"Tortuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles—Las Tours, the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was the way from France into Provence so that the silver ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... to the tortuous talker is a supreme test of patience. He slowly winds his way in and out of a subject. He traverses by-paths, allowing nothing to escape his unwearied eye. He goes a long way about, but never tires of his circuitous journey. Ploddingly and perseveringly he zigzags from one point to ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... of the debt owed by England and the empire to Lord Milner for the inflexible determination with which he penetrated, unmasked, and finally baffled the tortuous diplomacy of the Boer commissioners may be estimated from the fact that within three months of the signing of the Surrender Agreement at Pretoria, three out of their number asked the British Government to re-open the discussion and make, what Mr. Chamberlain rightly ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... three degrees. Captain Wickham and the surgeon visited an inlet near the ship to-day, which had indeed been looked into, but not explored before. They proceeded to the south-west for about three miles, through a very tortuous channel, dry in many parts at low-water, thickly studded with mangrove bushes, over and through which the tide made its way at high-water, giving to that part of the country the appearance of an extensive morass. A slightly elevated table-topped range ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... mightiest man-of-war. Many and many a gully, half choked with stones and briers, lurks under the base of an overtopping hill, and shows where a forgotten Undine lived and loved. The hills still bear the scars of their wounds. No soft-springing greenness veils the tortuous processes. Uncompromising and terrible, the marks of their awful rending, the agony of their fiery birth, shall remain. Time, the destroyer of man's works, is the perfecter of God's. These ravages are not Time's; they ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... for it was here that Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated, as he attended High Mass, on April 26th, 1478, with the connivance, if not actually at the instigation, of Christ's Vicar himself, Pope Sixtus IV. Florentine history is so eventful and so tortuous that beyond the bare outline given in chapter V, I shall make in these pages but little effort to follow it, assuming a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the reader; but it must be stated here that periodical revolts against the power and prestige of the Medici often occurred, and none ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... peculiar emotions. This party had suddenly sprung up in opposition to the ease with which foreigners secured suffrage and office; and, although it shrewdly avoided nominations for governor and President, it demoralised both parties by the strange and tortuous manoeuvres that had ended in the election of a mayor of New York in the preceding spring. It operated, for the most part, in that city, but its sympathisers covered the whole State. Then, there was the anti-rent party, confined to Delaware and three or four adjoining counties, where long leases ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... was lifting his hand toward a tortuous brass knocker the door opened and Barbara, carrying a book and pencil in one hand, while the other held down her hat-brim, tripped ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... tortuous hours in which the souls of those who watched and waited for his return were tried to the utmost. A restless, uncanny feeling prevailed: as if they were prisoners waiting in dead silence for the sickening news ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... northwest and directing his steps towards the interior of the island, the traveller will notice that the land rises rapidly, and after three hours' walking over tortuous paths obstructed by great masses of rock and sometimes cut by ravines, he will find himself on the border of a great maquis. The maquis is the domain of the Corsican shepherds and of those who are at ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... literary labors—that were like crowding the Bard of Avon into a magazine article. For 300 years the world has been studying the latter, and is not yet sure that it understands him; yet Shakespeare is to Carlyle what a graded turnpike is to a tortuous mountain path. The former deals chiefly with the visible; the latter with the intangible. The first tells us what men did; the last seeks to learn why they did it. Carlyle is the prince of critics. He is often lenient to a fault, but seldom deceived—"looks ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in a way, that his decision had already been forced upon him, that the dice had been cast and counted. He had been trying to sweep back the rising sea with a broom; he had been trying to fight down that tangled and tortuous past which still claimed him as its own. And now all that remained for him was to slip quietly and unprotestingly into the current which clawed and gnawed at his feet. He had been tried too long; the test, from the first, had been too crucial. He might, in time, even find ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... dressing-room. She must get away before her admirers demanded her reappearance on the platform. The old man quitted the establishment. Stepping out of the vestibule, dimly lighted by a flickering jet of gas, he strode along the narrow and tortuous streets of Chalons at a great pace. This pedestrian seemed out of humour: he marched along, bent beneath the weight of his accordion, tapping the road violently with the point of his long climbing stick. Taking a circuitous route, ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets, its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... fancies and romantic thoughts, I lost count of streets and passages, turning this way, that and the other, through many narrow and tortuous byways and alleys, until I realized I was hopelessly lost. With my fair guide in front and my good sword by my side, lightly I recked of streets or houses. Yet I dared not forget I was on an errand for the Governor and must not expose myself to ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... thin and squalid, fit emblem of the sterility of the country. We could gain no information from her, she was so much alarmed, but not long after parting with her we came to a puddle of water in the plains, and encamped for the night. Our stage had been a tortuous, but not a long one, and we halted early in the day, the latitude was 30 degrees 58 minutes S. by an altitude ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... followed by perceptions; that he should have observed the antecedent separate from the consequent: otherwise his statement, instead of being complimented as a plain statement of fact, must be condemned as a tortuous statement of hypothesis. Unless he has observed No. 1 and No. 2 in sequence, he is not entitled to declare that this is an observed sequence. Now, did Reid, or did any man ever observe matter anterior to his perception of it? Had Reid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the grim, consuming pestilence of gaming claim more victims than in the Ghetto. The ravages of drink and debauchery are slight indeed; but the tortuous streets can show too many a humble home haunted by the spectres of ruin and misery which stalked across the threshold when the FIRST CARD ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... scourge of the flaming sun, tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red plain stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over which writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing its tortuous way over the red world. Sometimes it was as unreal as a fever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen, perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper's bed. Sometimes the dragon curled itself into a ball, and the ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... to Johnson's position at West View; one through Harrisonburg; the second by Port Republic, Cross Keys, and Mount Sidney; the third, the river road, by Port Republic and Staunton. The first of these was already occupied by the Federals; the second was tortuous, and at places almost within view of the enemy's camps; while the third, though it was nowhere less than ten miles distant, ran obliquely across their front. In fact, to all appearance, Banks with his superior force blocked Jackson's march on Staunton more ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... enough for the lichen and the moss, or for these, in their turns, to become the receptacle of the seeds of forest trees, blown from some distant region—is a problem. In threading these islands, sometimes our vessel passed through tortuous passages apparently blocked up at the end, and within a few yards of land, but by a sudden turn emerged into fine large basins, and so wound and twined its way along. As the sun declined, every island made a full, clear reflection in the glassy surface of the water; and the boughs ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... bells were ringing the procession gradually formed;—a dozen or more priests leading,—incense-bearers and acolytes walking next,— and then the long train of little children and girls carrying their symbolic banners, following after. The way they had to walk was a steep, winding ascent, through tortuous streets, to the Cathedral, which stood in the centre of a great square on an eminence which overlooked the whole city, and as soon as they started they began to sing,—softly at first, then more clearly and sweetly, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... fro until he had the proper focus and might obtain the sun's altitude; whereby he had presently found our present position, the which he duly pricked upon the chart. He now showed me how, by standing out on direct course instead of following the tortuous windings of the coast, we could shorten our passage by very many miles. Hereupon we shaped our course accordingly and, the wind freshening somewhat, by afternoon the high coast had faded to a faint blur of distant mountain peaks, and by sunset we had ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... they now turned from the broad highway into a narrower road, on which they traveled for a long time in silence on account of its tortuous course, and because in some places the snow formed drifts difficult to traverse. In the spring or summer, on rainy days, this road must have ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... tortuous course in a northwesterly direction they reached a point where the path was barely wide enough for the wagon to pass, and was bounded on the one side by a wall of rock and on the other by a ragged precipice descending hundreds of feet ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... Tullianum or Prison of St. Peter, we were led through a tortuous subterranean passage of Etruscan character, a hundred yards long, cut out of the rock. It was so low that we had to stoop all the way, and in some places almost to creep, and so narrow that a very stout person would have some ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... made attractive, or insidiously alluring. The shadow of expiation, remorse, punishment, retribution is ever present, like a death's-head at a feast. The day of reckoning comes, and bitterly do the culprits realize that the tortuous game of vice is not worth the candle. Casuistical theologians may attempt to explain away the notions of punishment in the life to come, of retribution beyond the grave. But the shallowest thinker will not ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... Few of his promises to them were performed. They worshipped a bankrupt deity. The land of promise was a Tantalus cup ever held to their lips, and ever mocking them when they essayed to drink. God was their greatest enemy instead of their best friend. Their tortuous path across the wilderness was marked by a track of bleaching bones. All the evils which imagination can conceive fell on their devoted heads. Bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, cursed with famine and drought, swallowed by earthquake, slain by war, ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... a third party, the neutral; and it therefore appears desirable, before tracing the progress of this warfare, to outline briefly the principles of international law which, by a slow and tortuous process, have grown up defining the respective rights of neutrals and belligerents in naval war. Blockade is among the most fundamental of these rights accorded to the belligerent, upon the conditions that the blockade shall be limited to enemy ports or coasts, ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... into the tortuous twists of streets that stamp the old Greenwich village with a character all its own, the worse it seemed to get. Decrepit relics of every style of architecture from almost the earliest times in the city stood out in the darkness, like so ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... puerile, jesuitical, and made unintelligible, as I think, from design, to conceal the palpaple contradictions and absurdities of which it is full. I can compare it to nothing better than to a serpent, which hides its ugly head under the tortuous folds of its horrible body. The protest, on the contrary, is the finest document of its kind, that I remember to have seen. As precise as it is luminous, it presents at once, and gathers, so to speak, into a single focus, all the reasons for the opposite ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... he passed. With slow and careful steps, his sagacious steed moved on, obedient to the rein, at one time topping the crest of a rugged hill, and then winding at a snail's pace down the steep declivity, or following the tortuous course of the streamlet through deep ravines, whose jagged and bush-clad sides frowned down upon them on either side, deepening ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... exceedingly narrow and tortuous, but a rapid survey of it satisfied me that the wind was free enough to allow the ship to traverse it, and I at once determined to make the attempt. There was no time for hesitation; whatever was to be done must be done at once. I therefore ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... too numerous to conduct with sufficient secresy and dispatch the affairs of a state that pursued a policy alike tortuous and complicated, the most general of its important interests were intrusted to a council composed of three hundred of its members. In order to avoid the publicity and delay of a body large even as this, a second selection was made, which was known as the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Siskiyous. It there meets the Trinity, which flows northwest. The combined rivers take the direction of the Trinity, but the name of the Klamath prevails. It enters the ocean about thirty miles south of the Oregon line. The whole region is extremely mountainous. The course of the river is tortuous, winding among ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... maiden voyage commenced. With Mr. Stanley Spencer in the car, she sailed gracefully down the football field, wheeled round in a circle—a small circle, too—and for perhaps a quarter of an hour sailed a tortuous course over the heads of a small but enthusiastic crowd of spectators. The ship was handicapped to some extent by the fact that in their anxiety to make the trial the aeronauts had not waited to inflate it fully, but still it did its work well, answered ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... and the range of Heights running south from it. And there, I think, the King is mainly to be found, looking now at the Austrians, now at his own people, for some three hours to come. His plan of Battle is soon clear to him: Nypern, with its bogs and scrags, on the Austrian right wing, is tortuous impossible ground, as he well remembers, no good prospect for us there: better ground for us on their left yonder, at Leuthen, even at Sagschutz farther south, whither they are stretching themselves. Attempt their left wing; try our "Oblique Order" upon that, with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... is especially ver. 1 which attracts our attention: "In that day the Lord with His sword, hard, great, and strong, shall visit the leviathan, the tortuous serpent, and killeth the dragon that is ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... turbulence on the level beach between Colombo and Point-de-Galle, as in a great degree to disperse the accumulations of sand brought down by the rivers, or heaped up by the tide, when the wind is off the land. Still, many of the rivers are thrown back by embankments, and after forming tortuous lakes flow for a long distance parallel to the shore, before finding an escape for their waters. Examples of this occur at Pantura, to the south of Colombo, and at Negombo, Chilaw, and elsewhere to the north ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... running with all sorts of lists and bends, going on and on endlessly, according to the belief of the boys of Waddy. The road was overhung by tall gums and nourished many clumps of fresh green saplings, about which the tortuous cart-track wound in deep yellow ruts, baked hard in summer, washed into treacherous bog in winter. Here caution was not necessary, and there were divers fierce hand-to-hand attacks on clumps of scrub representing a vindictive and merciless police, out of which Moonlighter ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... of the entrances to the great building, the girls went in. After following devious directions and tortuous ways, they found the perfumery counter, and as they had now sufficient command of the French language to make their wants accurately known, they inquired for the precious Cyclamen. The affable salesman was at first quite sure he could supply it, but an exhaustive search ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... the hills had grown higher and higher upon either side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine that forbid a passage south. Up through these the main road has been pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of India watered by the Ganges and Jumna. The country is for the most part perfectly flat, and cut up into little fields, divided by shallow ditches. Here and there nullahs, or deep watercourses, with tortuous channels and perpendicular sides, wind through the fields to the nearest stream. These nullahs constitute the great danger of hunting in the country. In the fields men may be noticed, in the scantiest of attire, working with hoes among their springing crops; women, wrapped ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... the sea; its rocky, wave-worn base is whitened by a long line of snowy breakers; its deep, wild ravines are filled with soft blue summer haze; and down from the clouds which shroud its higher peaks tumble in white, tortuous streaks the foaming waters of unnamed and almost unknown mountain torrents. As one sails, at a distance of two or three miles, along this wild, beautiful coast, the picture presented by the fringe of feathery palms over ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... discovered something else. She had changed her course. The boat seemed to be drawing away from him! His heart sank, but almost at once, the boat turned again, following the tortuous ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... "I am enjoying this brief interchange of confidences. Circumstances have made me, as you see, a politician, a schemer if you like. Nature meant me to be one of the frankest, the most truthful, the best-hearted of men. I detest the tortuous ways of the old diplomacy. The spoken word pleases me best. That is why I like a few minutes' conversation with the enemy, why I love to stand here and talk to you with the buttons off our foils. We are scheming against you and your country, and you know it, and we ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Taal making this appointment, causing his pachydermatous hide to know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only last Sabbath she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young woman capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might be made useful in a variety of ways—some of them tortuous, all of them secret, as the Slabbertian ways ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... usual with his tribe, had two entrances to his lodge, one a tortuous passage opening under water and leading inward about a foot, then slanting upward five or six feet, the other leading to the open air, its exit cleverly concealed by a tussock of coarse grass. Here he lived a life of ease and also of adventure, feasting on sweet-flag ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... exertions of that last bitter hour; his body labored mechanically, without cognizance of the strain put upon it. He had traversed fifteen miles of the blackest of forests and by way of the most tortuous of roads. A subconscious triumph now inspired him, born of the certainty that he had left his enemies far behind. It was this oddly jubilant spur that drove him safely, almost instinctively, into the heart of S——. The music of a band both attracted ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... out to be long and tortuous, leading at last to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Duke of Lotzen was only a means to an end: money and exquisite ease. Left with ample wealth on his decease, she, for her excitement and to be in affairs, had mixed in diplomacy, and had quickly become an expert in tortuous moves ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... low one. Another, narrow and high, protected it in the street. The sun shone upon and brightened the chimney-tops. The tortuous Rue Saint Antoine wound before ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... by General Lee was shrouded in fog, and, as morning had dawned without the expected signal, he concluded that some mishap had befallen the force which was to make it. By a tortuous path he went down the side of the mountain low enough to have a distinct view of the camp. He saw the men, unconscious of the near presence of an enemy, engaged in cleaning their arms, cooking, and other morning occupations; ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... you may enter a narrow and very tortuous path, called the Labyrinth, which leads to an immense split, or chasm, in the rocks. Here is placed a ladder, down which you descend twenty-five or thirty feet, and enter a narrow cave below, which brings you to a combination of rock called the Gothic Window. You stand in this recess, while ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... before I espied him descending the Gusedub by that tortuous path, marking so strongly the character of a Scottish glen. He was easily distinguished, indeed, at some distance, by his jaunty swagger, in which he presented to you the flat of his leg, like the manly knave of clubs, apparently with the most perfect contentment, not only ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Reviews" has answered the book: for what signify the details, if the fundamental lie has been detected, and unrelentingly exposed? The man who plants his heel on the serpent's head, and refuses to withdraw it, can afford to disregard the tortuous writhings of the long supple body.—Again. These attacks are seven. Must seven men with "concert and comparison,"—with leisure and inclination too,—be procured to demolish this flimsy compound of dogmatism and unbelief? to disperse ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... these men wriggled themselves down the tortuous path, keeping always under cover of the bushes; and even when the open ground below was reached, they slipped so silently along beneath the cover of the hedges that not an eye saw them, not even the sharp ears of the Indians ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... reaches over and quite on to the sound parts. When the glue has hardened perfectly and the cramps have been removed, the careful shaving down and finishing of both the inner and outer blocks or slices may be proceeded with. If the burrowings and tortuous course of the obnoxious depredator give indication of its having been of huge proportions for its species, for these creatures vary in size from a small pin to nearly an eighth of an inch in diameter, and the tunnellings are not very close together, then pieces ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... soon, for scarcely had he drawn himself to the safety of the limb than two gaping mouths snapped venomously below him. For a few minutes Tarzan rested in the tree that had proved the means of his salvation. His eyes scanned the river as far down-stream as the tortuous channel would permit, but there was no sign of the Russian ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be intercepted. The build of the boats also is peculiar; they are very wide and flat bottomed, and the rudders are unusually large, so as to enable them to turn quickly in the narrow channels, which are often tortuous. The bow rises in a splendid curve high out of the water, and throws the spray clear of its low body, for the Egyptian loads his boat very heavily, and I have often seen them so deep in the water that a little wall of mud has been added to the gunwale ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... dealings with the world, and under any other circumstances he would in all likelihood have made a determined effort to gain his brother's sympathy. But in the refusal of his application for a pardon he had believed certain, he had suffered a severe blow. Deep in his tortuous nature there existed at least one sincere and good quality, which was his passionate love for his native country. It had been distorted indeed, through the influence of another strong affection, the love for his wife while she had lived, and, being misdirected by her agency, the very strength ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... but missed the ford. It has been said that the enemy, by building a dam below, had raised the water to seven feet. Be that as it may, a few venturing in with musket and ammunition belts were drowned. Groping for the way, and apparently confused between the tortuous courses of the river itself and a tributary which enters near by, the mass of the troops blundered into a sharp bend curving to the northward, thus coming under a cross fire from the two enclosing banks. Here they ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... may be conveniently classed as four separate chains: the Smoky, forming the western boundary of the State; the Blue Ridge, running across the State in a very tortuous course, and shooting out spurs of great elevation; the Brushy (which divides, for the greater part of its course, the waters of the Catawba and Yadkin), beginning at a point near Lenoir and terminating in the Pilot and Sauratown Mountains; ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... from Jerusalem, with a troop of cavalry and Kavasses in gorgeous array. The office lasts from 10 o'clock on Christmas Eve until long after midnight. "At the reading of the Gospel the clergy and as many of the congregation as can follow leave the church, and proceed by a flight of steps and a tortuous rock-hewn passage to the Grotto of the Nativity, an irregular subterranean chamber, long and narrow. They carry with them a waxen image of an infant—the bambino—wrap it in swaddling bands and lay it on the site which is said to ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... more, but Mrs. Brook preferred none the less to treat the question as between themselves. She WAS, as the others said, wonderful. "You can't help thinking me"—she spoke to him straight—"rather tortuous." The pause she thus momentarily produced was so intense as to give a sharpness that was almost vulgar to the little "Oh!" by which it was presently broken and the source of which neither of her three companions could ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... could not rest. In and out the tortuous streets of Paris he roamed during the better part of that night. He was now only awaiting the dawn to publicly demand the right to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... somewhere else for modern improvements. It is a shame, when Quebec placed herself far out of the way, up in the very neighbourhood of Hudson's Bay, that it should be hunted and harassed with new-fangled notions, and that all the charming inconveniences and irregularities of narrow and tortuous streets, that so delight a traveller's eyes, should be altered to suit the fantastic notions ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... started along a tortuous and narrow path and Gus followed for more than half a mile. They were just off the thoroughfare when they started, but the youth could hear the distant booming of the ocean waves on the beach ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... melo-tragedy is Don Juan, the hero of unlimited desire, pursuing the unattainable through tortuous interminable labyrinths, eager in appetite yet never satisfied, 'for ever following and for ever foiled.' He is the incarnation of lust that has become a habit of the soul—rebellious, licentious, selfish, even cruel. His nature, originally noble ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... upon either side or down the center of long and tortuous Grand Avenue to arouse enthusiasm, nor was Billy particularly enthusiastic about that more or ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... watched him as he moved round the table ore in curiosity now than in fright. He puzzled her, and she still had a feeling at the back of her mind that there must be something more definite and more evil lurking at the back of that tortuous brain. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... came down on one side, they went not up on the other. Instead, having reached the nether bluff, they turned sharp along its base, by another and still narrower trace, which they knew would take them up to the mission-building. A route tortuous, the path beset with many obstacles; hence their having spent several hours in passing from the ford to the mission-house, though the distance between is ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... The street was tortuous and narrow, paved with rough cobbles; and it rose steeply, so that the porter bent lower beneath his burden, panting. With the bag on his shoulders he looked like some hunchbacked gnome, a creature of nightmare. On either ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... promiscuous one. It had more tortuous relationships than most families have, although there were only four in it, ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... alabaster. In the midst of the plain of snow lie these chasms; the vertical walls, the bold headlands, the turrets and spires and obelisks, the rounded and towering capes, the carved and buttressed precipices, the branch valleys and canons, and the winding and tortuous course of the main channel are all here,—all that the Yosemite or Yellowstone have to show, except the terraces and the cascades. Sometimes my canon is bridged, and one's fancy runs nimbly across a vast arch of Parian marble, and that makes up for the falls and the terraces. Where the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... Garden—spot beloved of the people for its welcome shades, where artificial waterfalls, from the "Isar rolling rapidly," add chill to the natural dampness; where unwilling streamlets creep slowly through tortuous channels toward a stagnant pond, and pestiferous miasma, rising like incense at the going down of the sun, broods over the meadows until his rising again. It was in one of the streets bordering this park that the cholera broke out in 1873, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... effect of all these disturbing causes, primary and secondary, is seen in that irregular distribution of climates, which the tortuous isothermal lines and the mottled raincharts illustrate. The isothermal lines may be regarded as the topographical delineations of that bed of temperatures down which the upper atmosphere flows from the equator toward the poles, till its downward tendency is balanced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... desert—is there found, as also its enemy, the Mexican jackal, or coyote. To the rattlesnake and horned lizard (agama) it is a congenial home; and the singular snake-bird (paisano) may frequently be seen running over the arid waste, or skulking through the tortuous stems of the nopals. In the canons of the stream the grizzly bear makes his haunt, and in times not long gone by it was ascended and traversed by the unwieldy buffalo. The wild horse (musteno) still occasionally ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... bow and arrow on the ground beside him and lighted eagerly, for she knew then that the fishingpole was for her. Without a word they slipped through the bushes and down the steep side of the spur to a little branch which ran down into a creek that wound a tortuous way into ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... and tortuous streets where the moon's frosty brilliance was almost completely hidden, I came at last to the waterman's door and knocked. He was in bed and for some time my summons was in vain. At last I heard a sound in the room ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tossed it into the rickshaw and silently pointing toward the north, climbed in. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. The men sprang away in a quick dog-trot along the Bund, and then started to climb the hillside at the back of the town. They wound slowly up the narrow tortuous roads, past numberless villas, hung with lights, from which voices floated ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... perfect in their whole circuit, and give one a very clear idea of the complicated arrangements for the defence of a mediaeval town, by the many gateways and tortuous roads by which the town is entered, while the ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... provocation. The appearance of the Remarks on Cato gave the irritable poet an opportunity of venting his malice under the show of friendship; and such an opportunity could not but be welcome to a nature which was implacable in enmity, and which always preferred the tortuous to the straight path. He published, accordingly, the Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis. But Pope had mistaken his powers. He was a great master of invective and sarcasm: he could dissect a character in terse and sonorous ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... attained such a knowledge of affairs and such an ability to cope with intricate problems as to make them efficient leaders—leaders capable of guiding aright the noble ship of state thru difficult and tortuous channels beset, on every side, by dangerous rocks and calamitous whirlpools. And among that class of efficient leaders you, young men and young women of the University of North Dakota, will soon be numbered. How shall you respond to the call of duty? Your State, by virtue of what she ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... suddenly. A sad-looking group of men trailed in and made for a corner where certain bulky, shapeless bundles were soon revealed as those glittering and tortuous instruments which go to make a ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... therefore confers upon them at once the security and commercial accessibility which result from contact with the sea. Other countries, like Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungary, chiefly central in location, have the strategic and even the commercial value of their coasts reduced by the long, tortuous course which connects them with the open ocean. Therefore, we find Russia planning to make a great port at Ekaterina Harbor on the northernmost point of her Lapland coast, where an out-runner from the Gulf Stream ensures an ice-free port on the open sea.[250] ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... his ambition looks beyond himself to the future of his descendants. Measured by our modern standards, his religious professions seem only hypocrisy; but as we analyze his character we find that a faith in Jehovah, narrow and selfish though it be, was ever his guiding star. Out of the tortuous windings of his earlier years it ultimately led him to a calm old age. Imperfect though his character was, like that of the race which he represented, the significant fact is that God ever cared for him and was able to utilize him as an agent ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... was built in 1683. William Pitt came to live here in 1801. St. James's Place is a medley of old and modern buildings, some having been built in the last decade. Wheatley speaks of it because of its tortuous course, as "one of the oddest built streets in London." Wilkes and Addison, and Mrs. Delaney, at whose house Miss Burney stayed, have been among the residents. Samuel Rogers lived for fifty years at No. 22, which looked out over ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... present world only a small minority can have that direct and honourable relation of public service in the work they do; most of the important business of the community is done upon the older and more tortuous private ownership system, and the great mass of men in socially useful employment find themselves working only indirectly for the community and directly for the profit of a private owner, or they themselves are private owners. Every man ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... however, to walk in single file, with much care to their steps, for the obstacles were ceaseless in the way of trailing vines, saplings, and fallen trees. The narrow and tortuous avenue they threaded was gloomy in the extreme, affording scarcely any glimpse of the sky, and opening out no vistas between the serried ranks of steins, each clothed in a covering of velvet moss, and all looped together by the parasitical ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... no more. Is there not something drearily monotonous in those interminable perspectives? How frightfully the way lengthens before one's eyes! In the twists and curves of the old Paris one was relieved from the pain of seeing how far one had to go from one spot to another,—each tortuous street had a separate idiosyncrasy; what picturesque diversities, what interesting recollections,—all swept away! Mon Dieu! and what for,—miles of florid facades staring and glaring at one with goggle-eyed pitiless windows; house-rents ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as it passed along the edge of a deep precipice, and was only a foot wide and considerably out of the horizontal, so that a single false step would have been fatal. Road continued same character all the way along, though much above the tortuous and noisy Jhelum, and its ups and downs were the roughest, longest, and most trying, I have yet experienced. I am pleased to know that the remaining two marches will be, in the words of my Coolies ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... him time to reflect upon his coming interview with Rosey. He had resolved to begin by confessing all; the attempt of last night had released him from any sense of duty to Sleight. Besides, he did not doubt that Nott's letter contained some reference to this affair only known to Nott's dark and tortuous intelligence. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... dolts and dullards who declare that women who are witty and accomplished, generally make bad housewives. They are said to lie on sofas all day through, reading hooks they cannot understand; playing all kinds of tortuous music; and painting moss roses upon velvet. I am not an old married man (twenty days old only), but I am ready to wager, from what I have already seen of my Carrie, that there is not the slightest ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... marshes and fens—all country that is hard to traverse: this is difficult ground. 9. Ground which is reached through narrow gorges, and from which we can only retire by tortuous paths, so that a small number of the enemy would suffice to crush a large body of our men: this is hemmed in ground. 10. Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... ever known of the liturgies of ages came crowding into his mind. He could hear the sounding of matin invitatories; chimes telling a rosary of harmony over tortuous labyrinths of narrow streets, over cornet towers, over pepper-box pignons, over dentelated walls; the chimes chanting the canonical hours, prime and tierce, sexte and none, vespers and compline; celebrating the joy of a city with the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... bank, where the streams setting over the sandy ridges make a confusing perilous sea to mariners in bad weather. Else, he must sail north between the Ecrehos and the Dirouilles, in the channel called Etoc, a tortuous and dangerous passage save in good weather, and then safe only to the mariner who knows the floor of that strait like his own hand. De la Foret was wholly in the hands of Buonespoir, for he knew nothing of these waters and coasts; also he was a soldier ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the arteries depends on the stage of the disease, and when the disease is actually present, the palpable arteries do not collapse on pressure. They soon lose their elasticity, and if this occurs in parts which are soft and flexible, the arteries become more or less tortuous by the force of the blood current twisting and bending them, owing to the irregularity of their hardening. The extremities readily become numb, or the part "goes to sleep," as it is termed. This occurs frequently at night. Sooner or later some edema of the feet and legs occurs in the ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... had throughout been tortuous and immoral, and she thought she could treat Russia with defiance, secure in the support of her German ally. Similarly the policy of Germany had been an equivocal and double-faced policy, and it mattered little whether the German Government knew or did not know the terms of the Austrian ultimatum; ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... streets—much dirtier than usual, for the best public thoroughfares remained uncleansed in those times of terror—he stopped at a chemist's shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands. A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill thoroughfare, by a small, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... secret passage. It was a narrow cleft, splitting the canyon wall, rough, uneven, tortuous and choked with fallen rocks—no more than a wonderful crack in solid stone, opening into another canyon. Above us the sky seemed a winding, flowing stream of blue. The walls were so close in places ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... was riding above a large city, for he saw spires and house roofs rising from the clouds in every direction. Sometimes an opening was made in the circling mists, and he looked down into a running, tortuous stream; but no land could he see. All this was beautiful to look upon, but he felt quite distraught—as one does when happening ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... creeks, you know nothing, you see and hear nothing, and, if you change your course, must do so by mere guess. But the most annoying thing is, after an apparent advance of a quarter of a mile, to find yourself not twenty yards from your starting-point, so tortuous are the windings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... with exalted virtue, can never constitute greatness. In whatever position placed, or whatever inducements persuade, virtue and a conscientious conviction of right must regulate the mind and conduct of man to make him great. The tortuous course of politics, made so by unprincipled men, renders the truly upright man usually a poor politician. He who possesses the capacity to discern the true interests of a country, and who will virtuously labor to secure and promote those interests, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... street, and, of course, a dirty one, ill-lit, and, apparently, at the moment of my appearance, deserted. I had gone, perhaps, half-way down its tortuous length, blundering more than once into the kennel, wondering what fantastic whim had brought me into such unsavoury quarters, and what would happen to me if, as seemed extremely possible, I lost my way. On a sudden my ears were saluted by sounds which proceeded from a house ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... not betrayed his knowledge of the Colonel's house; and when, on his return to barracks, he discovered that no cheroot-case had been left behind, he beamed with delight. Here was a man after his own heart—a tortuous and indirect person playing a hidden game. Well, if he could be ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... teeming with fishes and sharks. O king! she directing her course towards the sea, separated herself, into three streams; and her water was bestrewn with piles of froth, which looked like so many rows of (white) ganders. And crooked and tortuous in the movement of her body, at places; and at others stumbling at it were; and covered with foam as with a robe: she went forward like a woman drunk. And elsewhere, by virtue of the roar of her waters, she uttered loud sounds. Thus assuming very many different ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to-day. Here, in a vessel too old for service, most of Drake's eleven brothers were born to a life as nearly amphibious as the life of any boy could be. The tide runs in with a rush from the sea at Sheerness, only ten miles away; and so, among the creeks and marshes, points and bends, through tortuous channels and hurrying waters lashed by the keen east wind of England, Drake reveled in the kind of playground that a sea-dog's son ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... hearing—not even the distant lights of one. The current was so strong that the Cameron twins went back among the islands where the water was smoother. Besides, it was much more romantic, Helen said wickedly, among the islands, and Chess and Ruth were more likely to remain in the tortuous passages. ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... special manner with sagacity or reason. The fact is, the epithet "subtil" is applied to the serpent with reference to its form and movements, which convey the abstract idea of subtlety on the same principle that the words "tortuous" and "twisting" have an abstract meaning when we speak of "tortuous policy," {12} or "twisting the meaning of a sentence." Now this subtle entity—this serpent—although presented to Eve in bodily form, ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... I took one or two rides along the southern slopes of the mountain on the old pretext of shooting for the pot. Hans accompanied me on these occasions, but was, I noted, very silent and thoughtful, as though he were hunting something up and down his tortuous intelligence. Once we got quite near to the mouth of the cave or tunnel where poor Savage had met his horrid end. As we stood studying it a white-robed man whose head was shaved, which made me think he must be a priest, came up and asked me mockingly why we did not go through the tunnel and see ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... and at the other side of the world seven ships, fitted out from Holland by private enterprise, were forcing their way to the South Sea through the terrible strait between Patagonia and Fire Land; then supposed the only path around the globe. For the tortuous mountain channel, filled with whirlpools and reefs, and the home of perpetual tempest, which had been discovered in the early part of the century by Magellan, was deemed the sole opening pierced by ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... during pregnancy the veins in the legs become somewhat enlarged. This is due to the pressure of the womb, which interferes with the circulation. If the veins become very prominent, swollen and tortuous, they are called varicose. This condition should be prevented, because it often and to some degree always persists permanently even after the pregnancy is over. The best precautionary measure is for the woman to wear a well-fitting abdominal belt or maternity corset, which supports ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Orleans was can not be found twice in the same age and country; and one of the most mournful spectacles of our time is, the fate of the man and his family, for whom all these violent, and we must add, tortuous exertions, were made twenty years ago. Talleyrand's share in these transactions can not be gainsaid. Though a revolutionist, in so far as the elder branch of the Bourbons was concerned, he was not, however, a Republican in 1830; and had, probably, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the universal train already prepared in thought, and the selfish ambition of Aristagoras forwarded the march of a revolution in favour of liberty that embraced all the cities of Ionia. But Aristagoras, evidently a man of a profound, though tortuous policy, was desirous of engaging not only the colonies of Greece, but the mother country also, in the great and perilous attempt to resist the Persian. High above all the states of the elder Greece soared the military fame of Sparta; and that people ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... south-east coast of America with great rapidity. The 3rd of July we were at the opening of the Straits of Magellan, level with Cape Vierges. But Commander Farragut would not take a tortuous passage, but doubled ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... springing roan under him he felt little care or uneasiness. After a five-mile gallop he drew in to the plainsman's jogging trot, and rode northeastward toward the Nueces River bottoms. He knew the country well—its most tortuous and obscure trails through the great wilderness of brush and pear, and its camps and lonesome ranches where one might find safe entertainment. Always he bore to the east; for the Kid had never seen the ocean, and he had a fancy to lay ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... its compact and restricted area, was aptly suited for government from one centre; the Nile valley proper, narrow, tortuous, and stretching like a thin strip on either bank of the river, did not lend itself to so complete a unity. It, too, represented a single kingdom, having the reed and the lotus for its emblems; but its component parts were more loosely ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... Nello's steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in the town, save where some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices of house-shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting drinking-songs. The streets were ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise to reach a designated [spot], even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci |
