"Torrid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was so tremendous as to prove this contention up to the hilt. From May 18th to September 8th, 1565—that is to say, in one hundred and thirteen days—thirty thousand Moslems and eight thousand Christians perished—an average of some three hundred and thirty-six persons per day. In that blazing torrid heat the sufferings of those who survived from day to day must have been accentuated beyond bearing by the myriads of unburied corpses by which they lived surrounded; and that the contending forces were not swept away by pestilence ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to his favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row of shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and had the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he told him, that, properly used, they would be worth all the rest of the legacy a hundred-fold. As the apothecary, however, found the manuscripts, in which he conjectured there was a treatise on the subject of these shrubs, ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... trees, lying sprawled out like a boy, resting at times with sweet forgetfulness of the whole world, but feeling a dull pain whenever he remembered the stern, silent man pitching hay in the hot sun on the torrid ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... abroad either enjoy only the short period of one summer, or else doze away the cold uncomfortable months in profound slumbers; but these, residing as it were in a torrid zone, are always alert and merry—a good Christmas fire is to them like the heats of the dog-days. Though they are frequently heard by day, yet is their natural time of motion only in the night. As soon as it grows dusk, the chirping increases, and they come running forth, and are from the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... desert; December to February - northeast monsoon, moderate temperatures in north and very hot in south; May to October - southwest monsoon, torrid in the north and hot in the south, irregular rainfall, hot and ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... against one of the walls, in which species of cloister the human guests were privileged to spread their blankets in case of rain or an icy norther. Otherwise they slept in the sky-vaulted court among the four-footed transients, for what men on the torrid Gulf coast would allow his beast more fresh ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... ill-treated, are slow and dull-looking animals. The climate of England is much too cold for the ass; in the south of France and the Mediterranean, where it is much warmer, the ass is a much finer animal; but to see it in perfection we must go to the Torrid Zone in Guinea, right on the equator, the hottest portion of the globe, where the ass, in its native state and in its native country, is a handsome creature and as fleet as the wind; indeed, supposed to be, and mentioned in the Scriptures ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... world and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of warmth, then ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... she feels an unconquerable sense of lassitude. For the first time, her feet begin to fail her. For the first time, she, who traversed, with firm and equal footsteps, the moving lava of torrid deserts, while whole caravans were buried in drifts of fiery sand—who passed, with steady and disdainful tread, over the eternal snows of Arctic regions, over icy solitudes, in which no other human being could live—who had been spared by the devouring flames of conflagrations, and by the impetuous ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... and starless night closed in, accompanied by cold winds and drizzling rain. We seemed to have made a sudden leap from the torrid to the frigid zone. Two hours before, my light summer clothing was almost insupportable, and now a heavy and well-lined plaid formed but an inefficient screen from the inclemency of the weather. After watching for some time the singular ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... under your torrid sun, O gleaming carbuncle? Have you the bucolic tastes of your rival in finery, the Splendid Phanaeus? Can you be a knacker, a worker in putrid sausage-meat, like Phanaeus Milon? Vainly do I consider you and marvel at you: your ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... Ages, the reports of this Cipango inflamed the imagination of Europe, and to reach it became at once the desire and the problem of adventurers and merchants. But how could this El Dorado be reached? Not by sailing round Africa; for to sail South, in popular estimation, was to encounter torrid suns with ever increasing heat, and suffocating vapors, and unknown dangers. The scientific world had lost the knowledge of what even the ancients knew. Nobody surmised that there was a Cape of Good Hope which could be ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... striking illustration of reason and folly en masse. The total number of venomous species is really great, and their distribution embraces practically the whole of the torrid and temperate zones. They are too numerous for mention here; and their capacity for mischief to man is very great. Our own country has at least eighteen species of poisonous snakes, including the rattlesnakes, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing undiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of understanding life. The social changes desired by the various assailants of the old order are only the expression of a deeper change in moral idea, and the drift of the new moral ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... branches, if Lebanon had never been beautiful to sense, it would not now be a fit or poetic subject of allusion. And the word "Fez" would be without imaginative value if no traveller had ever felt the intoxication of the torrid sun, the languors of oriental luxury, or, like the British soldier, cried amid the dreary moralities of ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... suburbs. As it was a hot day, he was kept busy. The waiters had gone through a trying morning; there were many strangers in Paris. Outside, the Boulevard des Italiens, despite its shade trees, broiled under a torrid July sun that swam in ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... fumes appear the subdued colours of embroidered stuffs and the inscrutable traceries of bronze lamps. Or, maybe, the scene passes on a terrace overlooking a dark river. Behind the domes and minarets a yellow moon dreams like an odalisque, her hand on the circle of her breast; and through the torrid silence of the garden, through the odour of over-ripe fruit and the falling sound thereof, comes the melancholy warble of a fountain. Or is it the sorrow of lilies rising through the languid air to ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... slowed along After the torrid hours were done, Though still the posts and walls and road Flung back their sense of the hot-faced sun, And had walked by Stourside Mill, where broad ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... vegetable forms than are contained within an extensive space of ground in our countries. Close to the parasite plants peculiar to very hot climates we observed, not without surprise, in the centre of the torrid zone, and near the level of the sea, mosses resembling in every respect those of Europe. We gathered, near the Great Cataract of Atures, that fine specimen of Grimmia* with fontinalis leaves, which has so much fixed ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Dreams came like a wind through, their souls, drifting off with the seed-dust of beautiful experience which they had ripened, to fertilize the souls of others withal. In them the sea and the sky and ships had mingled and bred new blossoms of the torrid heat of their love. And the seed of such blossoms was shaken as they slept, into the hand of God, who held it in His palm preciously; then scattered it again, to produce ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... American spring. Men tell me they have seen in a single week the snows disappear, ice break in the streams, the grass spring up, and the trees beginning to bud. Nature adapts herself to all her conditions. In the Arctic as in the Torrid zone she fixes her compensations and makes her laws for the best good ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... pine Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast Of some great ammiral, were but a wand— He walked with, to support uneasy steps Over the burning marle, not like those steps On Heaven's azure; and the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire. Nathless he so endured, till on the beach Of that inflamed sea he stood, and called His legions—Angel Forms, who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... the radio boys and their families left the group of cottages where all had spent such an eventful and pleasant summer. Brilliant sunlight beat down on the yellow sand, but its heat was very different from the torrid rays that had kept them running to the ocean to cool off all that summer. There was a clear and sparkling appearance to the air and sky, and the wind that came sweeping over the level sands had a nip in it that made even Jimmy walk fast to ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... jumps up at last and over-turns the table, letters and all, and audibly expresses a desire to let all the winds loose upon the world at once, to revel and tear and do as they like, to bring blinding snow from the far north and drenching rains from the torrid zone, to order a select assortment of thunderstorms from the Cape of Good Hope, and a healthy tornado from the Indian Ocean. But he thinks better of it, burns all the letters, and goes quietly on with ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... cold and barren regions of the far north. There man, once more partaking of the nature of his surroundings, yields as slowly to the impulses of his passions as does the ice-bound earth to the slanting rays of the summer sun. Maturity, so quick to come, so swift to leave in the torrid heats, arrives, chilled by the long winters, to the girls of Lapland, Norway, and Siberia, only when they are eighteen and nineteen years of age. But, in return for this, they retain their vigor and good looks to a ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... courses of salad, ice and strawberries, with stout gentlemen crushing their feet, anxious mammas sticking sharp elbows into their sides, and absent-minded tutors walking over them. They can flirt vigorously in a torrid atmosphere of dinner, dust, and din; can smile with hot coffee running down their backs, small avalanches of ice-cream descending upon their best bonnets, and sandwiches, butter-side down, reposing on their ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... mind, though, that neither the cold of winter nor the heat of summer, in northern Arizona, are as frigid or as torrid as the readings of the thermometer may seem to indicate. The cold or heat is not felt to such an extreme as in the East. A minimum of humidity is the basic reason for this wide difference between, for example, ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... certain justice in Mosey's contention," I remarked, addressing Willoughby. "He argues that, as Burke, by dying of hardship, earned himself a statue, so Brown, Jones, and Robinson—whose souls, we trust, are in a less torrid climate than their unburied bones—should, in bare justice, have similar post-obituary recognition. For Burke's sake, of course, the comparison in value of service had better not be entered on. Mosey would have our cities resemble ancient Athens in respect ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... territories in middle Europe, Siberia, and Northern America, as well as in Patagonia, Southern Africa, and Southern Australasia, remained in early postglacial conditions which rendered them inaccessible to the civilized nations of the torrid and sub-torrid zones. They were at that time what the terrible urmans of North-West Siberia are now, and their population, inaccessible to and untouched by civilization, retained the characters of early post-glacial ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... wrath inflamed; Behold the tyrants locks with dust besmeared; In sluggish breasts once more The sacred name of Liberty revered; Behold o'er all the subjugated earth, The troops of Latium march triumphant forth, From torrid desert to the gloomy pole. And thus eternal Rome, That had so long in sloth oblivious lain, A daughter's sacrifice ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... had already known something of torrid heat, but the next few days was to show that, as yet, they had only begun to appreciate it; for there is but one hotter zone on earth than this in which the Red Sea lies, and that contains ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... strait-lined course, but frequently were seen to describe a curve. When they met the top of a wave as they skimmed along the surface of the ocean, they passed through, and continued their flight beyond it. From this time, till we left the torrid zone, we were almost daily amused with the view of immense shoals of these fishes, and now and then caught one upon our decks, when it had unfortunately taken its flight too far, and was spent by its too great elevation above ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... but, oh, joy and gladness! it has outside blinds and inside folding-shutters, so that in the brightest of days we may create there a darkness that may be felt. To observe the generality of New England houses, a spectator might imagine they were planned for the torrid zone, where the great object is to keep out a furnace ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the sandy plains, In the zone called torrid; Send her where it never rains, Where the heat is horrid. Mind that she has only flour For her daily feeding; Let her have a page an hour Of ...
— The Nursery, November 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 5 • Various
... my heart was quiet as a grave Asleep in moonlight! For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul A passion burns from basement to the cope. Poesy, poesy! But one who imagines that this passion can exist in the soul wholly unrelated to any other, is confusing ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the reverse of ours, the rising of Sirius or the Dog Star in July marks the season of the greatest cold instead of, as with us, the greatest heat; and just as the civilized ancients ascribed the torrid heat of midsummer to that brilliant star,[804] so the modern savage of South Africa attributes to it the piercing cold of midwinter and seeks to mitigate its rigour by warming up the chilly star with the genial heat of the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... the sun are caused by the eruption of some new volcano therein, which at first pouring out a prodigious quantity of smoke and other opacous matter, causeth the spots; and as that fuliginous matter decayeth and spendeth itself, and the volcano at last becomes more torrid and flaming, so the spots decay, and grow to umbrae, and at last ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... sprang, retraced his wandering steps, Yet heedless ran, and could not leave his play. And since that day what scenes had he passed through, What trials met, what sights his eyes beheld! Beneath the burning skies of torrid zones, On frozen banks of Nova Zembla's coast, Or the more fertile climes of Italy; There, where the luscious grape in fulness hangs, And fields of roses yield a rich perfume; 'Mid orange-groves whence sweetest odors rise, 'Neath branches burdened with their fragrant fruit, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... conditions of growth are less powerful in winter, when the temperature is ten degrees lower, and the fall of rain small. At the same time, there is more sunshine to impart those aromatic qualities which are so much relished by smokers of tobacco. In Virginia the torrid heat and thunder showers during the summer months are by no means favorable for developing the mild aroma of a good smoking leaf. Such atmospheric conditions are better suited for cotton and Indian corn than tobacco, which must have dry weather and sunshine ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... had been of the hottest, and the heated earth gave back the glare until the air quivered in torrid waves. Richard had drawn back the cover of the wagon that his brother might breathe the air, but he replaced it now to protect him from the overpowering beams. Once more he anxiously studied the country, but it gave him little hope. The green of the grass was gone, and most of the grass with it. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or me? She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned trance, from which she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... half-ripe fruits of the torrid South, to this fruit matured by the cold of the frigid North? These are those crabbed apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... fire all around now, and smoke and cinders floated over the biggest brother and the little girl, choking them and shutting out the road ahead. The wind, as it brushed by, seemed to sear their faces with its torrid breath. Suddenly, the dust and smoke clearing to the right, the little girl clutched the biggest brother's arm and pointed out a dark, bulky creature that was in the lead. It was a bison, evidently one of those lonely bachelors that, exiled from their kind, were the ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... thousand of the most stupendous miracles, and entirely unnecessary ones. This, the Rev. Dr. Pye Smith saw, when he said, "We cannot represent to ourselves the idea of all land animals being brought into one small spot, from the polar regions, the torrid zone, and all the other climates of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, Australia, and the thousands of islands,—their preservation and provision, and the final disposal of them,—without bringing up the idea of miracles more stupendous than ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... home of the Laieikawai story, the action as here pictured, with the exception of two chapters, is localized on the Hawaiian group. This consists of eight volcanic islands lying in the North Pacific, where torrid and tropical zones meet, about half again nearer to America than Asia, and strung along like a cluster of beads for almost 360 miles from Kauai on the northwest to the large island of Hawaii on the southeast. Here volcanic activity, extinct from prehistoric times on the other ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... made the whole known universe pay tribute, never did your far-famed banquet-halls witness the appearance of those succulent jellies, the delight of the indolent, nor those varied ices whose cold would brave the torrid zone. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Guadalajara. It lies on the western slope of the Great Cordillera of Anahuac. Hills, woods, and beautiful valleys diversify its surface; its pasture-grounds are watered by numerous streams, that rare advantage under the torrid zone, and the climate is cool and healthy. The Indians of this department are the Terascos—the Ottomi and the Chichimeca Indians. The first are the most civilized of the tribes, and their language the most harmonious. We are now travelling in a north-westerly direction, towards the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... shall nurse the Nurses? When the strain Of ministry on India's torrid plain Brings the fatigue that, long-neglected, kills, They'll need, as health-resorts whereto to send, For rest restorative, the soldiers' friend, Homes ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... seem to be so natural an adjunct to the surroundings. Nature's never-failing rule of compensation is manifested here: all the attractions are not bestowed upon any one class; brilliancy of feathers and sweetness of song do not go together. The torrid zone endows the native birds with brilliant plumage, while the colder North gives its feathered tribes the winning ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... all people living under a torrid zone and a despotic government, are of an indolent disposition, and, it is said, require great excitement to make them work; but the real secret of their idleness is the certainty that they will not be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Possessing no certain ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... of water and Wilbur's hammock was gone, so the pair decided to camp on shore. In that torrid weather to sleep in the open ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... In China, nobody objects to take the fin of a Shark, but in this country, when a Shark extends his fin to an honest man, it is always rejected with contempt. This voracious creature is common both in the Temperate and Torrid Zones. It has, in fact, no particular habitat, but is found in Diver's places in almost ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... have of us in swimming through the air. Taproban hath seen the heaths of Lapland, and both the Javas and Riphaean mountains; wide distant Phebol shall see Theleme, and the Islanders drink of the flood Euphrates. By it the chill-mouthed Boreas hath surveyed the parched mansions of the torrid Auster, and Eurus visited the regions which Zephyrus hath under his command; yea, in such sort have interviews been made by the assistance of this sacred herb, that, maugre longitudes and latitudes, and all the variations of the zones, the Periaecian people, and Antoecian, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... them. They hold us where the sweet herbage of life has become dry and sere, where no shelter offers us a grateful retreat. Vanitas can bear away with him his "lengthening chain" to his leafy groves; but Scripsit is confined to the torrid regions of his scanty garret. In vain he gazes afar, beyond the smoky haze of his stony prison, upon the green slopes and shady hills. In vain he toils and strains to burst the links that bind him. His soul is yearning for the cooling freshness, the sweet fragrance, the beauty, the glory, of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... during the first ten minutes of their acquaintance. On him her beauty fell flat. He evidently failed to recognise her supreme loveliness. It might be that she was the wrong type for Cuba. Every nation has its own Venus; and that far away spot beyond the torrid zone might have a somewhat barbarous idea of beauty. At any rate, Don Gomez was apparently unimpressed. And yet Lesbia flattered herself that she was looking her best to-night, and that her costume was ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... go into the torrid deserts in the heat of the summer and stay there for weeks just for fun. There is no fun or pleasure to it, let me tell you. It's hard work when one investigates properly, and I surely did it right. I ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... Kings of Argier, Morocco, and of Fez, You that have march'd with happy Tamburlaine As far as from the frozen plage [237] of heaven Unto the watery Morning's ruddy bower, And thence by land unto the torrid zone, Deserve these titles I endow you with By valour [238] and by magnanimity. Your births shall be no blemish to your fame; For virtue is the fount whence honour springs, And they are worthy she ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... a troop of eighty-one buffaloes defiled slowly before their evening fire, while herds of splendid elands stood, without fear, at two hundred yards' distance. The country is rather unhealthy, from the mass of decayed vegetation exposed to the torrid sun. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... they will then represent of the air, against the inundations of the peopling of any country or water, against the fire of volcanoes, of the world. In this state of natural against the intemperance of frigid liberty, society will be our first and torrid zones, against the sterility thought. A thousand motives will of the earth which, refuses him aliment, excite them thereto. The strength of or its baneful fecundity, which one man is so unequal to his wants, makes poison spring up beneath his and his mind so ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... of azure in her eyes that looked ocean-deep into an interior soul; she had softly purplish windings of hair around a low, cool brow, that said, "There are no torrid thoughts in me." And yet I always felt that there was an equator in Sophie's soul, only no mortal could find it. Looking at her, as thus she stood, I forgot that she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... a torrid sun, and the thermometer at 93 in the shade, his courage failed him, and, with all his preconceived ideas overthrown by the burning experience of one day, despair seized on him, and his expressions of horror and astonishment were ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... of September spent in torrid New York were a strange period of time to have projected itself into the calm life of Miss Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. Suddenly she found herself a cog screwed tight into a rapid-fire piece of machinery that was running at ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... amount of food which a man can get off this little patch I dare not guess. Well says Humboldt, that an European lately arrived in the torrid zone is struck with nothing so much as the extreme smallness of the spots under cultivation round a cabin which contains a numerous family. The plantains alone ought, according to Humboldt, to give one hundred and thirty-three times as much food as the same space of ground ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the virgin, from the brazen prow Of Athens o'er AEgina's gloomy surge, [X] 150 To drive her clouds and storms; o'erwhelming all The Persian's promised glory, when the realms Of Indus and the soft Ionian clime, When Libya's torrid champaign and the rocks Of cold Imaues join'd their servile bands, To sweep the sons of Liberty from earth. In vain; Minerva on the bounding prow Of Athens stood, and with the thunder's voice Denounced her terrors on their impious heads, And shook her burning aegis. Xerxes saw; [Y] 160 From ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... modification may be effected in some animals within even a few generations, but he attributes the effect produced to the direct influence of climate. Buffon concludes his sketch of the animals of the new world by pointing out that the larger animals of the African torrid zone have been hindered by sea and desert from finding their way to America, and by claiming to be the first "even to have suspected" that there was not a single denizen of the torrid zone of one continent which was common also ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... by pickaxes, crowbars, saws, and other useful implements, not to mention clothing adapted to every temperature, from that of polar regions to that of the torrid zone. ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... much-despised SALSOLEA and other shrubs should be coveted and sought after; that the bugbear of Oxley, the ACACIA PENDULA, should now be held to indicate good country was inconceivable; and when, above everything, the most fondly cherished of all delusions, that in the torrid north the sheep's wool would turn to hair, had to be given up, it was quite evident that a new order of belief ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... moved on in unseasonable, torrid heat, all the sores of the social system swelled and began to break. The bleak winter had seen mute starvation and misery, and the blasts of summer had brought no revival of industry. Capital was sullen, and labor violent. There were meetings and counter-meetings; agitators, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... room, a tall, spare form arose to meet me. She was evidently a full-blooded African, and though now aged and worn with many hardships, still gave the impression of a physical development which in early youth must have been as fine a specimen of the torrid zone as Cumberworth's celebrated statuette of the Negro Woman at the Fountain. Indeed, she so strongly reminded me of that figure, that, when I recall the events of her life, as she narrated them to me, I imagine her as a living, breathing ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... half-ripe fruits of the torrid South to this fruit matured by the cold of the frigid North? These are those crabbed apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with them,—bending to drink ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... slake, and has likewise other and higher ends, for the attainment of which he is peculiarly qualified by means of hands. Adapted by his constitution to inhabit all climes, he has hands to adapt his clothing to the same, whether torrid, temperate or frigid. Possessed of the knowledge of the utility of the soil, he has hands to cultivate it. Located far distant oftentimes from the running stream, these hands enable him to disembowel the earth and there find an abundant supply of the all-necessary ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... since the pittance of the night before, and yet for nine long hours of that fearful day, the air so heated that it hardly fed the lungs, and the sun blazing so pitilessly upon the log structure that a faint odor of parching wood mingled with the torrid air within the Fort, yes, for nine long hours the elder prayed, or preached, or recited aloud the deep abasement of the penitential psalms, and the wail of the prophets, proclaiming, yet deprecating, the wrath ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... oddities, its wide range of hues, its easy culture, its readiness to hybridize and to ripen seed, the certainty, by comparison, of rearing the proceeds, each of these merits appeals to one or other of orchid-growers. Many of the species which come from torrid lands, indeed, are troublesome, but with such we are not concerned. The cool varieties will do well anywhere, provided they receive water enough in summer, and not too little in winter. I do not speak of the American ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... room of the new Osmanli Baths in Cork Street four or five recumbent individuals, in a state of moist nudity and self-respecting inertia, were smoking cigarettes or making occasional pretence of reading damp newspapers. A glass wall with a glass door shut them off from the yet more torrid regions of the further swelter chambers; another glass partition disclosed the dimly-lit vault where other patrons of the establishment had arrived at the stage of being pounded and kneaded and sluiced by Oriental-looking attendants. The splashing and trickling of taps, ...
— When William Came • Saki
... All through the torrid day the disquieting impulse warned her to be up and on her way—just as the birds feel the urge of an irresistible voice to desert the land of their birth and to seek a foreign clime as the change of the season draws ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... the same number is the terrestrial; which zones are the arctic and antarctic, the summer and winter tropics (or temperate zones), and the equinoctial; the middle of which zones equally divides the earth and constitutes the torrid zone; but that portion which is in between the summer and winter tropics is habitable, by reason the air ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... vegetation, intensely, vividly green, was motionless in the still, hot, heavy air; the living nightmares inhabiting that primitive world were lying in the cooler depths of the jungle, sheltered from the torrid rays of that ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... at hand, the season of impulse, when we obey most readily the sudden stirrings of our hearts. Even in the torrid climate of Egypt, squalls of rain passed over like stray birds of passage. Asako Barrington felt the fresh influence and the desire to do new things in new places. Hitherto she had evinced very little inclination to revisit the home of her ancestors. But on their ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... European bowls. The single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of an hundred climates. The muff and the fan come together from the different ends of the earth. The scarf is sent from the torrid zone, and the tippet from beneath the pole. The brocade petticoat rises out of the mines of Peru, and the diamond necklace out ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... bright and torrid, Isles of green in deserts horrid Once thy home, thy likeness ever! We with sword no less divine Would the good and evil sever, In a larger ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... was fitted by nature to adorn a far more brilliant position than that which he occupied, as the petty commander of a few colored soldiers, in a little island of the torrid zone. He was slightly made, but perfectly proportioned, with a face of rare beauty, and an expression at once noble and pleasing. His eyes were large, and full of a dark light; his black hair and moustache were trimmed with a care that showed him ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... ideas, ideas more in consonance with the spirit of our institution. There is no strength in a union that enfeebles. Assimilation, a melting into the corporate body, having no distinction from others, equally the recipients of government—this is to be the independent man, be his skin tanned by the torrid heat of Africa, or bleached by the eternal snows of the Caucasus. To preach the independence of the colored man is to preach his Americanization. The shackles of slavery have been torn from his limbs by the stern arbitrament of arms; the shackles of political enslavement, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... description of the frozen zone, in the Winter, is perhaps even finer and more thoroughly felt, as being done from early associations, than that of the torrid zone in his Summer. Any thing more beautiful than the following account of the Siberian exiles is, I think, hardly to be found in the whole ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... Slaves are certainly the only people to be depended upon, but it is necessary, I imagine they should be born in one or other of our Northern Colonies, the Winters here will not agree with a Native of the torrid zone, pray therefore if possible procure for me two Stout Young fellows, who have been accustomed to Country Business, and as I shall wish to see them happy, I am of opinion there is little felicity without a Communication with the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... crests stood out grayish-white against the almost black indigo of the sky, like the broken battlements of a giant ruined fortress. The rays of the sun heated to white heat one of the sides of the funeral valley, the other being bathed in that crude blue tint of torrid lands which strikes the people of the North as untruthful when it is reproduced by painters, and which stands out as sharply as the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... will have become of all this greenness and beautiful colour of flowers? The torrid sun and the hot breath of summer will have burnt up the fair garment of spring, and laid bare the arid sternness of the South again. The nightingale still warbles fitfully in the green bushes, but the raven, perched up yonder upon the stark rock, croaks like a misanthrope ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... world in which we live is full of animal life. In the great forests, under the ground, on the steep mountainsides, in the depths of the oceans, rivers, streams, from the frigid north to the torrid south, in the parched deserts, are animals of every size, colour, and form, all of which are, in their general form, adapted to their peculiar places in nature. Their lives and habits undeniably demonstrate ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... so learned, live in the exercise and habit of prayer; and it will be as much his instinct to cry to God in all changing circumstances as it is for the swallows to seek the sunny south when the winter comes, or the cold north when the sunny south becomes torrid and barren. So, then, 'He shall call upon Me' is the characteristic of the truly God-knowing and God-loving heart, which was described in the previous verse. 'Because he has clung to Me in love, therefore will ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... around. It was a hot, torrid night, although the moon shone brightly. All was silent as O-hi-o and little Mus-kin-gum came forth to the sacrifice. She wore her ceremonial costume; her long, black hair was flowing and held in by a beaded headband. She looked so beautiful as she marched up the mountain ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... think, is where we must make our bow, for we had some small place in these operations; it was, in fact, our introduction to actual fighting, though we had already spent many torrid weeks on the Suez Canal. And no better mise en scene could we have than the old Missa, for the story of the campaign would be incomplete without mention of her; she was unique. Besides, everybody in Egypt knows the Missa. Those who had ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... reason to believe that in this supposed case there would be formed upon the surface of the globe three different regions—the torrid region, the temperate, and the frigid. These three regions would continue stationary; and the operations of each would be continual. In the torrid region, nothing but evaporation and heat would take place; no cloud could be formed, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of a dull red, was outlined on a sky of sapphire blue; their base was swallowed up in a whirl of snowy foam, hidden by the incessant shock of enormous mountains of water which broke upon these reefs in tones of thunder. The sun with all its strength threw a brilliant, torrid light on this mass of granite; there was not a cloud in the brazen heavens. On the horizon there appeared through a burning vapor the high land ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... spurs in haste the valiant peer: And on the winged courser forth is flown, Leaving beneath him, in his swift career, The royal castle and the crowded town; The bugle ever pealing, far and near. The harpies fly toward the torrid zone; Nor light until they reach that loftiest mountain Where springs, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... pomegranate, sago-palm and many others whose home is in the tropics. The delicious climate of this island, several degrees warmer than that of the main land in the same latitude, enabled the proprietors of this insular Paradise to grow nearly all the fruits of the torrid zone. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... forth upon the earth—her thousand plants Are smitten; even the dark, sun-loving maize Faints in the field beneath the torrid blaze; The herd beside the shaded fountain pants; For life is driven from all the landscape brown; The bird has sought his tree, the snake his den, The trout floats dead in the hot stream, and men Drop by the sunstroke in ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... Martina to make them acquainted; but nothing would have induced Dame Martina to go out of her rooms, protected to the utmost from the torrid sunshine, so she left it to Heliodora to pay the visit and give her a report of the hero's daughter. Heliodora had devoted herself heart and soul to the little heiress, and humored her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the east to the west, by no means enjoy. The advantages accruing from their neighborhood to the equator are added to those acquired from the natural variety of their climate; and the produce of both the torrid and temperate zones, the palm-tree and the fir, the pine-apple, the corn ear and the potato, flourish side by side upon ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... the line of the Equator has had also something to do with staying the onward march of civilization from without. The world learned first to think only of the enervating influence of a torrid sun upon the inhabitants of the great continent, and this was not inviting ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... Topas Port, in angry sort, A scowl upon his forehead, Relieved his chest, of wrath possessed, In words distinctly torrid; His brows were raised, his eyes they blazed, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... from his hand to the table before him and was soon lost in thought. An English gentleman, unquestionably in the highest sense of the word, was Sir Jasper Coleman; a true type of that class who, from the time of the Norman conquest to the present day, whether beneath the Torrid or Frigid Zone's; on the bloody battlefield, or launching their thunders on the billows of the white-crested main, nobly upheld the honor of their country's flag, whose heroic deeds and honorable names have been handed down unsullied and untarnished for many generations. Since leaving ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... were accustomed to confer upon it, and could scarcely fail to awaken a new interest. The periodic recurrence of its phases; its reflection of the sun's rays, shedding upon it a light and a heat seven times greater than that received by the earth; its glacial and its torrid zones, which, on account of the great inclination of the axis, are scarcely separable; its equatorial bands; its mountains eleven miles high;—were all subjects of observation worthy of the ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... to hail that last morning of the great council, and beamed with torrid tolerance upon the ceremony of kindling the greatest of the fires. On this morning Colonel Clark did not sit alone, but was surrounded by men of weight,—by Monsieur Gratiot and other citizens, Captain Bowman and the Spanish officers. And when at length the brush crackled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of his best work; it had been her influence which finally had led him to come back into the firing line; it had been in the hope for the future, a hope growing less and less vague as the months passed by, that he had been willing and glad to prolong his stay through one more torrid African summer. And to ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... law, with its delays and circumventions, took root in the virgin soil, and people at such posts as Sandy seldom shut and rarely locked their doors, even by night. Windows were closed and blanketed by day against the blazing sun and torrid heat, but, soon after nightfall, every door and window was usually opened wide and often kept so all the night long, in order that the cooler air, settling down from mesa and mountain, might drift ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... of husbandry, others in deep despair summoned death to their relief. Men began to look on each other with eyes of enmity" (i. 105). "The sun exhibited signs of decay, its surface turned pale, and its beams were frigid. The northern nations dreaded perishing by intense cold ... and fled to the torrid zone to court the sun's beneficial rays" (i. 120). "The reign of Time was over, ages of Eternity were going to begin; but at the same moment Hell shrieked with rage, and the sun and stars were extinguished. The gloomy ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... science. They were mostly dirty and neglected in their personal appearance, and their houses were certainly neither built nor kept in accordance with those laws of sanitation which in the civilised world have become a matter of course. Water was scarce, and the long and torrid summers, during which every bit of vegetation was dried up on the veldt, had inured the population to certain privations which would have been intolerable to Europeans. These things, and the unfortunate habits of the Boers, made ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... particularly some part of the eastern, most of the southern, and all the western hemisphere; from them we have learned that the earth is surrounded by the ocean, and that all the countries under the torrid zone are inhabited, and that, quite contrary to the notions that were formerly entertained, they are very far from being the most sultry climate in the world, those within a few degrees of the tropics, though habitable, being much more hot, for reasons which have ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... generalities. He went on to document them with exactitudes. He teamed up with a meteorologist to explain the distribution of rainfall in spite of lack of frigid and torrid air masses. Cal's doubt was not appeased. Weather prediction was about on a par with race-horse handicapping, and easy to ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... round those urns of mingled clays That Tuscan potters fashion'd in old days, And coloured like the torrid earth ablaze, ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... the same yet not the same, "elevation does not always give coolness, and one may be torrid and tempestuous even ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... legal practitioners must be imported from an immense distance. All English labor in India, from the labor of the Governor-General and the Commander-in-Chief, down to that of a groom or a watchmaker, must be paid for at a higher rate than at home. No man will be banished, and banished to the torrid zone, for nothing. The rule holds good with respect to the legal profession. No English barrister will work, fifteen thousand miles from all his friends, with the thermometer at ninety-six in the shade, for the emoluments which will content him ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... everybody sees through the pretence. They're glass chips, and brittle shavings, slender pinkish scrids,—no name for them; but just you say blonde, soft and slow and rolling,—it brings up a brilliant, golden vitality, all manner of white and torrid magnificences, and you see me! I've watched little bugs—gold rose-chafers—lie steeping in the sun, till every atom of them must have been searched with the warm radiance, and have felt, that, when they reached that point, I was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... Pitt only nineteen men were under the surgeon's charge. The regiment was now in better quarters than it had been for years. It was greatly reduced in numbers, from its long service, the nature and variety of its hardships, amidst the torrid heat of the West Indies, the rigorous winters of New York and Ohio, and the fatalities on the ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... regard of his mistress's eyes, and, at the same time, their power of producing love in him, he considers them as burning-glasses made of ice. Finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, he concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. Upon the dying of a tree on which he had cut his loves, he observes that his flames had burnt up ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... and instead of being tanned it became more and more transparent, and her little hands looked as if they were moulded of wax. She did not lack care and even such comforts as Stas and Dinah with the aid of Hatim could provide, but she lacked the salubrious desert air. The moist and torrid climate united with the hardships of the journey more and more undermined the strength of ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... here and take a trip south we find it constantly growing warmer. At last we come to a place where it is extremely warm in both summer and winter. That region is called the Torrid Zone because "torrid" means "hot." This hot zone extends right around the middle part of the earth. The very hottest part through the middle is the Equator. Notice on the drawing that we live in a zone between the very cold region, or ...
— Where We Live - A Home Geography • Emilie Van Beil Jacobs
... desert of Kaits, in Northern Ceylon, nourishes on its dry and torrid sands some species, represented by a large number of individuals, together with some rarer plants. The commonest forms are Erigeron Asteroides, Vernonia cinerea, Laurea pinnatifida, Vicoa auriculata, Heylandia latebrosa and Chrysopogon montanus. ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries |
