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More "Tortuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they hiding him? Gall and wormwood! That he should slip through Boris Karlov's fingers, after all these tortuous windings across the world! Patience. Sooner or later the girl would lead the way. Still, patience was a galling hobble when he had so little time, when even now they might be hunting him. Boris Karlov had left New York rather ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... A.M. our muster was completed, and the party for the lower regions duly told off. As the carriage slowly crept down some of the steepest portions of the tortuous way, time and opportunities were afforded to steal a look under the cloudy canopy which the sun was quickly drawing upwards, and thus good assurance was afforded that the guide had ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... miles past 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 mountain with ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the Divide in the Hahns Peak district, skirted Steamboat Springs on his way to Oak Creek. In his wanderings, he had panned the alluvium of many small streams and had recovered more than the usual amount of gold. Now he would work his way back home through the Middle Park and cross the tortuous windings of the Divide by the ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... 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 ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the effect produced by a violent gale upon the tattered shreds of a shivered main-top-sail, bound up into the most tortuous knots that it is possible to conceive of, and so hard and solid that you might saw the canvas balls in slices like boards, may form some idea of the task the doctor had imposed upon himself to loosen the hide strands tied together by the furious fingers of the hurricane. Patiently ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... large and elegant mansion surrounded by trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, I found myself, after walking a few rods farther, in full view of the Merrimac. A deep and rocky channel stretched between me and the Dracut shore, along which rushed the shallow water,—a feeble, broken, and tortuous current, winding its way among splintered rocks, rising sharp and jagged in all directions. Drained above the falls by the canal, it resembled some mountain streamlet of old Spain, or some Arabian wady, exhausted by a year's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... night in a glowing sunset which was followed by a grand moon. The house was warm and clean and bright, with red curtains and open fires and everything was just as we had left it, so that it seemed as though we had just come out of a tortuous bad dream of asphalt and L. roads and bad air. I was never so glad to get away from ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... yet precisely what these were I could not say; my sense of them was indistinct. The city was dominated by a great castle upon an overlooking height whose name I knew, but could not speak. I walked through many streets, some broad and straight with high, modern buildings, some narrow, gloomy, and tortuous, between the gables of quaint old houses whose overhanging stories, elaborately ornamented with carvings in wood and stone, almost met ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... the proposal, and they accordingly proceeded to the cloisters of Saint George's Chapel, and threading some tortuous passages contrived among the canons' houses, passed through a small porch, guarded by a sentinel, and opening upon a precipitous and somewhat dangerous flight of steps, hewn out of the rock and leading ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... stood clear of the town at the end of a short but narrow and tortuous lane. This situation had tempted the burglars whom Seaton baffled; and now it ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... constitutionalism in 1867 the problem of the franchise became one of peculiar and increasing difficulty, and the process by which the Empire has been brought laboriously to its present condition of democracy has constituted one of the most tortuous chapters in recent political history. The conditions by which from the outset the problem was complicated were three in number: first, the large survival of self-assertiveness on the part of the various provinces among whom parliamentary representatives were to be distributed; second, the keenness ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... he had drifted to the south or the north, the east or the west; and, indeed, an intellect less obtuse than that of Tipperary Tom might have been puzzled upon the point. It has been already mentioned, that the Solimoes is so tortuous as to turn to every point of the compass in its slow course. The mere fact that the moon was shining at the time could be of little use to Tipperary Tom, whose astronomy had never extended beyond the knowledge that there was ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... hand at Grenoble could prove very useful. But of course I cannot possibly pretend to give you all the reasons which actuated M. de Talleyrand when he caused five and twenty millions of stolen money to be conveyed secretly to Grenoble rather than to Paris. His ways are more tortuous than any mere army-surgeon can possibly hope to gauge. Enough that he did it and that at this very moment there are five and twenty millions which are the rightful property of the Emperor locked up in the cellars of the Hotel de ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... That the tortuous channel of Wimbledon river be made straight, and the tyrant man be compelled to perform the labor ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... should admire the more: the simplicity of the multitude or the audacity of the adventurer. But such are the subtleties, such the quibbling reasons, with which he blinds and leads this people. How long a course so tortuous can be pursued with safety I am incapable of guessing; not long, one would suppose; and yet this singular man has been treading the mazes for five years, and his favour at court and his popularity among the lodges ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... began to appear and mark his course as favorable, at the very moment when the sun struck one end of the log, an eddy of the current struck the other, and sent the stanch little craft Good Luck and her captain by a wide curve back up the river. The backward journey was slow and tortuous, and twice when the Good Luck turned turtle, submerging Aladdin, he gave himself up for lost; but amidships of the island, fairly opposite to the spot where he had left Margaret, the log was again seized by the right current, and the voyage recommenced. But ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... Choulette lighted one of those long and tortuous Italian cigars, which are pierced with a straw. He drew from it several puffs of infectious vapor, then ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... the intake of the river. Along the tortuous course of that stream she knew a hundred hiding-places. The land trail followed the general direction of the river, but touched it only at one or ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... deliberation, turned into the path. Never before had he felt himself so completely the football of fortune. Destiny seemed to kick him here and there in no gentle manner, and to no purpose that he could fathom. As he stumbled through the blackness of the tortuous forest path, he tried to connect one thing with another, and find some meaning in the token that had brought him here. Evidently the sender was so far from being in league with his foes that he made a kind of contrary current, eddying him one way just when fate seemed to have ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... procession moved away. They came after a short journey to a natural opening leading to the heart of the plateau. The apes and gorillas, with the exception of the red leader, remained outside. The remainder of the party pushed through a tortuous tunnel until they reached a cavernous opening directly beneath the plateau. Vertical openings in the walls furnished light and air. The white chieftain spoke in a strange tongue to his followers, and they ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... and daisies. Tempered and secluded from the sun's rays by its lofty shadows, the delicious obscurity of the canyon was in sharp contrast to the fiery mountain trail that in the full glare of the noonday sky made its tortuous way down the hillside, like a stream of lava, to plunge suddenly into the valley and extinguish itself in its coolness as in a lake. The heavy odors of wild honeysuckle, syringa, and ceanothus that hung over it were lightened and freshened by the sharp spicing of pine and bay. The mountain ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... cool and refreshing from a branching tunnel in the rock. There was no lack of ventilation, as they well knew, throughout all the tortuous passages, but this came with a scent of outdoors that set both men a-tingle with hope. Jerry forgot even the dull ache in his arm as he breathed deep of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... all that was in the evening. Below me lay the white tortuous road leading downward to the shore in coils, and clothing the road, the many woods, all hoary white because the sharp sea-breeze had breathed on them. Evening had long since settled on the road and on the wintry trees; it lay ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... its depths. Continental Europe during these years passed through many convulsions. Bloody revolutions shook many states, and Prussia, Austria, Denmark, Turkey, and Italy were involved in wars. The hand that piloted England among the rocks of the tortuous channel of foreign politics for nearly a generation was that of Lord Palmerston, for nearly twenty years Foreign Secretary and twice Prime Minister ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... Valley 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 ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... contemporary history compressed into the appearance of a pair of wheels engaged in their ordinary daily duty in the streets. It was in that central and crowded part of the city which is between the church of the Gesu and the Farnese palace, a labyrinth of tortuous streets and lanes, not often visited by foreigners unless when bent on some special expedition of sight-seeing. There are no sidewalks for foot-passengers in these streets. They are narrow, very tortuous and very crowded. Foot-passengers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... now a double line of communication with its base, yet the long haul from New Iberia and the scarcity of light-draught steamboats adapted to the navigation of the narrow and tortuous bayous made the task of supplying even the urgent wants of the troops both tedious and difficult. The herds near Opelousas were fast disappearing under the ravages of the foragers, authorized and unauthorized, yet had it not been for the beef obtained from this source ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... in the tortuous mountain road, both drew up sharply, with a gasp of astonishment. For a long time neither spoke, their bewildered minds struggling to comprehend the vast puzzle that confronted them. Even the fagged horse ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... side, and he resolved to persevere in his original intention. As for General Forey, whether his dullness of perception failed to grasp the true drift of his master's mind, or whether he was unable to steer his way through the tortuous policy which he was called upon to further, he seemed to regard his mission as fulfilled. After he had established the native provisional government, he complacently rested in the enjoyment of his new title of Marshal of France, apparently overlooking ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... vastly stronger, and for my own sake as well as yours I should abstain from any action against him. Mind, at present I have only vague suspicions, but if those suspicions turn out true, it will be evident that your father has been pursuing a very tortuous policy, to put it no stronger, in order to gain possession of Fairclose. I cannot say definitely as yet what I shall do, but at present I incline to the opinion that I shall ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... generosity? If you can speculate in the dying why exclude the dead? the principle would serve the same faith in Christianity. The heart that can purchase the dying must be full of sad coldness, dragging the woes and pains of mortality down to a tortuous death. Save us from the feelings of speculation,—call them Christian, if you will,—that makes man look upon a dying mortal, valuing but the dollars and cents that are passing away with his life," she interrupts, giving vent to ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... infinite annoyance. Though such a Patriarch might be deposed without any flagrant violation of the canonical formalities, the operation would necessarily be attended with great trouble and loss of time. Peter was no friend of roundabout, tortuous methods, and preferred to remove the difficulty in his usual thorough, violent fashion. When the Patriarch Adrian died, the customary short interregnum was prolonged for twenty years, and when the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... prevail and peace was to reign. But the outcome of this impracticable treaty was a five years' struggle between the Mohegan chieftain, Uncas, actively allied with the colony of Connecticut, and Miantonomo, sachem of the Narragansetts, which involved Connecticut in a tortuous and often dishonorable policy of attempting to divide the Indians in order to rule them—a policy which led to many embarrassing negotiations and bloody conflicts and ended in the murder of Miantonomo in 1643, by the Mohegans, at the instigation of the commissioners of the United Colonies. ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... secret intrigues, and the tactics of the 'gum-shoer' are discredited. The world wants none of them these days. It despises and loathes them. What the world asks are honest declarations openly proclaimed. The statesman who seeks to gain his end by tortuous and underground ways is foolish or badly advised. The public man who is sly and secretive rather than frank and bold, whose methods are devious rather than obvious, pursues a dangerous path which leads neither to ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... Guimic roared white between its tortuous shores, some of the loud-mouthed men did go away. Nevertheless, the big cat's rage waxed hotter than ever. Far worse than the men who went were three portable steam sawmills which came in their place. At three separate points ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... long 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 with his leg and boot, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... expression of the whole town. How much is suggested by the well-known, familiar cathedral spire at Antwerp, as, of some fresh morning, we come winding up the tortuous Scheldt, the sad, low-lying plains and boulders lying on either hand, monotonous and dispiriting, yet novel in their way; the cream-coloured, lace-worked spire rising ever before us in all its elegant grace, pointing the way, growing by degrees, never for an instant out of sight. It seems ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... pots and old tins, together with the presence of women and children, introduce a rustic and farmlike element, and it is always a matter of wonder to me how these floating curiosity shops are able to thread their ways unaided through tortuous channels and crowded shipping out to sea, and when once there, why they do not succumb to the first rough weather ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... been left behind and he turned at the forking beneath a big birch bluff that he tightened his grip on the bridle. There it was different, for the trail no longer led wide and trampled hard across the level prairie, but wound, an almost invisible riband, through tortuous hollow and over swelling rise, so narrow that in places the hoofs broke with a sharp crackling through the frozen crust of snow. That, Larry knew, might, by crippling the beast he rode, stop him then and there, and he pushed on warily, dazzled at times ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... and for the last mile actually dangerous, 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 over "uch'-cha ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... to which he had assigned me—my life might have run its course in another channel. Now, as I look back, it seems as though my story became entangled with my line in that overhanging branch, as though there I picked up the strong, holding thread of it, and followed its tortuous ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... was carried out in a ghostly manner, in order, without a whisper, without a sound, through forests, ravines, and valleys. A tortuous and ill-omened march. A stealthy gliding onwards ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... does not amount to more than two or three degrees. Captain Wickham and the surgeon visited an inlet near the ship to-day, which had indeed been looked into, but not explored before. They proceeded to the south-west for about three miles, through a very tortuous channel, dry in many parts at low-water, thickly studded with mangrove bushes, over and through which the tide made its way at high-water, giving to that part of the country the appearance of an extensive morass. A slightly elevated table-topped range of land was seen from time ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... upheaval of defiant hills which were, if possible, more desolate and weird than any we had seen, we gained the boundary of California and gazed upon the Colorado River. It is a stream whose history thrilled me as I remembered how in its long and tortuous course of more than a thousand miles to this point it had laboriously cut its way through countless desert canons, and I felt glad to see it here at last, sweeping along in tranquil majesty as if aware that all its struggles were now ended, and peace and victory had ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... having to follow at the same moment two quite different impulses, is necessarily always in a zigzag or a curve. That is to say that at every erotic moment her action is the resultant of the combined force of her desire (conscious or unconscious) and her modesty. She must sail through a tortuous channel with Scylla on the one side and Charybdis on the other, and to avoid either danger too anxiously may mean risking shipwreck on the other side. She must be impenetrable to all the world, but it must be an ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... through which such a sea was running. Indeed, Hozier himself, sailor as he was, felt more than doubtful as to the fate of their argosy. But Marcel paddled ahead with unflagging energy once he was clear of the tortuous passage, and, before the catamaran had traveled many yards, even Iris was able to understand that the outlying ridge of rocks both protected their present track and created much ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... Small, the keeper, if there were any signs of fish alongshore. The pull was a long one, but I enjoyed every stroke of it. The tide was almost full, just beginning to ebb, so there was scarcely any current and I could make a straight cut across, instead of following the tortuous channel. My skiff was a flat bottomed affair, drawing very little, but in Denboro bay, at low tide, even a flat-bottomed skiff has to ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... or hurricane deck (as it is called) was very attractive. Flowing, as the river Hudson does, through a fine mountainous country, the magnificent scenery on the banks strikes the observer with feelings allied to awe. The stream being broad and tortuous, beetling crags, high mountains and bluffs, and dense forests, burst suddenly and unexpectedly into view; fearful precipices abound here and there, amidst luxuriant groves and uncouth pine barrens, forming altogether a diversity that gives the whole ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... invited to enter the inhospitable gates. In half an hour they were wending their way down the north side of the peak by gradually declining roads, headed for the much-talked-of home of the Witch in Ganlook Gap, some six miles from Edelweiss as the crow flies, but twice that distance over the tortuous bridle paths ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... tortuous, extending in a general direction south nine miles. No events occurred worthy of any remark during our examination, except one of a trifling character: the mosquitoes taking advantage of the calm, between the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... at Chazy Junction. The foothills were sparsely settled and the inhabitants too humble to be attractive to gentlemen of the road, while the rocky highways, tortuous and uneven, offered no invitation ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... Pass (2,700 feet) was reached in about four hours, and now the deep blue Adria was spread out before us, and our tortuous descent commenced. Commanding the pass still stands a mighty but much-battered fortress, taken by the gallant Montenegrins in that memorable battle. But nowhere could the historical old town and fortress of Bar, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... lagoons, with shelving and verdant shores, studded with white stone buildings, and well cultivated plantations, and then the passage would narrow again suddenly, and the masses of rock rose so high on each side of us, as almost to exclude the light of the day. The way was tortuous, but not abruptly so; and, as we wound through it, ever and anon we came to some picturesque inlet, some cool grotto, so beautiful that its very beauty must have peopled it with nymphs, for none could look ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... because we are 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 grey olive leaves appeared like hair flying in ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... than a just tribute to commerce, when she accords to that agency important civilizing influences; yet it must be admitted that it has frequently pursued a tortuous course, has often been unscrupulous in the means that it has employed, and has not always been reciprocal in its advantages. Like religion, it has been used as an opening wedge to conquest. As the establishment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Yang-tse by a long and tortuous passage through which the "Great River" rushes with a force and a roar like the cataracts of the Rhine, only on a vastly greater scale. In some bygone age volcanic forces tore asunder a mountain range, and the waters of the great stream ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... seedlings, the probable nature of the fruit; for, as Van Mons remarks,[828] variations in the leaves are generally accompanied by some modification in the flower, and consequently in the fruit. In the Serpent melon, which has a narrow tortuous fruit above a yard in length, the stem of the plant, the peduncle of the female flower, and the middle lobe of the leaf, are all elongated in a remarkable manner. On the other hand, several varieties of Cucurbita, which have dwarfed stems, all produce, as Naudin remarks with surprise, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... revealed with unerring truth, as suffering under a cruel malady, strangely diverse in its operations, but all tending to the downward, dark, dreary road to misery temporal and eternal: but it also displays the antidote; an infallible remedy against all the subtilties of this tortuous disease. Reader, this treasure is in our hands. How great is the responsibility. How blessed are those who with earnest prayer for divine illumination read ponder and relying upon the aid of the Holy Spirit, understand and instantly obey the sacred precepts which its pages unfold. Weigh well their ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... through the streets, to see her face as she sat in the dim old cathedral; that softened, tremulous face, of which he had caught a glimpse once before, the memory of which lived with him still. When the service was over, he wanted to be her guide, to climb with her the tortuous staircase, and look down on the ant-like figures in the streets below; to descend with her to the subterranean vaults. ... He, Rupert Guest, wished to visit Saint Paul's on a grilling June afternoon, in preference to attending a fashionable rendezvous—what ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... human in any living animal. All nature, the universe as far as we see, is anti- or ultra-human, outside, and has no concern with man. These things are unnatural to him. By no course of reasoning, however tortuous, can nature and the universe be fitted to the mind. Nor can the mind be fitted to the cosmos. My mind cannot be twisted to it; I am separate altogether from these designless things. The soul cannot be wrested down ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... thinking now of the reddest chapter in the Indian wars of the Western plains. Out amid the dirge of landscape, framed within the valley of the Little Big Horn, where that historic river winds its tortuous way through the sagebrush and cactus of Montana, a weather-beaten cross stands on a lonely hillside, surrounded by a cluster of white marble slabs, and all marking the final resting-place of the heroes of the Seventh United States Cavalry, who perished to a man, "in battle ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... turns, brought the three into a black no-thoroughfare of a hall, whose further end was closed by a locked door. The girl here rubbed a brimstone abomination of a match into a mal-odorous green glow, and by its help the old man got a tortuous key into the snaky opening in the great lock, creakily shot back its bolt, swung open the door, and motioned ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... left La Union at dawn on the 15th of April. We found that the river enters the bay by a number of channels, through low grounds covered with mangrove-trees. It was at half-tide, and we experienced no difficulty in entering. Our course at first was tortuous, and it seemed as if the river had lost itself in a labyrinth of channels, and we were ourselves much confused with regard to our true direction. Keeping, however, in the strongest current, at the end of half an hour we penetrated beyond ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... inspection of that which was merely damp, revealed the fact that but one person could be made comfortable to-night. Our bachelor Doctor volunteered to be that one. So we bade him God-speed, and with toilet bag in hand I led my little family up a tortuous path, so slippery in the rain that we were obliged in our muddy climb to cling to grass-clumps and bushes. And thus, wet and bedraggled, did we sally forth upon the Ironton Bottom, seeking ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... answered Commines, as gravely as if his master's tortuous road to the consolidation of the kingdom had not been strewn with ruptured contracts, unscrupulous chicanery, and solemn pledges brazenly evaded. "But how am I to act? How can I, in the dark, parry a blow from ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the thunder-storm of the 24th extended very little to the north and north-west, having passed over from west to east. From time to time we crossed low ridges covered with scrub, and cut through by deep gullies, stretching towards the river, which became narrower and very tortuous in its course; its line of flooded-gum trees, however, became more dense. Within the reedy bed of the river, not quite five miles from the camp, we found wells of the natives, not a foot deep, but amply supplied with water, and, at four miles farther, we came to a ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... because 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 ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... a northern slope about Moamba's, lat. 10 deg. 10' S., but the streams are very tortuous, and the people have very confused ideas as to where they run. The Lokhopa, for instance, was asserted by all the men at Moamba's to flow into Lokholu, and then into a river going to Liemba, but a young wife of Moamba, who seemed very intelligent, maintained ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... on bravely for a good half-hour. More witnesses were called; each answered with wonderful aptness, ease, and clearness; none were confused or timid; these were not men to be the playthings of others who made tortuous cross-questionings their trade. They, also, were Frenchmen; they knew how to speak. The judge and the Coutances lawyer continued their jokes and their squabblings. And still only the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... intermediate state of sinning manhood; and though his nature told him that he was not of the temper that attains sanctity all at once, he felt that he owed to his mother's hopes for him a sort of loyalty in which Aurora had made him fail. The reasonings of innocent sentiment are more tortuous than the wiles of the devil himself, and have amazing power to torment the unfledged conscience of a ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... four miles away on our right front emerged a long black line with white spots. It was the enemy. It seemed to us, as we looked, that there might be 3,000 men behind a high dense zeriba of thorn-bushes. That, said the officers, was better than nothing. It is scarcely necessary to describe our tortuous movements towards the Dervish position. Looking at it now from one point of view, now from another, but always edging nearer, the cavalry slowly approached, and halted in the plain about three miles away—three great serpents of men—the light-coloured one, the 21st Lancers; a ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... It was a tortuous path and one in which the old man himself, knowing, as he thought he did, every foot of the country around, could easily have been lost. Above, through the trees, the moon shone dimly, and no path could be seen under foot. But Jack Bracken slouched heavily along, in a wabbling, awkward ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... that one should be chosen who is frank and good-natured, and congenial in his sentiments; one, in fact, who is influenced by the same motives, all of which qualities have a tendency to create sincerity. For it is impossible for a wily and tortuous disposition to be sincere. Nor in truth can the man who has no sympathy from nature, and who is not moved by the same considerations, be either attached or steady. To the same requisites must be added that he shall neither take delight ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... explore the now narrowing valley, following the stream over steep rocks and fallen trees, and pushing through tangled undergrowth and among briers and bushes and around slippery banks until they came to another tortuous turn, where a second spring, welling up from under a flat, overhanging rock, tumbled down to augment the supply for the future lake; and here they stopped and had a drink of the cool, delicious water, Sam making the girl a cup from a huge leaf which she said made ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... the afternoon, when the flicker and shine of many lamps in little shop windows brightened the tortuous streets, a man clad in tarpaulins, and carrying a big canvas bag on his back, passed rapidly through the village. He had come that day from London upon the paying off of his vessel; and while he left his two chests at the railway ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... upon the shore, and in twenty-four hours was so repaired as to enable them to continue their journey. As they entered more southern latitudes the floating ice disappeared, and the voyage became more pleasant, as they rapidly floated down the tortuous stream, by forests and headlands, and every variety of wild, sublime, and beautiful scenery, until they reached New Orleans, on ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... secret of the human heart, however studiously concealed, that she could not discover; no workings in the listener's mind that she would not penetrate; no intrigue, from the low cunning of vulgar intrigue to the vast combinations of politics, that she would not unravel; no labyrinth, however tortuous, that she would not thread. It was this comprehensive and searching faculty, this intuitive penetration, which made her so formidable; for under imaginary names, when she wished to show a person that his character and course of life were ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... 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 ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... his horse, oversweet with its warm, fragrant breath, gray where it waved to the light, darker where the wind left it still, and beyond the wonderful haze-purple lent by distance. Far across that wide waste began the slow lift of uplands through which Deception Pass cut its tortuous ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... the trail. After a short distance a body had been dragged evidently. Roleau led the way through a tortuous path until they came in sight of a small vacant spot where sometime Indians had camped, as they could tell by the scorched and blackened trees. A nearly nude body had been fastened to one and a few dead branches ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... hospitably spread the board For her regale, while with my best dispatch I lay my bellows and my tools aside. He spake, and vast in bulk and hot with toil 505 Rose limping from beside his anvil-stock Upborne, with pain on legs tortuous and weak. First, from the forge dislodged he thrust apart His bellows, and his tools collecting all Bestow'd them, careful, in a silver chest, 510 Then all around with a wet sponge he wiped His visage, and his ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... her by the shoulders; but all without succeeding in making her show any sign of consciousness. He then tied a handkerchief over her eyes; and, leaving the stage, went about through the room, touching people here and there as he went, pursuing a most tortuous course, and ended at last by placing his hand upon Aunt Phoebe's diamond necklace. He then bowed to the Professor to intimate that we were ready to see the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... A tortuous double iron track; a station here, a station there; A locomotive, tender, tanks; a coach with stiff reclining chair; Some postal cars, and baggage, too; a vestibule of patent make; With buffers, duffers, switches, and the soughing automatic brake— This is the Orient's ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... castle, the barracks, the Saxon gardens, watched the winding river Vistula and the Praga suburb beyond, and did not fail to spy out the old town, lying beneath the guns of the fortress, a maze of red roofs and tortuous streets and alleys wherein the outcasts were hiding. To this latter he turned by some good instinct which seemed to say that he had an errand there. And here little Lois Boriskoff touched him upon the shoulder and bade him follow her—just as imagination had told him would be the ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... had thought her eyes held something just for me that night. She had not seen Beverly at the chapel beside the San Christobal River, and to me she had not given even a parting glance when she went away. If she had cared for me at all she would not have left me so. And I had climbed the tortuous trail with her and stood beside her in the zone of sanctuary safety that Father Josef had ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... a ship, by skilful steersman wrought Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the wind Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail,— So varied he, and of his tortuous train Curl'd many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... termed flexuose stems the stem twists alternately to one side or another, frequently in association with an oblique form of the leaf. This state is sometimes present to an extreme degree, as in some varieties of shrubs (Crataegus, Robinia, &c.) cultivated for their singularly tortuous branches. ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... the summit should be clear—water-courses here and there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks. Towards afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the range comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge, tortuous buttresses standing edged with sun. At all hours of the day they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my orders on setting out from Winchester—the alternative return to that place—was not touched upon, for the wisdom of having ignored that was fully apparent. Commenting on this recital of my doings, the General referred only to the tortuous course of my march from Waynesboro' down, our sore trials, and the valuable services of the scouts who had brought him tidings of me, closing with the remark that it was, rare a department commander voluntarily deprived himself of independence, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... they ascended a deep and tortuous river where the snow lay thick and soft. One man on snow-shoes broke trail for the dogs till they reached the foothills. It was hard work, but infinitely preferable to that which followed, for now they came into a dangerous stretch of overflows. The stream, ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... twilight shades grew dark; And read and read in the Arabian Nights, Till all the beautiful grew possible; And then when I had read them every one, To find behind the door, against the wall, Old volumes, full of tales, such as in dreams One finds in bookshops strange, in tortuous streets; Beside me, over me, soul of the place, Filling the gloom with calm delirium, That wondrous woman-statue evermore, White, radiant; fading, as the darkness grew, Into a ghostly pallour, that put on, To staring eyes, a vague and ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... prepared in advance by the agents of the King, and were only subscribed to and sealed by the assistants—were addressed, not to the Pope, but to the college of cardinals. The despatch of the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and unreasonable enterprises of him who, at present, is at the seat and government of the Church, and declares that neither the nobility nor the universities nor the people require correction or imposition of any trouble, whether by the authority of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... which Jones had played a part, Catherine said, with a different accent: "Ce Paul Jones etait une bien mauvaise tete." Certainly Jones's diplomacy, which was of a direct character, was not equal to his present situation, unfamiliar to him, and for success demanding conduct tortuous and insincere to an Oriental degree. Jones, in comparison with his associates in Russia, was remarkably truthful,—a trait which involved him in humiliating difficulties, and which was a source of irritation to the empress ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... Translated by Jacob S. Fassett, Jr. $2.00 net. Around Cordova, the fascinating and romantic "city of the discreet," Baroja has spun an adventurous tale. He gives you a vivid picture of the city with her tortuous streets, ancient houses with their patios and tiled roofs and of her "discreet" inhabitants. In a style that is polished where Ibanez' is crudely vigorous, and with sympathy and understanding, he portrays Quentin, the natural son of a Marquis and a woman of humble birth; Pacheco, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... about for an acquaintance who manufactured chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard classmate, in the dyeing business—just the man. But at the last moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course. Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... With the keen intelligence of the wounded wild ruminant, he chose the line of least resistance, and on three legs fled downhill. He went on down, and kept going, until he reached the bottom of the biggest and most tortuous coulee in his neighborhood. And then what? Instead of coming to rest in a reposeful little valley a hundred feet wide, he chose the most rugged branch he could find, the one with the steepest and highest banks, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... wild and lovely tangles of foliage and flower which Nature and her subject man succeed in working out together after considerable conflict and argument, one of the most beautiful and luxuriant is a Somersetshire lane. Narrow and tortuous, fortified on either side with high banks of rough turf, topped by garlands of climbing wild-rose, bunches of corn-cockles and tufts of meadow-sweet, such a lane in midsummer is one of beauty's ways through the world,—a path, which if it lead ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... the year 1267, says the continuator of Matthew Paris, a soldier by the name of Adam Gordon, who had lost his estates with other adherents of Simon de Montfort, and refused to seek the mercy of the king, established himself with others in like circumstances near a woody and tortuous road between the village of Wilton and the castle of Farnham, from which position he made forays into the country round about, directing his attacks especially against those who were of the king's party. Prince Edward had heard much of the prowess ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... same idea in two or three English words, if not one; there is a perpetual clumsiness in his construction of common sentences and his use of common words. Clarendon himself is not harder or more tortuous. Even in purely narrative parts, which ought to flow most easily, the understanding of the reader can seldom keep pace with his eye. Cyclopean epithets are piled together almost at random on any substantive which will ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... I 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 ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... 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 Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... As she shrank, the broad moon in its third quarter crept into view over the rim of her disc. I looked for the constellations. Only that part of Aries directly behind the sun and the Lion, which the earth covered, were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky Way with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great Bear hung over the circle of the earth. And ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... building on the principal street of the city, with the battery-room in the rear; behind which was the office of the agent of the Associated Press. The plastering was about one-third gone from the ceiling. A small stove, used occasionally in the winter, was connected to the chimney by a tortuous pipe. The office was never cleaned. The switchboard for manipulating the wires was about thirty-four inches square. The brass connections on it were black with age and with the arcing effects of lightning, which, to young Edison, seemed particularly partial to Louisville. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of union, with them as with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noble families in Italy, prevented their founding a substantial dynasty. Their power, based on force, was maintained by craft and crime, and transmitted through tortuous channels by intrigue. While false in their dealings with the world at large, they were diabolical in the perfidy with which they treated one another. No feudal custom, no standard of hereditary right, ruled the succession in their family. Therefore ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... unaccompanied 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, defying opposition and fearlessly braving ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Tortuous little streets lead through the town of Coucy into a great green space which commands the castle. It is approached from the new and rather pretentious lodge in which the keeper of the castle now resides, through one of the finest and loftiest avenues in France. But the tallest ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... other's lord, And like a tyrant he demean'd himself, Laid forced exactions on his fellow's purse; And when that poor means fail'd, held o'er his head Threats of impending death in hideous forms; Till the small culprit on his nightly couch Dream'd of strange pains, and felt his body writhe In tortuous ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... foot-note at February 2nd, he states, "I afterwards found that these distances were incorrect. The true distances West and North respectively from the 82nd camp to the point in our track where the Leader turned back, are about 24 miles W. and 7 N." Now, considering the tortuous course of the river, the nature of the country, the weather, and obstacles of the creeks, 6 miles is not a great error in westing. Mr. Richardson's own reckoning, generally, despite his advantage over the Brothers, in having nothing to do but follow the cattle, was not more to be depended ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... unwavering adherence to a line of conduct which has made England feared and her power respected by every country in the world has a certain element of dignity and manly self-reliance which compels our admiration. And while they have been of late so frequently outwitted by the flexible, if not tortuous, policy of Louis Napoleon, it yet remains to be seen whether the firm and unyielding course of the English Ministry will not in the end prove quite as successful as the more Machiavellian management of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... o'clock in the afternoon, when the flicker and shine of many lamps in little shop windows brightened the tortuous streets, a man clad in tarpaulins, and carrying a big canvas bag on his back, passed rapidly through the village. He had come that day from London upon the paying off of his vessel; and while he left his two chests at the railway station, he made shift to bring his sea-bag ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... 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 ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... of more than usual dullness, and, as Sir Francis Varney removed the massy stone, which hid the narrow and tortuous entrance to the dungeons, a chilly feeling crept over him, and he could not help supposing, that even then Marchdale might have played him false, and neglected to supply the prisoner food, according to ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... passage through which Mr. Ramsey, Mr. Kemp, Mr. Cattell, and I were conducted from the Old Bailey dock to Newgate prison, was long and tortuous, and two or three massive doors were unlocked and relocked for our transit before we emerged into the courtyard. In the darkness the lofty walls looked grimly frowning, and I imagined what feelings must possess the ordinary criminal who passes ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... a lesson in the importance of accuracy over my dirty and clean linen bundles. Never again would I risk the ordeal of a surprise stocktaking; never again would I risk a combat with a ledger-fortified sergeant; never again would I risk any attempt at the tortuous in my dealings with the classifications of the eighty-one items on the tear-off leaf of that dire volume, the Check ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... of awful and most brilliant light. A long and vivid line of light, superior in brightness to the parts of the sea not immediately near the vessel, showed the base of the high, frowning, and dark land abreast; the sky became lowering, and more intensely obscure. Long tortuous lines of light showed immense numbers of large fish, darting about as if in consternation. The topsail yard and mizzen boom were lighted by the glare, as if gas-lights had been burning directly below them; and until just before daybreak, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... manoeuvre. That colonel knew what he was doing. He had hastened to recommend his favourite for a step. It was outrageous that a man should be able to avoid the consequences of his acts in such a dark and tortuous manner. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... the intermediate state of sinning manhood; and though his nature told him that he was not of the temper that attains sanctity all at once, he felt that he owed to his mother's hopes for him a sort of loyalty in which Aurora had made him fail. The reasonings of innocent sentiment are more tortuous than the wiles of the devil himself, and have amazing power to torment the unfledged conscience of a boy ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... upper or hurricane deck (as it is called) was very attractive. Flowing, as the river Hudson does, through a fine mountainous country, the magnificent scenery on the banks strikes the observer with feelings allied to awe. The stream being broad and tortuous, beetling crags, high mountains and bluffs, and dense forests, burst suddenly and unexpectedly into view; fearful precipices abound here and there, amidst luxuriant groves and uncouth pine barrens, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... night—when the cab that was to take the prisoner to his execution arrived at the door of the Abbaye. It was a long way from Saint-Germain-des-Pres to the barriers by way of the Rue du Four and Rue de Grenelle, the Avenue de l'Ecole Militaire, and the tortuous way that is now the Rue Dupleix. The damp fog made the night seem darker; few persons were about, and the scene must have been peculiarly gloomy and forbidding. The cab stopped in the angle formed by the barrier of Grenelle, and on the bare ground ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... bedraggled and shabby-looking troop; and still, as always, Joan was the freshest of us all, in both body and spirits. We had averaged above thirteen leagues a night, by tortuous and wretched roads. It was a remarkable march, and shows what men can do when they have a leader with a determined purpose and a resolution ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... branches bend, And milky eddies with the purple blend; The Chyle's white trunk, diverging from its source, 550 Seeks through the vital mass its shining course; O'er each red cell, and tissued membrane spreads In living net-work all its branching threads; Maze within maze its tortuous path pursues, Winds into glands, inextricable clues; 555 Steals through the stomach's velvet sides, and sips The silver surges with a thousand lips; Fills each fine pore, pervades each slender hair, And drinks salubrious dew-drops ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... the chief feature of the scenery, and is really no site where any inscription should be put, as it no more than constitutes the first step in the inspection of the landscape. Won't it be well to employ the exact text of an old writer consisting of 'a tortuous path leading to a secluded (nook).' This line of past days would, if inscribed, be, in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... clouded brow 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 ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... 14,000 inhabitants of Zara, its capital, are Italian. Yet, were it not for the occasional Morlachs in their picturesque costumes seen in the markets or on the wharfs, one would not suspect the presence of any Slav element in the town, for the dim and tortuous streets and the spacious squares bear Italian names—Via del Duomo, Riva Vecchia, Piazza della Colonna; crouching above the city gates is the snarling Lion of St. Mark, and everywhere one hears the liquid accents of the Latin. Zara, like Fiume, is an Italian colony ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... in a dimple of the inner coast range, and is reached nowadays through one of the finest pieces of engineering skill in the State. The tortuous route through the mountains, over trestle-bridges that span what seem, from the car-windows, like bottomless chasms, needs must hold some compensation at the end to counterbalance the fears engendered on the way. The higher one goes the more beautiful becomes ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... formidable Elizabeth with Elizabeth's subsequent conduct towards Mary Queen of Scots, her generosity to the causes she had at heart with Elizabeth's unfailing parsimony, and her open and straightforward dealings both in matters of Church and of State with her sister's mean and tortuous subterfuges, we may well extend not only our pity to the woman, but some tribute of admiration to the Queen. At least we may agree with Froude that "few men or women have lived less capable of ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it—except perhaps during the droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the text, and of this I venture to say that it is altogether inapplicable to Marcion. No doubt Marcion, like every other heretical teacher of the second century, or indeed of any century, did 'pervert the oracles of the Lord' by his tortuous interpretations; but he did not pervert them 'to his own lusts.' The high moral character of Marcion was unimpeachable, and is recognized by the orthodox writers of the second century; the worst charge ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... in his book of river maps, and together they looked down the tortuous stream; he rested the tip of his pencil on Yankee Bar below ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... the mist or could only divine that these hated their wives. One man held that all domestic matters should be left entirely to the wife and that talking was a domestic matter. Another said that the words "yes, no, and why" would safeguard a man through any labyrinth, however tortuous. Another said that he always went out when the wife began to speak; and yet another suggested that the only possible basis for conversation was that of perpetual opposition, where an affirmation was always countered by a denial, and the proving ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... would not dare to forsake its hollow in the olive-tree. The butterfly, better endowed with its faceted eyes than the owl with its single pupils, goes forward without hesitation, and threads the obstacles without contact. So well it directs its tortuous flight that, in spite of all the obstacles to be evaded, it arrives in a state of perfect freshness, its great wings intact, without the slightest flaw. The darkness is light enough ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... lovers abroad, for lovers love their friend the gentle moon; but none were more fitted for love's consummation than the two drifting on the old river whose limpid waters never again "shall blacken below, spear and the shadow of spear, bow and the shadow of bow," and which, after rushing a tortuous way between its wild gorges, steadies by the old settlement on the plain, and saunters smooth and straight and deep a space between fertile banks gardened with lucerne fields, orchards of peach and apricot, and delightful orange groves. The air was ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... in others of dioryte, as in Santo Domingo; and in many parts of South America and Australia. In North Wales we have, firstly, an intrusion of diabase, occurring in great mountain masses; secondly, Irregular tortuous dykes of diabase; thirdly, Elvan dykes; and, lastly, auriferous quartz veins. In every region of intrusive plutonic rocks that has been thoroughly explored, a similar succession of events, culminating in the production of mineral veins, has been proved ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... and so little used industrially that as a rule it was not owned in severalty; and even the villages and tribes had little occasion to mark the limits of their domains. For travel by land there were nothing but narrow, rough and tortuous foot-paths, with makeshift bridges across the smaller streams. The rivers were highly advantageous both as avenues and as sources of food, for the negroes were ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... immediate suburbs of the large towns, there is no ambition beyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore. There is no such thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility of name, up or down the whole tortuous length of the Ohio. As yet the land is not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep it to themselves or come away to spend it in European travel, or pause to waste it unrecognized on the ungrateful Atlantic seaboard. The ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... from the 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 variance with justice. It must be known that, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... which we were abreast of at 3 o'Clock in the Morning, having passed all the Islands 3 or 4 hours before. This point I have named Point Hillock,* (* Point Hillock is the east point of Hinchinbrook Island, which is separated from the main by a narrow and tortuous channel.) on account of its Figure. The Land of this point is Tolerable high, and may be known by a round Hillock or rock that appears to be detached from the point, but I believe it joins to it. Between ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... a mystic shape in the dim distance; and, as the inlet was entered, it was lost entirely to view. By tortuous passages among the marshes, they drew up at the ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... of the President's message, and the style. It reads uneasy, forced, tortuous, and it declares that it is impossible to subdue the rebels by force of arms. Of course it is impossible with Lincoln for President, and first McClellan and then Halleck to counterfeit the parts of the first Napoleon, and the at once energetic ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... a luxurious woodland dip, well beyond the town limits, and occupied a small flat of rich grass through which a mountain creek wound its ridiculously tortuous course. Thus it was provided with the natural resources demanded by a steeplechase course ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... presents a strong contrast to the new town. The streets are narrow, tortuous and inaccessible to carriages. They often end in a cul-de-sac. The principal street is the rue de la Kasbah, which leads up to the citadel by 497 steps. The streets are joined by alleys just wide enough to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... proposal, and they accordingly proceeded to the cloisters of Saint George's Chapel, and threading some tortuous passages contrived among the canons' houses, passed through a small porch, guarded by a sentinel, and opening upon a precipitous and somewhat dangerous flight of steps, hewn out of the rock and leading ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... especially of the scientific or skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For the man who thinks backwards ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... muster was completed, and the party for the lower regions duly told off. As the carriage slowly crept down some of the steepest portions of the tortuous way, time and opportunities were afforded to steal a look under the cloudy canopy which the sun was quickly drawing upwards, and thus good assurance was afforded that the ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... in haste, opened the door, and stepped out into the loggia. Not finding Fra Pacifico there, or in the other rooms, he passed down the stone steps into the little square, threading his way beyond as he best could, through the tortuous little alleys toward the gate. Most of the men had already gone to work; but such as lingered, or whose business kept them at home, rose as he passed, and bared their heads to him. The mothers and the girls stared at him and smiled; troops of children followed at his heels through the town, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... occasion, but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall—girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands—wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... wait a month or six weeks for the snow outside to disappear. At intervals short breaks occur in the sheds, where the track runs over deep gulch or ravine, and at one of these openings the sinuous structure can be traced for quite a long distance, winding its tortuous way around the rugged mountain sides, and through the gloomy pine forest, all but buried under the snow. It requires no great effort of the mind to imagine it to be some wonderful relic of a past civilization, when a venturesome race of men thus dared to invade these vast wintry solitudes ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... mean?" There was a note of exasperation in Muriel's voice. She saw that he had an object in view, but his method of attaining it was too tortuous ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... 'twere sad If such example were allow'd to fleet Without abiding trace for those behind. To stand on earth's high places, in the garb Of Christian meekness, yet to comprehend And track the tortuous policies of guile With upright aim, and heart immaculate, To pass just sentence on the wiles of fraud, And deeds of wickedness, yet freshly keep The fountain of good-will to all mankind, To mark for more than fourscore years, a line Of light without a mist, are victories Not oft ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... to trace the course of the Gwydir. A native village of bowers. Effect of sudden moisture on the wheels. Tortuous course of the Gwydir. Lines of irrigation across the plains. Heavy rain. Crested pigeon. The party impeded by the soft state of the surface. Lagoons near the river. Excursion northward. Reach a broad sheet of water. Position of the party. The ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... possessed with one idea, are indeed at one with those who can manage to agree with us; but those who do not, can only get on with us by cheating us. It is our unyielding obstinacy, which drives even the simplest to tortuous ways. In trying to manufacture a ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... low over the handle-bars. The skin-tight stockings had split from thigh to heel, mud flew from the tires, beplastering the luckless figure from nape to waist, and still, without pause, he pushed onward, ever onward, for London Bridge, for Southwark, and for safety. The way was tortuous, dark and unfamiliar, but it was for life or death, and Copernicus ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... scope of this work to describe the series of events which led up to the sack of Rome in 1527. Clement, by his tortuous policy, and by the avarice of his administration, had alienated every friend and exasperated all his foes. The Eternal City was in a state of chronic discontent and anarchy. The Colonna princes drove the Pope to take refuge in ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... itself is not particularly attractive. The old streets are narrow and tortuous, paved with pointed stones; but a fine broad street—the Rue de la Republique—has recently been erected through the heart of the old town, which greatly adds to the attractions of the place. At one end of this street an ideal statue of the Republic has been ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... quarters where no one scarcely ventured to go in search of them. The Cour des Miracles was the usual refuge of all those wretches who came to conceal in this corner of Paris, sombre, dirty, muddy, and tortuous, their pretended infirmities ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... at once involves 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, confined within ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... them. The limestone cliff, fantastically eroded, offered a score of shelters, some shallow and needing to be walled up in front, others deep and tortuous. All was ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... a sigh because we are 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 grey olive leaves appeared like hair flying in the wind, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... ship, by skilful steersman wrought Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the wind Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail,— So varied he, and of his tortuous train Curl'd many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve To ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... there among the surf as a warning to any vessel to give them a wide berth. The cliff was hardly less dangerous than the rocks below, for its surface was torn into great rugged chasms, each as deep as the sea level, though often only a few feet in breadth. These curious natural rents wound in tortuous course to the edge of the precipice, sometimes crossing one another, and thus leaving islands stranded between, or long promontories, from the ends of which there would be no escape except by a jump. Gwen and Dick picked their way carefully along. There was scarcely need for Mr. Gascoyne's ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... learn." George Moore once had dubbed the novelist, "Gaboriau with psychological sauce." Since then, Mr. Moore has contributed a charming introduction to Poor Folk, yet there is no denying the force and wit of his hasty epigram. Dostoievsky is often melodramatic and violent; his "psychology" vague and tortuous. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... asked for no explanations. She was naturally, behind her pale and placid countenance, a woman of a tortuous and intriguing mind. She preferred to look through a keyhole even when she could walk straight in at the door; and knowledge which could be gained by a little maneuvering was always more desirable and precious in her eyes than any information ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... what device the Indian does not know is little worth knowing. Under a dripping leaden sky the earth lay desolate and repulsive. Miles away to the north the dim, castellated buttes and pinnacles of the range were still faintly visible, and the tortuous trail of the column of twos winding its way over wave after wave of barren prairie like the wake of some terrestrial bark in a sea of mud. Far to the westward a jagged line of hills, sharply defined, seemed to rear their crests from the general level of the land, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... endless varieties of lichens and mosses. In the Rookery adjoining John Evelyn's "Wotton" were many such temples dedicated to sylvan deities: one of them, to Pan, consists of a pediment supported by four rough trunks of trees, the walls being of moss and laths, and enclosed with tortuous limbs. Beneath the pediment is the following apposite ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... against them in the best manner possible. In the first place, therefore, as the river Euphrates ran in a straight course through the city, she formed excavations at a distance above it, by which means its course became so tortuous that it three times passed a certain town of Assyria, called Ardericca; travelers from our sea,[10] in descending the Euphrates toward Babylon, three times arrive at that town in the course of three days. She also raised both banks ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... you wrote me back word that the circumstance gave you the greatest delight. But I should have preferred your writing to him and saying that he was doing all I could expect—not because he was, but in order that he might do so. For he is a man of astonishing whims, as you know, "tortuous and no wise——."[282] But I stick to the rule "Follies of those in power," etc.[283] But, by Hercules, that other friend of yours, Hortalus—with what a liberal hand, with what candour, and in what ornate language has he praised me to the skies, when speaking of the praetorship of Flaccus and that ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... which a mere nothing will destroy, shut in the narrow chamber of the burrow among vigorous beetles, for weeks on end working their long spurred legs; or at grips with a monstrous caterpillar making play with its flanks and mandibles, rolling and unrolling its tortuous folds?" ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... Through tortuous little streets they finally arrived at the market-place which was situated in the center of the city. On the way they saw many men with a hand or foot cut off. They were thieves or transgressors who had concealed booty. The punishment meted by the caliphs for disobedience or ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 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 ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... inches long, with a blade 3 1/2 inches wide. Work it out of half-inch cherry or maple and fine the blade down thin. Tie it to a rib with a slip-knot, having the handle in easy reach, and when you come to a narrow, tortuous channel, where shrubs and weeds crowd you on both sides, take the double-blade inboard, use the pudding stick, and you can go almost anywhere that a ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... gained and crossed the central pass, low in comparison with the mountains it threaded, yet formidable in itself and not possible for loaded sleds. Five days more of tortuous winding, from lower altitude to lower altitude, brought them to the open, rolling, and merely hilly country La Perle had found ten years before. Smoke knew it with the first glimpse, on a sharp cold day, the thermometer forty below zero, the atmosphere so clear that he could see a hundred miles. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... boy, I have seen it ranked only as a third-rate seaport. Its streets tortuous and narrow, with pavements in the middle, skirted by mud or dirt as the season happened. The sidewalks rough with sharp-pointed stones, that made it misery to walk upon them. I have seen houses, with little low rooms, suffice for the dwelling of the ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... she said chidingly. "It has been three months," and she searched through Amy's eyes onward along the tortuous little passages of her heart as a calm blue air might search the chambers of a ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... may pass through it. A careful exploration with a probe, passed into the external opening while the finger is in the rectum, generally reveals the direction of the tract; but, sometimes, in consequence of the tortuous course of the canal, the probe cannot he made to follow it. When the fistula is incomplete, and opens internally, the probe is passed into the rectum and directed outwards, when it may be felt externally. In such cases, a tumor, caused by the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. Perhaps sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at last, which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom—or even a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... an exquisite play of hues. The easy undulations, as they ran off to the unattainable horizon, were so many waves of delicate and varying color. There were great sweeps of ochre, of gray, of fresh, light green, pointed with black dots of live-oak, and traversed by tortuous lines of indigo where the pecan treed creeks pursued their foiled courses, and troops of little hills grouped themselves about,—pink, pinkish, purple, purpling blue, white, as they faded from view like the evanescent cherubs in the corner of an old master. The hills, however, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... St. Louis, a massive structure of stone, with square flanking towers, rose loftily from the brink of the precipice, overlooking the narrow, tortuous streets of the lower town. The steeple of the old Church of Notre Dame des Victoires, with its gilded vane, lay far beneath the feet of the observer as he leaned over the balustrade of iron that guarded the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... pastures were valueless compared to this gloomy land of black crag and tangled forest. Above the dark and often scarcely penetrable woods upon their flanks, the high, bare crowns of the mountains, white snow, and jagged rock towered upon each flank, leaving a long, winding, tortuous valley in the centre. Up this the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... door. Then he rushed forward and with a groan of relief threw himself into the room. Opposite the door loomed the grim sarcophagus of King Abibaal, and beside it on the floor lay the figure with the face that changed. He had gone a circle in those tortuous passages, and this was the room of ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Dalberg—and often; and always she had lost. The 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 of the ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... existence at every turn. Her success and her subjection; the place in Lady Henry's circle which Lady Henry had, in the first instance, herself forced her to take, contrasted with the shifts and evasions, the poor, tortuous ways by which, alas! she must often escape Lady Henry's later jealousy; her intellectual strength and her most feminine weaknesses; these things stirred and kept up in Jacob a warm and passionate pity. The more clearly he saw the specks in her glory, the more ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... amicably with him. Now, of course, that feeling is vastly stronger, and for my own sake as well as yours I should abstain from any action against him. Mind, at present I have only vague suspicions, but if those suspicions turn out true, it will be evident that your father has been pursuing a very tortuous policy, to put it no stronger, in order to gain possession of Fairclose. I cannot say definitely as yet what I shall do, but at present I incline to the opinion that I shall ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... wise aspect of the owl, the sweet plaint of the nightingale, the shrieks of some fierce beasts, and the howls of others startlingly like the cries of children and the moans of pain, the sparkling orbs and tortuous stealthiness of the snake; and the hints at metempsychosis are obvious. Standing face to face with a tiger, an anaconda, a wild cat, a monkey, a gazelle, a parrot, a dove, we alternately shudder with horror and yearn with sympathy, now expecting to see the latent devils ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... was thrown on the tortuous course of Russian diplomacy by a speech of Count Eugen Zichy to the Hungarian Delegations about a year later. He made the startling declaration that in the summer of 1885 Russia concluded a treaty with Montenegro with the aim of dethroning King Milan and Prince Alexander, and the division of the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... treading the tortuous mazes of fashion, it was well for her to be guided and guarded by such an old campaigner as Lady Kirkbank, a woman who, in the language of her friends, 'knew ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... 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 these cloudy doubts, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the lake. It is situated about a mile and half below the village, where a slight rising ground closes in the basin, and evidently once formed, the shore of the lake. Here the river enters a gorge, very narrow and tortuous, along which it rushes furiously for a short distance and then plunges into a great chasm, forming the head of a large valley. Just above the fall the channel is not more than ten feet wide, and here a few planks are thrown across, whence, half hid by luxuriant vegetation, the mad ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... line round the continents of North and South America runs a long and tortuous course, but finally closes back on itself, so will every contour do likewise. And just as truly as every bend in that high-tide mark turns out around a promontory, or in around a bay, so will every bend in a contour stand for a hill or a ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... the statistics of the insurance office. The world as a whole has gained by community, will attain its goal only through community. From the nomadic savage by the winding road of citizenship we have advanced far. The way winds upward still, hidden from us by the mists, but along its tortuous course lies our track into the Promised Land. Not the development of the individual—that is his own concern—but the uplifting of the race would appear to be the law. The lonely great ones, they ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... and skirt the Ecriviere Rock and 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... on the ground squirmed under the fire that was passing over them. Their bodies were in a tortuous motion. But York held them there; it made the gunners keep their ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... the capacity of Willow Bayou (which I estimate to be fifty miles long and very tortuous) as a military channel, to supply an army large enough to operate against Jackson, Mississippi, or the Black River Bridge; and such a channel will be very vulnerable to a force coming from the west, which we must expect. Yet this canal will be most ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... At length, by tortuous ways, across old rooms, and up and down abrupt little stairs, they reached the door of Lady Euphrasia's room. The key was found, and the door opened with some perturbation — manifest on the part of the ladies, and concealed on the part of the men. The place was quite ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... not made with hands"—the human body—has, like the house made with hands, its sewer system, which is over twenty-five feet in length. To cleanse (?) this wonderfully delicate, tortuous and extended passage-way of waste material, civilized man knows no better than to put in at the top of the house, purgatives, cathartics, bile-bouncers, etc., with one hope and purpose in view, namely, ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... have impelled Jack to apply the adjective "wild" to that ill-behaved and disreputable river which, tipsily bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far Northwest, totters, reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles; and which, encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved Mississippi at Alton, and forcing its company upon this splendid river (as if some drunken fellow should lock arms with a dignified pedestrian), contaminates it all the way ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... transactions that could not be settled by the sword. Want of union, with them as with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noble families in Italy, prevented their founding a substantial dynasty. Their power, based on force, was maintained by craft and crime, and transmitted through tortuous channels by intrigue. While false in their dealings with the world at large, they were diabolical in the perfidy with which they treated one another. No feudal custom, no standard of hereditary right, ruled the succession in their ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... In tortuous paths, with prompters blind, we trust One Guide—to lead us forth and set us free! Give us, Lord God! all merciful and just! The FAITH that is but ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... conscience on the one side, and the hidden rocks of presumption and despair on the other—these very dangers that had baffled and perplexed her so long—and tracing out through them all the clear deep safe channel of God's intention, who had allowed her to emerge at last from the tortuous and baffling intricacies of character and circumstance into the wide open sea of His own ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... thou to Nature! How strongly are all its powers and all its weaknesses on thy side! How sweetly dost thou mix with the blood, and help it through the most difficult and tortuous passages to the heart! ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... bows. The boat was immediately unloaded, drawn upon the shore, and in twenty-four hours was so repaired as to enable them to continue their journey. As they entered more southern latitudes the floating ice disappeared, and the voyage became more pleasant, as they rapidly floated down the tortuous stream, by forests and headlands, and every variety of wild, sublime, and beautiful scenery, until they reached New Orleans, on the 17th of ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... we are now possessed will enable us to track without difficulty the course, in reality consistent, though in appearance sometimes tortuous, which he pursued towards our domestic factions. He clearly saw what had not escaped persons far inferior to him in sagacity, that the enterprise on which his whole soul was intent would probably be successful if England were on his side, would be of uncertain issue ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was very fine, the season advanced, for the foliage was rapidly developing to perfection, and the sail down the broad tortuous river ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the congregation. An extension of this tradition is frequent in a long coda in the major. But this is quite different in kind from a plan where all of the last movement is in insistent major. We know that it is quite possible to begin a work at some distance from the main key, leading to it by tortuous path of modulation; though there is no reason why we may not question the composer's own inscription, the controlling point is really the whole tonal scheme. Here the key of the second movement is built ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... held myself to be still on duty. By what tortuous processes of thought I had arrived at the conclusion I do not know, but I considered myself responsible to Audrey for the safeguarding of the Little Nugget, and no altered relations between us could affect my position. Perhaps mixed up with this attitude of mind, was the less altruistic wish ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... neared the "Five Fingers." Only a few miles remained before the huge boulders forming the narrow and tortuous channels called the "Five Fingers" would be reached, and the face of the pilot was stern. It was a most dangerous piece of water and many boats had already been ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... as varied as that here indicated one should have anti-skidding tires on the rear wheels, take descents with care, and, if you be the owner of a powerful machine, do not make that an excuse for rushing up the tortuous, twisting, and frightfully dangerous roads, banked by a cliff on one hand, and by a precipice on the other, which abound in ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... produce the eye-witnesse of Galilaeus,[1] on which I most of all depend for the proofe of this Proposition, when he beheld the new Moone through his perspective, it appeared to him under a rugged and spotted figure, seeming to have the darker and enlightned parts divided by a tortuous line, having some parcels of light at a good distance from the other, and this difference is so remarkable, that you may easily perceive it through one of those ordinary perspectives, which are commonly sold amongst us, but for ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... to show the flame-devil who was master. He had compelled the terrified Wadakimba to go with him a part of the way. The white tuan—was he really a god, as he declared himself to be?—had gone alone up the tortuous, fissured slopes, at times lost to sight in yellowish clouds of gas and steam, while his screams of vengeance came back to Wadakimba's ears. Overhead, Lakalatcha continued to rumble and quiver and clear his throat with great showers ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... exhaustion she noted, as one does note his own soul-play when overwrought, that the prospect of death seemed less terrible than that of utter desertion. The mountains were so big they stifled her. With every tortuous step forward this formidable land all about her had grown more severe, more lonely, more to her like the kingdom of desolation than she had ever dreamed existed. There were slope fields strewn with black lava rock where never a solitary ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... By tortuous paths and devious passages, she had come out upon the heights, into the clear upper air of freedom and of love. Exquisitely, through the love of the one had come the love of the many; the complete mastery of self had been gained by the surrender ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... The tortuous path grew less and less defined as we proceeded, and was even covered in places with water, but the increasing excitement of the hound and the sight of the deep footmarks in the mud stimulated us to push on. At last, after struggling through a grove of high bulrushes, we came on a spot ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... holdings when he pledged the land, as a matter of sentiment, not of value. All the rest—acres of pasture, cleared and grassed, stretches of fertile ground, blocks of noble timber still uncut—had passed through the hands of mortgage holders, through bank transfers, by devious and tortuous ways, until the title rested in Horace Gower,—who had promptly built the showy summer house on Cradle Bay to flaunt in his face, so old Donald believed ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... question after they had been making their way along the tortuous bank of the winding creek for nearly half an hour. Such difficulties as crossed their path had been easily overcome, for both boys were pretty good woodsmen, and accustomed to getting ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... thought of enlisting again, and getting drafted to a foreign station. Nothing but the consciousness that he was subsisting on money not his own would have kept him from his vice. As it was, he had lived through the months between Winter and Spring, like one threading his way through the tortuous lengths of a cavern; never coming to the light, but coming upon absurd mishaps in his effort to reach it. His adventures in London partook somewhat of the character of those in Warbeach, minus the victim; for whom two or three gentlemen in public thoroughfares had been taken. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... we are sure to keep out of your sight. My deformed face and her fatal beauty shall hunt you through the world. The terrible secret of your dishonour, and of the atrocity by which you avenged it, shall ooze out through strange channels, in vague shapes, by tortuous intangible processes; ever changing in the manner of its exposure, never remediable by your own resistance, and always directed to the same end—your isolation as a marked man, in every fresh sphere, among every new community to ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... quicksands. Such fugitives came no more after the emancipation. Instead of slaves, there were black men who had outraged the law, who fled into the steaming, noxious waste in order to evade the penalty for crime. For a time, these evil-doers were hunted through the tortuous trails in the canebrakes with blood-hounds, even as their predecessors had been. But the kennels of the man-hunting dogs were ravaged by the black tongue, soon after the ending of the Civil War. Poisoners, too, took toll of the too intelligent brutes. The strain ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... she shrank, the broad moon in its third quarter crept into view over the rim of her disc. I looked for the constellations. Only that part of Aries directly behind the sun and the Lion, which the earth covered, were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky Way with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... epileptic, fears a fit will occur at an untoward moment. He dreads confined or, maybe, open spaces, or being in a crowd. When he reaches an open space (after walking miles through tortuous byways in an endeavour to avoid it) he becomes paralysed by an undefinable fear, and stops, or gets near to ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... 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
... westward, before 7.30 A.M. They had reached Denver by the Pacific express, and in five minutes the sleeper in which the two had journeyed from Chicago would be whirling swiftly away for "The Springs" before beginning the long, tortuous climb over the huge bulwark between them and the watershed of the great Colorado beyond. There had really been no reason why Graham should stop over at Denver. He knew none of the officials of ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... Orient, has until lately been afraid of the flash of humor in its serious works. But a growing acquaintance with Chinese painting is surely liberating in our poets and painters a happy sense of the disproportion of man to his assumed place in the universe, a sense of the tortuous grotesque vanity of the individual. By this weapon, man helps defend his intuition of the Absolute and of his own obscure but ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... couple found the cave and spent an hour or more within its walls, sallying forth after the tardy darkness had crept down over the mountain and into the peaceful valley. Then began the tortuous descent. Quinnox in the lead, they walked, crawled and ran down the narrow path, bruised, scratched and aching by the time they reached the topmost of the summer houses along the face of the mountain. After this walking was easier, but stealthiness made their progress slow. Frequently, ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... like as one does when following tortuous paths on a mountain slope. Nothing seems to weigh on one in those short, quick walks through the invigorating air of those heights, neither the body, nor the heart, nor the thoughts, nor even cares. On that day I felt nothing of all that crushes and tortures our life; I only ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... speak to Val Beverley and to learn what had taken place during her interview with Inspector Aylesbury, but Harley led the way toward the tower wing, and by a tortuous path through the rhododendrons we finally came out on the northeast front and in sight ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... 8.10 a.m., steered north-east down the valley of the creek, which I named Elsey Creek, after the surgeon of the expedition. Its course was generally to the north-east, but spreading into lagoons and swampy flats, became very tortuous and irregular. It then changed to a very winding reach of water fifty to sixty yards wide, with low banks covered with reeds and tall melaleuca-trees, beyond which was a belt of pandanus growing on the drier ground. Many small springs rose in the limestone rock and ran into the creek, ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark plain of sea-weed, of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea water like the ruts upon a wintry ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... between the hills, flowed a tortuous stream, by courtesy called a river. It sometimes rose in a turgid flood, but more often it sank and delivered up its ghost to such an extent that a man could have held it in his hat. Nevertheless some greenery ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... inventing greatness, American in this if in nothing else. Unnumbered writers of the day, of whom Mr. Kipling is not the least eminent, have profited by his influence, and learned from him to give the final, subtle thought its final form. If that form in his own case was tortuous, intricate, difficult, why so was the thought. If it makes hard reading, his subject at least got hard thinking. Before you condemn that curious style of his-so easy to parody, so hard to imitate—ask whether such refinement of thought as his could be much more simply expressed. Sometimes ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... dissembler, and he now perceived the policy of hailing as a friend the man whom he dared not defy as an enemy: he therefore with a mighty exertion stifled his emotion, and his whole appearance became calm and composed. Indeed an expression of mixed repentance and candour varnished his wily and tortuous features, as he proceeded to greet El Feri with words of amity ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... 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 ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... VENDALE!" for the people are proud of her to enthusiasm. This greeting of the bride under her new name is affectionately meant as a surprise, and therefore the arrangement has been made that she, unconscious why, shall be taken to the church by a tortuous back way. A scheme not difficult to carry into execution in the crooked little ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... proceeded more than fifty yards when his worst fears were realized. He had dodged his way along the tortuous footpath until, nearing an open space, he saw ahead of him his companions surrounded by a small ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... break the mighty walls of Moroccan cities. Underneath the tower the vaulted entrance turns, Arab fashion, at right angles, profiling its red arch against darkness and mystery. This bending of passages, so characteristic a device of the Moroccan builder, is like an architectural expression of the tortuous ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... they were 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 a faculty which enabled him to catch matter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... theologian, now showed the abilities of a diplomatist. When Napoleon III. was at Bordeaux, on the 11th October, 1859, the cardinal, whose duty it was to compliment the Emperor as his sovereign, failed not at the same time to remonstrate against his tortuous policy. "We pray," said the pious cardinal, "we pray confidently, persistently, and with hope which neither deplorable events nor sacrilegious acts of violence extinguished. Our hopes, the realization of which appears to be so remote, are founded on yourself, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... deck again, they found the steamer was among the islands, which were generally low, rocky, and covered with firs and pines. A crooked channel was carefully buoyed off, and the boat was threading its tortuous way with ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... 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
... military road, also built by Simcoe, followed the old Indian trail through thirty-three miles of forest from York to Lake Simcoe. This shorter route to Lake Superior enabled the North-West Fur Company—established by Frobisher and McTavish, of Montreal, in 1776—to avoid canoeing up the Ottawa and its tortuous tributaries. The batteaux were brought up the St. Lawrence, breaking bulk at certain "carrying places," then under sail up Lake Ontario to York. From here the cargoes were hauled by horses over Yonge's military road to Lake Simcoe, thence by river and stormy ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... bestows not his confidence on him who resists his will, nor subscribes to the advancement of one whom he does not hope to influence.—I may almost venture to add, that more dissimulation, meaner concessions, and more tortuous policy, are requisite to become the idol of the people, than are practised to acquire and preserve the favour of the most potent Monarch in Europe. The French, however, do not argue in this manner, and Rolland ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... 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 ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... renown. To embody the flying colours of folly, to arrest evanescence, to give to bubbles the globular consistency as well as form, to exhibit on the stage the piebald denizen of the stable, and the half-reasoning parent of combs, to display the brisk locomotion of Columbine, or the tortuous attitudinizing of Punch;—these are the occupations of others, whose ambition, limited to the applause of unintellectual fatuity, is too innocuous for the application of satire, and too humble ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... hereinbefore mentioned, or darkly shaded by the messenger clouds aforesaid; flowing at right angles with said Desert, and adjacent thereto, I see the silver and sinuous thread of the river, commonly called Carson, which winds its tortuous course through the softly tinted valley, and disappears amid the gorges of the bleak and snowy mountains—a simile of man!—leaving the pleasant valley of Peace and Virtue to wander among the dark defiles of Sin, beyond the jurisdiction of the kindly beaming sun aforesaid! And ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... any sign of water. And yet surely water must have made this bold cutting in the plateau. And if so, why is the lava sharp? My science gave out; but I could not but think it ominous and volcanic. The course of the stream was tortuous, but with a resultant direction a little by west of north; the sides the whole way exceeding steep, the expedition buried under fathoms of foliage. Presently water appeared in the bottom, a good ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... form in its citizenship an element able to look out for themselves, and demanding little of its special oversight. They have a story full of interest to tell, for the way of the deaf to the attainment of this position has been long and tortuous, being first looked upon as wards, and then by slow gradations coming to the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship. In this final stage, where the state provides education for the deaf only as it provides it for all others, ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... summit of the crater edge was comparatively rapid, though every footstep went down some fifteen inches through the volcanic ashes. I descended by the eastern side, and was soon at the base of the great cone. I made my way by tortuous walking round the erupted masses of lava, and also by portions of the lava streams, which, on losing their original fluidity, had become piled up ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... potence. That concentration of desire for the girl's well-being was not merely of this moment. It had been with him constantly during long hours of tedious clambering yesterday, when he followed the channel of Garden Creek through its tortuous course among the ravines of the Blue Ridge, through the narrow defile of the Devil's Garden, sunless, strewn with rubble of boulders, with a chaos of shattered rock masses—debris, superstition said, of cataclysm—of ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... of trying the superior thyroids for goitre, unless they were so manifestly enlarged, tortuous, and pulsating, as to render the operation so simple (from their superficial position) as to require no special directions; besides this, the cases in which it has been already done have given very little ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... still more salutary, an occasional outbreak of the plague, the easy-going authorities would never have issued any "cleansing edicts," and the still easier-going inhabitants would never have obeyed them. It was these dark, tortuous wynds and closes, nevertheless, that made up the Court End of Old Edinbro'; for some one writes in 1530, "Via vaccarum in qua habitant patricii et senatores urbis" (The nobility and chief senators of the city dwell in the Cowgate). And as for the Canongate, this Saxon gaet or way of ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... void," thousands of years perhaps, before the date of the Mosaic account of the Creation? The Winding Way is one hundred and five feet long, eighteen inches wide, and from three to seven feet deep, widening out above, sufficiently to admit the free use of one's arms. It is throughout tortuous, a perfect zig-zag, the terror of the Falstaffs and the ladies of "fat, fair and forty," who have an instinctive dread of the trials to come, and are well aware of the merriment that their efforts to force a passage will ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... own Foreign Minister, and being what he was, and swayed by the considerations I have imperfectly described, his foreign policy was necessarily tortuous and perplexing. As Ranke says, "Charles was capable of proposing offensive alliances to the three neighbouring powers, to the Dutch against France, to the French against Spain and Holland, to the Spaniards against France to the detriment ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... 'On the one hand,' it is said, 'see the soul going straight to its God, feeling His love, and content that others should feel it. On the other hand, see this pure and free communion, distracted and interrupted by a thousand tortuous reasonings as to the exact nature of it. What can obscure intellectual propositions,' it is asked, 'have to do with a religion of the heart? And do not they check the latter by being thus bound up with it?' But what really can be more misleading ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... where the rushing waters were beaten into spray, and where granite walls were shining like great sapphires reflected in the sun's bright rays, I wondered how many centuries it took to chisel that mighty water way fifty-two miles through this tortuous mountain. Perpendicular walls of fully 2000 feet are standing sentinels above this silvery water which goes roaring and ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... and mystic logic did not convince Pepe Rey; but he did not wish to follow his aunt in the tortuous path of such a method of reasoning, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... undressing. The interminable plain kept on with fatiguing monotony; icebergs of uniform aspect and hummocks whose irregularity ended by seeming always the same; blocks cast in the same mould, and icebergs between which tortuous valleys wound. The travellers spoke little, and marched on, compass in hand. It is painful to open one's mouth in such an atmosphere; sharp icicles form immediately between one's lips, and the breath is not warm enough ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... branches of blood vessels, supplying the subcortical centers from the base, are short, thick, straight, palisade-like, while those on the surface of the brain, supplying the cortex, run in long tortuous lines. And it is because of that, since with the increased length of the blood vessels the resistance to the propulsive force of the heart is increased, that the subcortical centers, the moment fatigue supervenes, are better supplied with blood than the cortex, they are less readily ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... gratification to every wish prevailed no more, the tempter's charm was broken. All was changed; the whole scene seemed to vanish; and that form, which once appeared to her like an angel of light, fell prostrate, writhing away in terrific and tortuous folds on the hissing earth. The crowd scattered with a fearful yell;—she heard a rush of wings, and a loud and dissonant scream,—and the "Bride of Bernshaw" fell ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... four days prior to our arrival at Laidley's Ponds, the upward course of the river had been somewhat to the west of north. The course of Laidley's Ponds was exceedingly tortuous, but almost due west. The natives explained to us that it served as a channel of communication between two lakes that were on either side of it, called Minandichi and Cawndilla. They stated that the former extended between the Darling and the ranges, but that Cawndilla ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... tradition of Sagan might be, the Castle itself was mediaeval, and, though it had been added to and restored, dark and tortuous passages still existed in the older portion of its huge bulk, and could by no means be improved away. Treacherous steps waylaid and betrayed the unwary foot; undreamed-of doors gave upon their dimmest corners, and not all the efforts of the nervous chatelaine ever accomplished ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... that a jungle trail is broad and easy. As I stumbled along the tortuous, uneven path, in the sweltering mid-day heat, pestered by legions of piums or sand-flies and the omnipresent mosquitoes, climbing, fallen trees that impeded us at every turn, I thought that I had reached the climax of discomfort. Little could I know that during the time to come ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... a wild irregularity in the laying out of gardens was carried to its extreme, the garden paths were so ridiculously tortuous or zig-zag, that, as Brown remarked, a man might put one foot upon zig and the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... 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
... these parts (save those armed with fortresses) are thus built for security against the pirates, who ravage the seaboard of this continent incessantly from end to end. And for this reason the roads leading up to the town are made very narrow, tortuous, and difficult, with watch-towers in places, and many points where a few armed men lying in ambush may overwhelm an enemy ten times as strong. The towns themselves are fortified with gates, the streets extremely narrow and crooked, and the houses massed all together with ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the tabu from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... expecting a like fate, shrieks out in fear of the impending vengeance. He pants for new victories, "Who will bring me into (the) strong city?" probably the yet unsubdued Petra, hidden away in its tortuous ravine, with but one perilous path through the gorge. And at last all the triumph of victory rises to a higher region of thought in the closing words, which lay bare the secret of his strength, and breathe the true spirit of the soldier of Jehovah. ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... right mamma of a woman of twenty. At the time he was called to see her she was suffering with what was called "green-sickness." The girl had never menstruated regularly or freely. The right mamma was quite well developed, flaccid, the nipple prominent, and the superficial veins larger and more tortuous than usual. The patient stated that the right mamma had always been larger than the left. The areola was large and well marked, and 1/4 inch from its outer edge, immediately under the nipple, there was an ulcer with slightly elevated ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... eye. It seems as if the inhabitants of the town must all of them be forced, and that at no distant date, either into religion or pauperism, just as small bodies floating in a pond are sucked into connection with one or other of the logs which lie among them. The shops in the one tortuous street block the footpaths in front of their doors with piles of empty packing-cases. The passenger is saluted, here by a buffet in the face from a waterproof coat suspended outside a draper's, there by a hot breath of whisky-laden air. Two shops out of every three are public-houses. These occupy ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... 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 couplets, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I remember the first sight of the wolds of South Africa! It was the hour of uncertain light that comes before the dawn; and as our railway train wound its tortuous course like a snake up the awful heights that would ultimately end in Majuba Hill—to which ill-fated spot I was bound—the billowy waves of rolling down seemed gradually to change to an immensely rough ocean running mountains high, and the mimosa trees dotting the plain for hundreds of miles ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... short of a miracle could have caused him to go to the trouble of getting out his watch on a morning as cold as this one happened to be, and so he regarded old Mr. Hooper's exit as a most astonishing occurrence. Further investigation showed that he had walked down the six tortuous flights of stairs instead of ringing for the elevator, and that he was clad in Mr. Bingle's best overcoat, an ulster of five winters, to say nothing of his arctics, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
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