"Rainless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It is difficult to imagine greater contrasts than those existing between the various climates of India—from the eternal snows in the north to the fierce and constant heat of the tropics in the south; from the practically rainless expanse of the western plains of Sind to the 600 inches of rainfall which deluges the eastern mountain slopes. No land is more extensively cultivated and none gives more fruit in return for human ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... the level of the surrounding grain, and a few yards distant was invisible. Its slightly sloping roof, already warped and shrunken into long fissures that permitted glimpses of the steel-blue sky above, was evidently intended only as a shelter from the cloudless sun in those two months of rainless days and dewless nights when it was inhabited. Through the open doors and windows she could see a row of "bunks," or rude sleeping berths against the walls, furnished with coarse mattresses and blankets. As the young girl halted, the man with an instinct of delicacy hurried forward, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... of guano differs greatly according to the extent to which its decomposition has gone, and this is chiefly dependent on the climate of the locality from which it is obtained. When deposited in the rainless districts of Peru it still retains some of the uric acid and the greater part of the ammonia naturally existing in it, and the quantity which has escaped by decomposition is unimportant. But that obtained from other districts ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... already over, and the foreign invaders have fled until next autumn. Egypt is now more Egyptian, beneath a more burning sky. The sun of this Easter Sunday is as hot as ours of July, and the ground seems as if it would perish of drought. But it is always thus in the springtime of this rainless country; the trees, which have kept their leaves throughout the winter, shed them in April as ours do in November. There is no shade anywhere and everything suffers. Everything grows yellow on the yellow sands. But there is no cause for uneasiness: the inundation is at hand, which has never ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... side check and condense all the moisture that comes from the Atlantic; the Sierra Nevada and the Wahsatch range on the other, running parallel with them to the west, check and condense all the moisture that comes from the Pacific coast. In between these two great lines lies the dry and almost rainless district known to the ambitious western mind as the Great American Desert, enclosing in its midst that slowly evaporating inland sea, the Great Salt Lake, a last relic of some extinct chain of mighty waters once comparable to Superior, Erie, and Ontario. In Mexico, again, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... dwellers in Glenavelin. The invitations were of old standing, but Lewis found their fulfilment a pleasant trick of Fortune's. To keep a bustling household in good spirits leaves small room for brooding, and he was famous for his hospitality. The partridges were plentiful that year, and a rainless autumn had come on the heels of a fine summer. So life went pleasantly with all, and the master of the place cloaked a very sick ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... frightful. A great percentage of deaths are ascribed to Resht fever—a terrible disease, due to the water and the exhalations from the marshes surrounding the city. It is certainly the dampest place in the world. The sun is seldom seen, and one's clothes, even on a dry, rainless ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... the Pyramids, with apex high, Like Alpine peaks cleave Egypt's rainless sky, And cast grim shadows o'er a desert land Forever blighted by oppression's hand? No patriot zeal their deep foundations laid— No freeman's hand their darken'd chambers made— No public weal inspired the heart ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... considerable coming and going through its doors, yet all in sobriety and peace, Ascalon passed the burning, rainless summer days. But not without a little cheer in the hard glare of the parching range, not without a laugh and a chuckle, and a grin behind the hand. The town knew all about the rainmaker at work behind the shielding rows of tall corn ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... five continental masses—have what we may call interior deserts. Africa has one such, though it is north of the centre, and extends to the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The only continent without this central nearly rainless field is South America, where the sole characteristic arid district is situated on the western slope of the Cordilleran range. In this case the peculiarity is due to the fact that the strong westerly setting winds which sweep over the country encounter no high mountains until they strike the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... weary land. In truth they found little shade in the cactus forest, but the green produced the illusion of it. They expected to find flowing or standing water, but they went on for many miles and the soil remained hard and baked, as it can bake only in the rainless regions ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... so long in the umbrella tree built a nest there and cooed on to his mate. The clear, rainless winter gave place to spring and the giant cactus burst into flower. It rained, short and hard, and the desert floor took on suddenly a fine mat of green; and still he did not come. He was like the rain, ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... Type.—This type is found in all of the territory west of the Cascade and Sierra Nevada ranges, and also obtains in a fringe of country to the eastward of the mountain summits. The distinguishing characteristic of the Pacific type is a wet season, extending from October to March, and a practically rainless summer, except in northern California and parts of Oregon and Washington. About half of the yearly precipitation comes in the months of December, January, and February, the remaining half being distributed ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... many portions of our journey through Cyprus, the simple action of an insignificant stream, or of a solitary cattle-wheel, forms an oasis in the rainless desert of the Messaria, and the eye that has been wearied with the barren aspect of a treeless surface is gladdened by the relief of a sudden appearance of groves of oranges, lemons, and other shady trees, the result of a supply of water. Whenever ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... evening, was reflected in flaming colour nearer home, for, lo! the lamp in the tea-basket exploded with a terrific bang and a tongue of flame which brought us all to our feet in an instant. Here was a calamity to occur on such a dry night, in a long rainless summer, and in a pine forest, too, where if the trees once ignited, flames might spread for miles and miles, causing incalculable damage. We all knew the danger, and each prepared to assist in putting out the fire. Grandpapa, with the agility of a cat, seized the burning basket and threw it and its ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... may be that they underwent some classic metamorphosis, translated to a rainless paradise, where they dreamed of battalions for ever inspected and the general ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... course unequal, both as to time and localities, and in those districts where the fall is most considerable, the number of rainless days is the greatest.[1] An idea may be formed of the deluge that descends in Colombo during the change of the monsoon, from the fact that out of 72.4 inches, the annual average there, no less than 20.7 inches fall in April and May, and 21.9 in October and November, a quantity one-third ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... of their cattle in winter, and thus obtained practical possession, without cost or taxes, of all the government land needed for their ranges. Sad experience has convinced settlers in all the vast rainless region of the west, that they cannot produce grain with any certainty of harvesting a crop, and thousands who have made the experiment in western Kansas and Nebraska and in eastern Colorado and Wyoming ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... was an object of idolatrous worship for ages. Its source was a mystery, and its annual rise in its rainless valley was so beneficent, that it was given the worship which belonged to the Divine alone. All the hope of the harvest depended on its annual overflow. It moistened and fertilized and prepared the ground, and then receded until the harvest was grown and gathered. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... writing was unknown in his day. Yet Prof. A. H. Sayce, D.D., LL.D., of Oxford University, one of the greatest archaeologists the world ever knew, writes: "Egypt was the first to deliver up its dead. Under an almost rainless sky, where frost is unknown, and the sand seals up all that is entrusted to its keeping, nothing perishes except by the hand of man. The fragile papyrus, inscribed it may be 5,000 years ago, is as fresh and legible as when its first ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... is far preferable to putting it up in stacks, except in rainless climates. With the aid of the hay-loader in lifting it from winrows in the field, and of the hay fork in unloading, the hand labor in storing is greatly reduced, but when it is unloaded with the horse fork, the aim should be to dump the hay from the fork on different parts of ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... adj.; dry; dry up, soak up; sponge, swab, wipe; drain. desiccate, dehydrate, exsiccate^; parch. kiln dry; vacuum dry, blow dry, oven dry; hang out to dry. mummify. be fine, hold up. Adj. dry, anhydrous, arid; adust^, arescent^; dried &c v.; undamped; juiceless^, sapless; sear; husky; rainless, without rain, fine; dry as a bone, dry as dust, dry as a stick, dry as a mummy, dry as a biscuit. water ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... During the long rainless season the distant hills and mountains are bathed in an atmosphere of soft purple and blue in ever-varying intensity, while later in the season Jack Frost with his magic brush paints the mountain-sides with the most varied and gorgeous colors, and the aspen changes ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... and fretted. The street cars, bulging humanity at every door and window, strove in vain to relieve the situation. Several children and numerous pigs and chickens were run over. From the unpaved street to the cloudless sky rose a vast cloud of dust, such as only a rainless country made of sand can produce. Dust was in every one's eyes and mouth and upon every one's clothing. It was the unofficial badge of the gathering. It turned the green of the cottonwood trees to grey, and lay in wait for unsuspecting teeth between the ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... chilly but rainless noon three days later. At the back of the scene, northward, rise the Michaelsberg heights; below stretches the panorama of the city and the Danube. On a secondary eminence forming a spur of the upper hill, a fire of logs is burning, the foremost group beside it being NAPOLEON and his staff, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... all day long in the steady warmth of the July sun. The last three weeks had been rainless, so that the short turf of the uplands began to grow crisp and discoloured, while the resinous scent of the fir forest, at once stimulating and soothing, was carried afar out over the sloping corn-fields and low-lying pastures. Above the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... rainless country grow anything? The secret is the Nile. Every year, when the rains fall in the great lake-basin of Central Africa, from which one branch of the great river comes, and on the Abyssinian hills, where the other branch rises, the Nile comes down in flood. All the lower ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... calendar, spring was well upon them, and the prairies would soon be flaunting new dresses of green. The calendar, however, had neglected to record the rainless heat of the summer gone before, or the searing winds that burned the grass brown as it grew, or the winter which forgot its part and permitted prairie-dogs to chip-chip-chip above ground in January, when they should be sleeping decently in ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... were wheat, barley, and apparently sorghum (Holcus sorghum, Linnaeus), the doora of the modern fellaheen. Then as now the whole country, with the exception of a fringe on the coast of the Mediterranean, was almost rainless, and owed its immense fertility entirely to the annual inundation of the Nile, which, regulated by an elaborate system of dams and canals, was distributed over the fields, renewing the soil year by year with a fresh deposit of mud washed ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... comes. Toward him it brings an eager humbleness that is the essence and the life of Heaven and of love. Poets may praise snowy women as they will, but the compelling woman is she of the warm blood. The snowy woman is the lifeless seed, the rainless cloud, the unmagnetic lodestone, the drossful iron. The great laws of nature affect her but passively. If there is aught in the saying of the ancients, "The best only in nature can survive," the day of her extermination will come. Fire is as ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... of land, To search over wastes of sea, Where the Prophets of Lycia stand, Or where Ammon's daughters three Make runes in the rainless sand, For magic to make her free— Ah, vain! for the end is here; Sudden it comes and sheer. What lamb on the altar-strand Stricken shall ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... with a medley of limbs, went in a throng, as sheep from the fold in multitudes follow the shepherd. Such creatures, compacted of various limbs, did earth herself produce from the primeval slime when she had not yet grown solid beneath a rainless sky nor yet had received a drop of moisture from the rays of the scorching sun; but time combined these forms and marshalled them in their ranks; in such wise these monsters shapeless of form followed her. And exceeding wonder seized the ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius |
