"Waterless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... understood it was Nature's blessing to them to enable the poor beasts to exist in these waterless regions." ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... conviction. We open with Huyghens, a Dutch astronomer of note, who, while he thinks it certain "that the moon has no air or atmosphere surrounding it as we have," and "cannot imagine how any plants or animals whose whole nourishment comes from fluid bodies, can thrive in a dry, waterless, parched soil," yet asks, "What, then, shall this great ball be made for; nothing but to give us a little weak light in the night time, or to raise our tides in the sea? Shall not we plant some people there that may have the pleasure of seeing our earth turn upon its axis, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... translucent hills rose before us, all around the solitude was complete. Village life, and even tent life, naturally gathers about a river-bank or a spring; and the waste we were crossing was of waterless sand bound together by a loose desert growth. Only an abandoned well-curb here and there cast its blue shadow on the yellow bled, or a saint's tomb hung like a bubble between sky and sand. The light had the preternatural ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... swung out into the great dry Karoo prairie. It was a comfortless trek. Earth and sky seemed to have forgotten the rain of preceding days; or it may have been that the storms which had distressed us had been purely local, for we had struck a great waterless plain which showed not the slightest sign of moisture. The shuffling mules and lumbering waggons churned up a pungent dust; a great spiral pillar of brown cloud mushroomed out above the column; no breath of air gave relief from the vertical rigour of the sun; the great snake-like column sweated ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... profaned its cleanliness by so much as one expectoration of tobacco juice, though all were either smoking or chewing that weed. They had far too great respect for Janet, Aleck's wife, and for the labor that cleanliness meant in that waterless region. They were all deep in the discussion of the late events at Sobrante and none heard the old traveler's approach over the soft ground, till he stood close beside them with his foot on ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... insight and thought of the observer, and we are not concerned with his travels. When a man travels across Arizona in a Pullman car, we do not think of him as having performed a feat bearing even the most remote resemblance to the feats of the first explorers of those waterless wastes; whatever admiration we feel in connection with his trip is reserved for the traffic-superintendent, engineer, fireman, and brakeman. But as regards the less-known continents, such as South America, we sometimes fail to remember these obvious truths. There yet ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... account of the change that has occurred in the opinions held concerning its physical condition. For a very long time our satellite was confidently, and almost universally, regarded as an airless, waterless, lifeless desert, a completely "dead world," a bare, desiccated skull of rock, circling ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... no route. Between us and the Silver Palace lie waterless deserts, great mountains, and, at last, a yawning chasm, miles in width, miles in depth. This chasm extends entirely round the broad plateau on which the wonderful palace stands like a dazzling dream. The bottom of the ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... the Puna coast is waterless. From the Volcano House you take with you not only food for the journey back to Hilo, but water in bottles; and your thirsty animals get none until you reach the end of your first day's journey, at Kaimu. Here, also, you can send a more than half-naked native into the trees for cocoa-nuts, ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... and 16th a desultory artillery duel proceeded on both sides with slight loss to us. The water question presented some difficulty, as the Blue Krantz River was several miles from Hussar Hill and the hill itself was waterless. A system of iron tanks mounted on ox waggons was arranged, and a sufficient though small supply maintained. The heavy artillery was also brought into action and strongly entrenched. The formidable nature of the enemy's position and the evident care with which he had fortified it may well have added ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... was passing the western confines of the waterless tract, and a cool breeze from the snowcapped Timanyonis was sweeping across the open platform. It blew strands of the red-brown hair from beneath the closely fitting travelling-hat; blew color into Miss Brewster's ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... fellow. It is clear that the case of a cold climate had never occurred to him; and even a hot one had been conceived most narrowly. Many of the Bedouin Arabs complain of ablutions not adapted to their waterless condition. These evidences of oversight would have been fatal to Islamism, had Islamism produced a high civilization.] from century to century, from the simplicity of shepherds to the utmost refinement of philosophers, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... rather waterless island of Bra['c], which is nearest to the mainland, seems to be chiefly remarkable on account of its chrysanthemums, from which an insect-powder is produced; and the number of changes, no less than ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... necessarily short, and only a few have navigable channels, the aggregate length of which is only 705 m. Nearly all rivers in the desert region are lost in the sands long before reaching the coast. Their waterless channels are interesting, however, as evidence of a time when climatological conditions on this coast were different. The principal rivers of this region are Sama (which forms the provisional boundary line with Peru), Tacna, Camarones, Loa, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... talk of Cotrone and its people, the Doctor could but confirm my observations. He contrasted the present with the past; this fever-stricken and waterless village with the great city which was called the healthiest in the world. In his opinion the physical change had resulted from the destruction of forests, which brought with it a diminution of the rainfall. "At Cotrone," he ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... Hawaiian Islands, though pitched in a lower key, and with greater variations between day and night. The key to its peculiarity, aside from its southern exposure, is the Colorado Desert. That desert, waterless and treeless, is cool at night and intolerably hot in the daytime, sending up a vast column of hot air, which cannot escape eastward, for Arizona manufactures a like column. It flows high above the mountains westward till it strikes the Pacific and parts with its heat, creating an ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... unclean spirit, when he is gone out of the man, passeth through waterless places, seeking rest, and findeth it not. Then he saith, 'I will return into my house whence I came out;' and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong
... which went into camp, waterless and hungry, in the dense jungle. Attracted by the horses, lions roared about the boma, and to their hideous din was added the shrill neighs of the terror-stricken beasts they hunted. There was little sleep for man or beast, and the sentries were doubled that there might be enough on duty ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... drifts, said it was as high as "five houses," or about fifty feet high. All the streams were buried; there was not a drop of liquid of any kind, and the villagers had lived in the tortures of that ash-choked air for three days, waterless. Two were delirious from thirst, all were at the point of exhaustion when the Coast Guard men ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of God, Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts, Which from this point begin and stretch away, Pathless, treeless, waterless, For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many mighty Nations, 5 Rested from their labors and from great afflictions Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall, And by the favor of KIEN LONG, God's Lieutenant upon Earth, The ancient Children of the Wilderness—the Torgote Tartars— ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... its disadvantages, the village is waterless; at all events in summer, when water is most wanted. Water is such a blessing and joy in a village—a joy for ever when it flows throughout the year, as at Nether Stowey and Winsford and Bourton-on-the-Water, to mention but three ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... steep sidling way into the passes of the Glorietta Mountains, down through lone, wind-swept canons, and on between wild, scarred hills, coming, at last, beyond the picturesque ridges, snow-crowned and mesa-guarded, into the long, gray, waterless lands of the Cimmarron country. Here we journeyed along monotonous levels that rose and fell unnoted because of lack of landmarks to measure by, only the broad, beaten Santa Fe Trail stretched on ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... shimmering heat and dry, thirsty sand, miles upon miles of it flashing by in a gray, barren blur. A flat, arid, monotonous land, vast, threatening, waterless, treeless. Its immensity awed, its bleakness depressed. Man's work here seemed but to accentuate the puny insignificance of man. Man had come upon the desert and had gone, leaving only a line of telegraph-poles with their glistening wires, two gleaming parallel ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes. It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless ravine, to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills—hills it might be of a greener kind—and above them invisibly supported, and seeming indeed to hang in the blue, were the snowclad summits of mountains ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... began to steam slowly up the long ditch called the Canal, and at last to the far east we caught a gladdening glimpse of the desert—the wild, waterless Wilderness of Sur, with its waves and pyramids of sand catching the morning rays, with it shadows of mauve, rose pink, and lightest blue, with its plains and rain-sinks, bearing brown dots, which were tamarisks (manna trees). The sky was heavenly blue, the water a deep band of ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... was one of the few He could take For His mission supernal, Whose feet would not falter, whose limbs would not ache, Through the waterless lands of the thorn and the snake, And the ways of the wild—bearing up for the sake Of a ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... pushed on, determined to have some fresh game before night if possible. Such thoughts as he sent back to the Nez Perce camp did not include the idea that it was already breaking up to follow him; still less did he have any imagination of thirsty white people toiling across a waterless ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... have passed in the meantime it is impossible to say. Its relatively small mass may have been unable to keep the lighter gases at its surface, or its air and water may, as some think, have been absorbed. It is to-day practically an airless and waterless desert, alternating between the heat of its long day and the intense cold of its long night. Careful observers, such as Professor Pickering, think that it may still have a shallow layer of heavy gases at its surface, and that this may permit the growth of some stunted vegetation during ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... depots. When I got the news, my principal concern wasnt for the incalculable damage to Consolidated Pemmican. My initial reaction was amazement at the ability of the devilgrass to make its way so rapidly across a sterile and waterless waste. In the years since its first appearance it had truly adapted itself to any climate, altitude, or condition confronting it. A few months before, the catastrophe would have plunged me into profound depression; now, with the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... it is about a fourth part, as Ptolemy's proofs have taught us, which is inhabited by living creatures known to us. If from this fourth part you take away in thought all that is usurped by seas and marshes, or lies a vast waste of waterless desert, barely is an exceeding narrow area left for human habitation. You, then, who are shut in and prisoned in this merest fraction of a point's space, do ye take thought for the blazoning of your fame, for the spreading abroad of your renown? Why, what amplitude or magnificence ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... of himself as a thirsty man in a waterless land. That may be a literally true reproduction of his condition, if indeed the old idea is correct, that this is a work of David's; for there is no more appalling desert than that in which he wandered as an exile. It is a land of arid mountains without a blade of verdure, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... extricated from imminent disaster by the masterful promptitude of Sir Redvers Buller. Notwithstanding a general consensus of professional and expert opinion in favour of the alternative route from Souakin to Berber, 240 miles long and far from waterless, the adoption of it was condemned as impossible. In June 1801, away back in the primitive days, an Anglo-Indian brigade 5000 strong ordered from Bombay, reached Kosseir on the Red Sea bound for the Upper Nile at Keneh thence to join Abercromby's force operating ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... edge of civilization, and he was waiting for the return of an Arab spy, a man he trusted, who had pushed on into the interior. The country beyond him was a dense tract of bush almost impenetrable; so far as he knew, waterless. ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... I know or dare to say, Yet remember me, Lord, because I am nothing, I have nothing, and am worth nothing. Do not turn your face from me; do not defer your coming; do not withdraw your consolation, lest my soul become like a waterless land before you. Lord, teach me to do your will; teach me to walk worthily and humbly in your presence; because you are my wisdom, who truly know me, and knew me before the world was made and before I was ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... the Soudan will ever be mentioned as one of the most difficult, and at the same time the most successful, enterprises ever undertaken. The task of carrying an army hundreds of miles across a waterless desert; conveying it up a great river, bristling with obstacles; defeating an enormously superior force, unsurpassed in the world for courage; and, finally, killing the leader of the enemy and crushing out the last spark of opposition; was a ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... scenery in the Low Country was to be found in the vicinity of the rivers. These, considering that they are African, do not lie very far apart. Yet sometimes there were long stretches of waterless country to be traversed, and severe suffering from thirst was a possibility occasionally realized. Besides, as we were practically explorers in a country without human inhabitants or recognizable landmarks, we might unwittingly pass ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... smuggle them in through my faithful adherent's territories, the stable, to avoid lectures within doors and at last even that resource failed; my garden, my blooming garden, the joy of my eyes, was forced to go waterless like its neighbours, and became shrivelled, scorched, and sunburnt, like them. It really went to my ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... shimmering desert flung its vast and desolate distances, forbidding and menacing. This was not the desert upland country of Utah, but a naked and bony world of colored rock and sand—a painted desert of heat and wind and flying sand and waterless wastes and barren ranges. But it did not daunt Slone. For far down on the bare, billowing ridges moved a red speck, at a snail's pace, a slowly moving dot of color which ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... cemetery undecorated with fountains, and through or near which no stream flows, is too dry a place for the average bird to risk the exigencies of rearing a family. A few simply constructed fountains or drinking-pools will work wonders in the way of attracting birds to a waterless territory. ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... had been taking a long walk in the sun, and returned so thirsty that all the old stories about travellers suffering in waterless deserts returned to memory with new significance;—visions of simooms arose before me. What a delight to see and to grasp the heavy, red, thick-lipped dobanne, the water-jar, dewy and cool with the exudation of the Eau-de-Gouyave which filled it to the brim,—toutt ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... the barranca, and tracked it with my eye as far as I could see: it was waterless as the lain itself. The rocks rested upon dry sand and gravel; not a drop of the wished-for element appeared within its bed, although it was evident that at some time a torrent must have swept along ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... land the filth and poverty of which Is unimaginable to those who have never left England. The sterile waterless rocks make it impossible to live with any decency. The worst English slum is luxury in comparison. Barely enough water to drink. None to wash in. One day I had nothing but dirty melted snow out of a hole. Vermin swarmed and no one worried about them. "If we had ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... broke out, I proceeded once more on my extensive travels, and I became something of an expert in the waterless, sandy wastes of the southern half of German Southwest Africa. As for the Kalahari Desert, over which the movement of men and transport was supposed to be quite impossible, we did not rest until we had sunk bore-holes ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... not very evident, but as the eagles gather round the carcass and the flies about the fallen deer, so men with shovels and axes appear as by enchantment when gold is struck. Distance counts as nothing, and neither thundering rivers nor waterless deserts can deter them. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... foretold gives us confidence in our Guide. We have the chart, and as we look upon it we see marked 'waterless country,' 'pathless rocks,' 'desert and sand,' 'wells and palm-trees.' Well, when we come to the first of these, and find ourselves, as the map says, in the waterless country; and when, as we go on step by step, and mile after mile, we find it ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... through the day's roaming the shepherd keeps one thing in mind. He must lead his flock to a drinking-place. The refreshment of good water makes the coveted hour of all the day; the spot where it is found amid the rough, waterless hills and plains is the crowning token of the shepherd's unfailing thoughtfulness. When at last the sheep are led 'beside the still waters,' how good it is, after the dust and ...
— The Song of our Syrian Guest • William Allen Knight
... strong enough to attack them, he determined to march to Nakheila. The mobility of the Arabs was now as conspicuous as their dilatory nature had formerly been. The whole Dervish army—horse, foot, and artillery, men, women, children, and animals—actually traversed in a single day the forty miles of waterless desert which lie between Aliab and Nakheila, at which latter place they arrived on the night of the 20th. The Sirdar's next object was to keep the enemy so far up the Atbara that they could not possibly strike at Berber or Railhead. Accordingly, at dawn on the 21st, the whole force was ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... home of Israel. It was a land of rugged and picturesque mountains, interspersed with a few tracts of fertile country, shut in between the sea and the ravine of the Jordan, and falling away into the waterless desert of the south. It was, too, a land of small extent, hardly more than one hundred and sixty miles in length and sixty miles in width. And even this amount of territory was possessed by the Israelites only during the reigns of ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... best of our repast, and after an hour's rest we made another start. We left the river now, and seemed to climb a breakneck hill for interminable hours. The region was barren and absolutely waterless, while the heat was tremendous. I only remember one view during that broiling ride. We had reached a great altitude, and were crossing a narrow ridge. On one side was the Moraca, and on the other the Mala, both streams mere threads ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... curious misfortune in 1841, according to the inscription on one of the cottages. A great flood, caused by a very sudden thaw which liberated some miles of snow-water on the higher portions of the Plain, tore down the narrow (and usually waterless) valley and caused great destruction in the tiny village; the old Norman church being the only building that was quite undamaged. Market Lavington is farther east on the Pewsey road. It was once of some importance and ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... have heard others told of, but the best mirages of all we never hear described; the mirage that waterless travellers see at the last. Those fountains rising out of onyx basins, blue and straight into incredible heights, and falling and flooding cool white marble; the haze of spray above their feathery ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... had not thought of that as a reason for this summons. Johnny Grantline was a close friend to us both. He had organized an exploring expedition to the Moon. Uninhabited, with its bleak, forbidding, airless, waterless surface, the Moon—even though so close to the Earth—was seldom visited. No regular ship ever stopped there. A few exploring parties of recent years had come ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... Germans were contesting stubbornly every mile of waterless, thorn-covered ground and clinging desperately to their positions along the railway. The officers of the Second Rhodesians had seen nothing more of Tarzan of the Apes since he had slain Underlieutenant ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... father, Wandering, led by Athene; and dare whatsoever betides me. Led by Athene I won from the gray-haired terrible sisters Secrets hidden from men, when I found them asleep on the sand-hills, Keeping their eye and their tooth, till they showed me the perilous pathway Over the waterless ocean, the valley that led to the Gorgon. Her too I slew in my craft, Medusa, the beautiful horror; Taught by Athene I slew her, and saw not herself, but her image, Watching the mirror of brass, in the shield which a goddess had lent ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... riding somewhere in the column with some chum of old days. He belonged to another regiment, but knew the Fifth of old. The hounds had tired of chasing over a waterless country, and with lolling tongues were trotting ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... foothills of the mountains, with the cold, clear trout streams and the bracing air, to take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie, covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless, springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull pools of stagnant water still held out against the sun, or, further still southeast among the "breaks" of the many forks of the South Cheyenne, on the sandy flats men dug for water ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... waterless desert stretching between the Cimarron and the Arkansas, consisting of almost a dead level of alkali and sand, although toward the northern extremity the sand had been driven by the ceaseless wind into grotesque hummocks. The trail, cut deep ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... road from Kerman to Kubenan is to Zerend about 50 miles, to the Sar i Benan 15 miles, thence to Kubenan 30 miles—total 95 miles. Marco Polo cannot have taken the direct road to Kubenan, as it took him seven days to reach it. As he speaks of waterless deserts, he probably took a circuitous route to the east of the mountains, via Kuhpayeh and the desert lying to the north of Khabis." (Houtum-Schindler, l.c. pp. 496-497.) (Cf. Major Sykes, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... breathed us, and handled our weapons some half a furlong from the alien host. They had no earth rampart around them, for that ridge is waterless, and they could not abide there long, but they had pitched sharp pales in front of them and they stood in very good order, as if abiding an onslaught, and moved not when they saw us; for that band of shooters had joined themselves to them already. Taken one with another we deemed them to ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... team, Garrison drove to Durgin's farm. He found his man in the center of a vast expanse of duck-pens, where ducks by the thousand, all singularly white and waterless, were greeting their ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... water—alas for selfish human nature!—to the last warm drop and went gayly back to her little room with no emotions whatever for the poor other boarders, soon to find themselves wrathfully hot-waterless. And then—she thoughtlessly curled down on the bed, and slept and slept and slept! She wakened dimly in time for the one o'clock dinner, dressed, and ate it in a half-sleep. She went back upstairs planning a trolley-ride ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... seventeen hours of endurance without water and but little rest. East Africa generally possessing unlimited quantities of water, caravans have not been compelled for lack of the element to have recourse to the mushok of India and the khirbeh of Egypt. Being able to cross the waterless districts by a couple of long marches, they content themselves for the time with a small gourdful, and with keeping their imaginations dwelling upon the copious quantities they will drink ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... much excellent grass and amidst much fine timber. A species of Anthistiria appeared here, which seemed different from the ordinary sort, although this was no stranger to me, when exploring the waterless plains westward of the Lachlan, where it looked as if stunted for want of moisture. Here, however, this variety presented the same knotty head, where other grasses grew luxuriantly. After getting ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... passed between them. On their left hand they saw the Thermae of Caracalla, their external magnificence scarce touched by decay, but waterless, desolate; in front rose the Caelian, covered with edifices, many in ruin, and with neglected or altogether wild gardens; the road along which they went was almost as silent as that without the walls. Arrived at a certain point, the two looked at each other and waved a hand; ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... it, and he knew full well that it would not bar his progress. Even as he gave vent to the sigh the glassy waters trembled, undulated, retreated, and, under the influence of a puff of air, slowly melted away, leaving the waterless karroo in its place. ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... which plantons are made. The single sceau which supplied the (at this time) sixty-odd inhabitants of The Enormous Room with drinking water had done its duty, shortly after our arrival from the first soupe with such thoroughness as to leave a number of unfortunate (among whom I was one) waterless. The interval between soupe and promenade loomed darkly and thirstily before us unfortunates. As the minutes passed, it loomed with greater and greater distinctness. At the end of twenty minutes our thirst—stimulated by an especially salty dose of lukewarm water ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... without eating?" The answer seems to be "A cloud." "My coal-brazier clothes me with a divine garment, my rock is founded in the sea" (a volcano). "I dwell in a house of pitch and brick, but over me glide the boats" (a canal). "He that says, 'Oh, that I might exceedingly avenge myself!' draws from a waterless well, and rubs the skin without oiling it." "When sickness is incurable and hunger unappeasable, silver and gold cannot restore health nor appease hunger." "As the oven waxes old, so the foe tires of enmity." "The life of yesterday goes on every day." "When the seed ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... for floating and other piers and are trying to improvise ways and means of coping with the water problem—this ugly nightmare of a water problem. The question of the carriage and storage of water for thousands of men and horses over a roadless, mainly waterless track of country should have been tackled before ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... the Rockies evil and terrible deserts stretch for leagues and leagues, mere waterless wastes of sandy plain and barren mountain, broken here and there by narrow strips of fertile ground. Rain rarely falls, and there are no clouds to dim the brazen sun. The rivers run in deep canyons, or are swallowed by the burning sand; the smaller watercourses are ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... simultaneously. We limbered up and withdrew a little way up the hill, and unhooked again for the night. I cannot hope to describe the bitter disappointment of that moment. That we had been spectators all day was bad enough, that the horses had been waterless for thirty hours and that we ourselves were hungry, thirsty, and very weary, was worse, but that the pernicious fog should have prevented us from loosing off at any rate one round was the ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... mine, Thou in the dim dominions Driftest with waterless lips, Unburied; and me the ships Shall bear o'er the bitter brine, Storm-birds upon angry pinions, Where the towers of the Giants[43] shine O'er Argos cloudily, And the ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... littlest streams as they served me; but it was the beginning of the hot weather, and all streams were low. I crossed dusty roads; I went through tall grass; I climbed hills in the moonlight. Even rocks did I climb, children—consider this well. I crossed the tail of Sirhind, the waterless, before I could find the set of the little rivers that flow Gungaward. I was a month's journey from my own people and the river that I knew. That ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... Burgoa, a priest of Oaxaca, who visited them in 1674, states that these beautiful halls were the scene, in prehistoric times, of the most diabolical rites. To-day the ruins are surrounded by a rude native population, most of whom dwell in wretched jacales, in a waterless and sun-beat valley—an environment in striking contrast to the antique splendour of these halls of the earlier occupiers ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... at 7 A.M., and, after passing the village cultivation, entered a waterless wilderness of thorn and tree forest, with some long and broad plains of tall grass intersecting the line of march. These flats very much resemble some we crossed when travelling close to and parallel ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... well out from the coast, Master Cockrell. Waterless they be, and without shelter. Blackbeard's fancy is to ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... with distinctness. There are no clouds in the moon; there are not even the mists or the vapours which invariably arise wherever water is present, and therefore astronomers have been led to the conclusion that the surface of the globe which attends the earth is a sterile and a waterless desert. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... vermin for the sake of precious stones in the earth. Thalassa brought up before the young man's eyes a vivid picture of an African diamond rush of that period—a corrugated iron settlement of one straggling street, knee-deep in sand, swarming with vermin and scorpions, almost waterless, crowded with a mongrel, ever-increasing lot of needy adventurers brought from all parts of the world by reports of diamonds which could be picked out with a penknife from the dunes and sandy shingle which formed the background of the villainous ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... ended. Again and again, in historic times, have its results operated fearfully on Europe, by forcibly precipitating the Asiatic nomades along the great path-zone; again and again, through such changes of level, have they been rendered waterless, and thus driven into a forced emigration. Some of their rivers, as the Oxus and Jaxartes, have, within the records of history, been dry for several years. To these topographical changes, rather than to political influences, we must impute many of the most celebrated ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Cibola, that Coronado and other Spanish adventurers sought in the vast deserts of the Southwest, were pueblos. A treacherous guide who had hoped to take Coronado into the waterless plain and lose him, but who first lost his own head, had told him a tale of the Quivira, a tribe that had much gold. So far from having gold these Indians did not know the stuff, but the myth that they had hoarded quantities ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... had disappeared in the black edge of the Bad Lands when Philip dashed up out of the dip into the plain. There was only one break ahead of him, and toward this he urged his horse. In the entrance to the break there was another sandy but waterless dip, and across this trailed the hoof-prints of the outlaws' mounts, two at a walk—one at a gallop. At one time, ages before, the break had been the outlet of a stream pouring itself out between jagged and cavernous walls of rock from the black heart of the upheaved country within. Now ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... declining sun, appeared in their quaint forms like loftier mountains with their snowy summits all aglow. This was, indeed, a grateful sight to us; the camels already pricked up their ears, for the smell of moisture was in the air. We knew that the end of our waterless journey was not far off; for where those clouds were discharging their precious burdens the valley of Ariab lay. But many a weary ridge of black rock and agaba must still be crossed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... constant fear of a death by thirst had began to tell upon me badly. Not so Inyati, who, thirsty or satisfied, was always cheerful, always optimistic that we should eventually find a way through to his country of many diamonds and many wives! Many a weary trek that had landed us waterless and still further involved in the vast wilderness of dunes, had seen me sink despondent on the sand, caring but little whether I ever tried to struggle farther; to be roused from my lethargy by the cheery whimsicalities of ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... of the solemn impressions with which one enters upon such a journey. Everything ahead is unknown and invested with perhaps exaggerated terrors by imagination and report. The name of Desert—the waterless Desert—hangs over the horizon, and suggests the most gloomy apprehensions. Behind, in the fading light, the trees of the valley still show their dim groups; before, the lofty level, slightly broken by undulations, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... the taps. For perhaps three seconds a stream of the dimension of a darning-needle emerged, then with a sad gurgle the tap relapsed into a stolid inaction. There is no stolidity so utter as that of a waterless tap. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... emigration, which principally benefits the labourer, may be discontinued. We have now arrived at a pass when the absence of those who have already emigrated becomes a matter of regret. There is work to be had nearer than the Canadian woods or the waterless prairies of Australia—work, too, that in its results must be of incalculable benefit to the community. But the government is bound to regulate it so, that, amidst superabundance of wealth, due regard is paid to the ECONOMY OF LABOUR. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... but in early periods, as to-day, it was pre-eminently the home of wandering, nomadic tribes. This wild, treeless region is divided by rocky ranges running from east to west. Parallel to these are deep, hot and for the most part waterless valleys. In the springtime these valleys are covered by a sparse vegetation; from a few perennial springs flow waters that irrigate the immediately surrounding land; but they soon lose themselves in the thirsty desert. During the summer the vegetation disappears ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... the way were piled the hides of bullocks, and from the train you might see their skeletons lying, each one bleaching where it died for want of fodder, scattered here and there on the brown and burning earth; for even every river bed was waterless, and not a single blade of green could you descry, for many hundred miles. And hence it came about, that as I gazed upon the two emaciated hacks that were to pull me from the station, a dozen miles out, and as many more back, I could bring ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... outflanked, continued its retreat, making stand after stand until most were slain. The Afghans pursued for about four miles, but were checked by a detachment of rallied cavalry, and desisted. The fugitives, forming with wounded and baggage a straggling column upwards of six miles long, crossed the waterless desert sixteen miles wide, to Hanz-i-Madat, which was reached about midnight and where water was found. From Asu Khan, where cultivation began, to Kokoran near Candahar, the retreat was harassed by armed villagers and the troops ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... further south, the stony summits of the Judaean hills, where Jerusalem and Bethlehem lie, and, through some gap in the mountains, a gleam as of sunshine upon armour tells where the ocean is. And then his eye falls upon the waterless plateau of the South, and at his feet the fertile valley of Jordan, with Jericho glittering amongst its palm trees like a diamond set in emeralds, and on some spur of the lower hill bounding the plain, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... acclimatized native to the brink of the grave. The Persian monarch chooses the southern rather than the northern side of the mountains for the site of his capital, preferring the keen winter cold and dry summer heat of the high and almost waterless plateau to the damp and stifling air of the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... nothing more; for until the morning when the desert wind blew, no Hebrew had disclosed the plans of his kindred. But the more sorely the heat of the day oppressed them, the greater became the dread of the faint-hearted of the pilgrimage through the hot, dusty, waterless desert. The terrible day had given them a foretaste of what was impending and when, toward noon, the dust grew thicker, the air more and more oppressive, a Hebrew trader, from whom the Egyptian soldiers purchased goods, stole into the store-house to ask ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... forests of pine or fir, clambered and sweated up and down incessantly by slopes steeper than any stairway, until I felt like the overworked chambermaid of a tall but elevator-less hotel. My foot was much swollen, and to make things worse the region was arid and waterless. Once I came upon a straggling mud village, but though it was half-hidden by banana and orange groves, not even fruit could be bought. Yet a day or two before some scoundrel had passed this way ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... Barrier Range, Sturt, who ascended to one of the summits, could see nothing hopeful in the prospect. How little did he dream that the hills beneath him were full of silver, and that one day a populous city of miners should occupy the waterless plain in front of him! In this region he had to be very careful how he advanced, for he had with him eleven horses, thirty bullocks, and two hundred sheep, and water for so great a multitude could with difficulty ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the wind-swept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herd gives him leisure for contemplation, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... dread of a remembered agony, he could not have told how many days ago, when a devil had whispered to him, and he had gulped down the contents of the pipkin in the morning, and for the rest of the day had gone waterless.... Again he moistened his fingers and sucked them; then he lay sprawling against the mast, idly watching the drops ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... in the dust-storms and heat. That was taken for granted, and the man who took it so considered himself the most commonplace of mortals. He was deeply moved by the account of a new aerial route which the French are laying out somewhere in the Sahara over a waterless stretch of four hundred miles, where if the aeroplane is disabled between stations the pilot will most likely die and dry up beside it. To do the Desert justice, she rarely bothers to wipe out evidence of a kill. There are places in the Desert, men say, where ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... the most difficult part of his journey, across a waterless desert, so hot that the very birds could not live in it. Horse and rider were both dying of thirst, and Rustem, dismounting, could scarcely struggle along while he supported his steps by his spear. When he had almost given up all hope, he saw a well-nourished ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... were the toiling of men in the dust of the dry land, Vain were the ploughing and planting in waterless fields, Save for the life-giving currents we send from the sky-land, Save for the fruit our embrace with the ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... cool sensation, and below 45 deg. a decidedly cold one. Water at a temperature of about 50 deg. is a generator of appetite. A sufficient quantity should be taken for that end; say, one or two tumblers an hour or so before each meal, followed by some exercise. Those who have acquired the waterless habit, and the many ills resulting from it, will hardly relish cool water as an appetizer; but if they would become robust they must adopt the water habit—a habit that will refresh ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... could judge, John and Hester were happy enough. Day after day, from sunrise to sunset, he fought with Nature in his small wilderness, and slowly won—hewing, digging, terracing, cultivating, reclaiming plot after plot, and adding it to his conquests. The slope was sunny but waterless, and within a year Hester could see that his whole frame stooped with the constant rolling of barrels and carriage of buckets and waterpots up and down the weary incline. It seemed to her that the hill thirsted continually; that no sooner was its thirst slaked than the weeds and brambles took fresh ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... a king is a cloud without rain; Without goodness a sage is a field without fruit; Without manners a youth is a bridleless horse; Without lore an old man is a waterless wady; Without modesty woman is ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... pushed the cattle off their beds an hour before dawn, and before they were relieved had urged the herd more than five miles on the third day's drive over this waterless mesa. In spite of our economy of water, after breakfast on this third morning there was scarcely enough left to fill the canteens for the day. In view of this, we could promise ourselves no midday meal—except a can of ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... and waterless, seem best adapted to the nut pine's development. No slope is too steep, none too dry; every situation seems to be gratefully chosen, if only it be sufficiently rocky and firm to afford secure anchorage for the tough, grasping roots. It is a sturdy, thickset little tree, usually about fifteen feet ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... reservation side, other than the Chaco and Chelly "rivers," which are really merely drainage channels and are dry during most of the year. The eastern slope of the mountain range gives rise to no streams, and the foot of the range on that side is as dry and waterless as the valley itself. One may travel for 20 miles over this valley and not find a drop of water. Except at Sulphur springs, warm volcanic springs about 30 miles south of the San Juan, the ordinary traveler will not find sufficient water between the foot ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... At some distance, raised on a dazzling white wall above the desert in an unshaded place, Domini saw a narrow, two-sided white house, with a flat roof and a few tiny loopholes instead of windows. One side looked full upon the waterless river bed, the other, at right angles to it, ran back towards a thicket of palms and ended in an arcade of six open Moorish arches, through which the fierce blue of the cloudless sky stared, making an almost theatrical effect. Beyond, masses of trees were visible, looking ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... pressure-suits, which they dared not remove, they started gesturing with them, trying to explain their predicament and make known that they bore them no ill-will, but the creatures waved for them to cease and led them swiftly through the now waterless temple. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... the hut, and its relative position with regard to the fire and water supply, and the position with regard to the great features of the country was exactly where a party going westward would first receive a check from the waterless tableland between the Roper and Victoria Rivers, and would probably camp and reconnoitre before attempting to cross to the ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... miracle was in all respects the same in the second as in the first. There was the same dependence for life on the second as the first. There was the same necessity that the second rock or stream should follow them as there was of the first; for they were yet a long way from Canaan, with a waterless desert before them. We can, therefore, see no reason why the first should be a type of Christ and ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... romance of the unconquered West, of the earth's virgin spaces, of the buffalo and the Indian. In their idle silence, treeless, waterless, clothed as with a dry pale hair with the feathered yellow grasses, they looked as if the monstrous creatures of dead epochs might still haunt them, might still sun their horny sides among the sand hills, and wallow in the shallows of the river. It was a bit of the early ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... defence of the Canal and of the eastern frontier of Egypt had depended almost entirely on the waterless nature of the 130 miles of country which separated it from Palestine. There were troops on the Canal, but their numbers and equipment forced them to remain strictly on the defensive, and Kitchener's alleged question—"Are ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... obliterated by and by, and the trails are so often drift-filled that unless one is himself accustomed to such methods of travel or has an experienced plainsman as his driver and guide, there is danger of becoming lost, or so out of the way that night may overtake him and compel a waterless camp for ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple-trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek. Nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilization—a shanty ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... remain. All that is known about the planet tends to show that the time when it attained that stage of planetary existence through which our earth is now passing must be set millions of years, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, ago. He has not yet, indeed, reached that airless and waterless condition, that extremity of internal cold, or in fact that utter unfitness to support any kind of life, which would seem to prevail in the moon. The planet of war in some respects resembles a desolate battle-field, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... to be remembered by one who so lightly forgets. So then I say, to teach myself to be true—'Look now, Criseyde, yonder fine, many-hearted poplar—that is Paris; and all that bank of marriage-ivy—that is marriageable Helen, green and cold; and the waterless fountain—that truly is Diomed; and the faded flower that nods in shadow, why, that must be me, even ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... earthy materials, but a great store of the sea water as well. The result would be in course of time a complete withdrawal into the depths of the earth of those substances which play a necessary part in organic development. The earth would become more or less completely waterless on its surface, and the rocks exposed to view would be composed mainly of silica, the material which to a great extent resists solution, and therefore avoids the dissolving which overtakes most other kinds ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... squarely around and faced the long, gray levels of the darkening desert. As his eye swept over that forbidding, waterless, almost trackless waste, a sudden fear of its horrors smote through his anger and chilled his resolution. Haney spurred his horse to ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... Indian, unlike his congener of the woods, has as yet been but partially able to substitute gunpowder for the bow. The advantage he has in the protection afforded him by the desolation of his waterless mesas and sage-covered hills is thus in great measure neutralized. What, when he does possess the modern firearm, he is capable of doing with it, the achievements of the Modocs in their volcanic stronghold will attest. But these were few, and soon went down. The extinction ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... caravans were passing. Everything was rushing to Goldite. There were horsemen, hurried persons on foot, men in carriages and autos, twenty-horse freight teams, and men on tiny burros. Nearly all were shedding bottles as they went. A waterless land is not necessarily devoid of ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... scruple to take with him for the journey any of the wine and fruits that were still fit for use, and Antonia assured him that by the direct way, well known to her, they would reach the fruitful shore of this waterless ocean in a few days. So with the approach of evening coolness they ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... very busy with his telegraphic matters—and considering that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as possible. He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those exhausting deserts—and it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... absolutely affirm that Life has no place at all upon this airless and waterless globe, since we know not under what strange conditions it may manifest its presence; and our most powerful telescopes, besides, do not bring the lunar surface sufficiently near to us to disprove the existence there of even such large creatures as disport themselves upon our planet. Still, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage |
