the tortuous policy which he was called upon to further, he seemed to regard his mission as fulfilled. After he had established the native provisional government, he complacently rested in the enjoyment of his new title of Marshal of France, ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... here; for, before the end of the century, they removed to a place four miles distant, now called New Lorette, or Indian Lorette. It was a wild spot, covered with the primitive forest, and seamed by a deep and tortuous ravine, where the St. Charles foams, white as a snow-drift, over the black ledges, and where the sunlight struggles through matted boughs of the pine and fir, to bask for brief moments on the mossy rocks or flash on the hurrying waters. On a plateau ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... set in a luxurious woodland dip, well beyond the town limits, and occupied a small flat of rich grass through which a mountain creek wound its ridiculously tortuous course. Thus it was provided with the natural resources demanded by a steeplechase course as well ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... waved to the light, darker where the wind left it still, and beyond the wonderful haze-purple lent by distance. Far across that wide waste began the slow lift of uplands through which Deception Pass cut its tortuous many-canyoned way. ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... luxuriant branches of fresh green blackberry bushes encroached upon the track, still seething in soul, and full of the bitter wrong inflicted upon him by the man he had till lately considered his dearest friend. At each bend of the footpath, as it threaded its way through the tortuous dell, following close the elbows of the bickering little stream, he expected to come full in sight of Nevitt. But, gaze as he would, no Nevitt appeared. He must have gone on, Guy thought, and come out at the other end, into the upland road, ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland had been only one of many gratifications which had been bestowed upon Monk, when he was created Duke of Albemarle, in recognition of the substantial benefits to the King which had resulted, when the long-drawn disguises of his tortuous and self-interested policy had gradually unmasked themselves. As general over the Irish army under the Cromwellian administration, he had contrived to secure an estate in Ireland worth some four thousand a year, and it was of the first importance to him to retain a hold over ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... ground squirmed under the fire that was passing over them. Their bodies were in a tortuous motion. But York held them there; it made the gunners ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... mountain climb I never undertook. The vegetation was all novel, but it had that barbaric rankness of all tropical woods, with nothing of the sylvan sweetness and simplicity of our home woods. There were no fine, towering trees, but low, gnarled, and tortuous ones, which, with their hanging vines, like the broken ropes of a ship's rigging, and their parasitic growths, presented a riotous, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... helper could hurry a few matters of business to completion at and about the Picayune Tier. Richling did not get back to the Doctor's house until night had fallen and the sky was set aglare by seven miles' length of tortuous harbor front covered with millions' worth of burning merchandise. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... true, the business of the historian is to understand the influences which led to the first, not the second, decision of the Representative or Senator or President or even Justice of the Supreme Court. Hence long-winded speeches or tortuous decisions of courts have not been studied so closely as the statistics of the cotton or tobacco crops, the reports of manufacturers, and the conditions of the frontier, which determined more of the votes of members of Congress than the most eloquent ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... garden, where the soft perfume of china-tree blossoms filled his nostrils. Keeping on he passed many of the hacienda buildings, a sugar mill, a cotton factory, warehouses, stables with corrals, and entered a tortuous street between adobes, where he found the hacienda store. Here the administrador was watching the clerks who sold and the peons who bought. The latter were mostly women, barefooted and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten corn, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... was a rather promiscuous one. It had more tortuous relationships than most families have, although there were only four in it, not ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... reappeared on his fruitless expeditions as the boy's eyes narrowed with excitement, and his figure straightened and his breathing quickened as he followed the police boat in the thrilling pursuit of Tonga and Jonathan Small on the tortuous, traffic-blocked Thames. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... not forgive him for having made them subject to their ancient vassals, took delight in holding him up to scorn, and not being able to deny the fact of his triumph, explained it by the adoption of tortuous and despicable methods. They would not even allow that he was of royal birth, but asserted that he was of ignoble origin, the son of a female goatherd and a certain Atradates,* who, belonging to the savage clan of the Mardians, lived by brigandage. Cyrus himself, according ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
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