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More "Tortuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... occurrence of this incident, the labyrinths among the ice became more broken, tortuous, and bewildering. At last they ceased altogether, and the travellers were compelled to take an almost straight course right over everything, for blocks, masses, and drifts on a gigantic scale were heaved up in such dire confusion, that nothing having the faintest resemblance ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... wishes of the young Nawab was his mother,[6] but her advice was of no avail, and her taunt that he, a soldier, was going to war upon mere traders, was equally inefficacious. The records of the time give no definite information as to the tortuous diplomacy which fanned the quarrel between him and the English, but it is sufficiently clear that the English refused to surrender the son of one of his uncle's diwans,[7] who, with his master's and his father's wealth, had betaken himself to Calcutta. Siraj-ud-daula, by the ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... 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 ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... mark. On the bottom of the huge and glassy lagoon was much pearl shell, and from the deck of the schooner, across the slender ring of the atoll, the divers could be seen at work. But the lagoon had no entrance for even a trading schooner. With a favoring breeze cutters could win in through the tortuous and shallow channel, but the schooners lay off and on outside and sent in their ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... the third, 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. "In God we shall ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... Lucien's advantage. Let those whose envy vents itself on magistrates think for a moment of their life spent in perpetual suspicion, of the torments these men must inflict on their minds, for civil cases are not less tortuous than criminal examinations, and it will occur to them perhaps that the priest and the lawyer wear an equally heavy coat of mail, equally furnished with spikes in the lining. However, every profession has its hair ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... unexpected acrobatic feats, while jolted from one side to the other by her swinging gait. This experience, under the scorching sun, unavoidably induced a state of body and mind something between sea-sickness and a delirious nightmare. As a crown to our pleasures, when we began to ascend a tortuous little path over the stony slope of a deep ravine, our Peri stumbled. This sudden shock caused me to lose my balance altogether. I sat on the hinder part of the elephant's back, in the place of honor, as it is esteemed, and, once thoroughly shaken, rolled down like ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... the pageant were the principal officers of the British army. Sabres flashed in front of the procession, bayonets sparkled in its rear, as it wended its way through the great bazaar which Pollock was to destroy three years later, and along the tortuous street to the gate of the Balla Hissar. But neither the monarch nor his pageant kindled the enthusiasm in the Cabulees. There was no voice of welcome; the citizens did not care to trouble themselves so much as to make him a salaam, and they stared at the European ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... to pass over all those prickles, and all that tortuous kind of discussion, and to show what we are:—after having explained the whole theory of Carneades, all the quibbles of Antiochus will necessarily fall to pieces. Nor will I say anything in such a way as to lead any one to suspect that ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Now a new problem presented itself, which was all the more exasperating for the reason that we were in sight of our goal. The ice pack was in the bay, and it was quite impossible to cross it until the wind might shift and blow the pack out. It is true that by a tortuous trail some thirty miles around we could with dogs reach Cape Charles, just below Battle Harbour; but none of the few drivers that knew the trail was anxious to undertake the journey, and as the probabilities were that even if we did succeed ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... trouble far above the scene of our first fight,—the Battle of the Hundred Pines, as my officers had baptized it; and ever, as we ascended, the banks grew steeper, the current swifter, the channel more tortuous and more encumbered with projecting branches and drifting wood. No piloting less skilful than that of Corporal Sutton and his mate, James Bezzard, could have carried us through, I thought; and no side-wheel steamer less strong than a ferry-boat could ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... army had 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 ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... excess in drink are, of course, identical in both cases: moral sensibilities blunted; manhood degraded; mind wrecked; worldly substance dissipated; health shattered; strength sapped; every mendacious and tortuous bent of one's nature stimulated, and ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... formerly one of the darkest and most tortuous of the streets about the Hotel de Ville, zigzagged round the little gardens of the Paris Prefecture, and ended at the Rue Martroi, exactly at the angle of an old wall now pulled down. Here stood the turnstile to which the street owed its name; it was not removed ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... curious old chambers, it was to be expected that I should see some Wohlegemuths—as usual, with backgrounds in a blaze of gold, and figures with tortuous limbs, pinched-in waists, and caricatured countenances. In a room, pretty plentifully encumbered with rubbish, I saw a charming Snyders; being a dead stag, suspended from a pole. There is here a portrait of Albert Duerer, by himself; but said to be a copy. If so, it is a very fine copy. The original ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... the water. This failed, and the 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 answered his purpose, which was to ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... slowly, indeed, that more than an hour after its first arrival, the sweet music of the head of the flood was distinctly audible from my tent, as the murmur of waters, and the diapason crash of logs, travelled slowly through the tortuous windings of the river bed. I was finally lulled to sleep by that melody of living waters, so grateful to my ear, and evidently so unwonted in the dry bed of the thirsty Macquarie. Thermometer, at sunrise, 47 deg.; at noon, 79 deg.; at 4 P. M., 88 deg.; at 9, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... him to some decent hostel where the sheets were clean and the tariff moderate; and the fellow, gathering up the reins, took him at a snail's pace to a mediaeval-looking tavern in La Rue Croissante. You remember that street? Perhaps not! It is quite a back street, extremely narrow, very tortuous, and miserably lighted with a few gas-lamps of the ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... in life which she felt she had really mastered. She was able to exhibit it to Verena with the greatest authority and accuracy, to lead her up and down, in and out, through all the darkest and most tortuous passages. We know that she was without belief in her own eloquence, but she was very eloquent when she reminded Verena how the exquisite weakness of women had never been their defence, but had only exposed them to sufferings more acute than masculine grossness can conceive. Their odious ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... 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 drop the ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... constraint of habit was upon the fugitive, the contraband. Homesickness in spite of him, it might be. Oh, surely freedom was not bare to him as a winter-rifled tree? Not a bud of promise swelling along the dreary waste of tortuous branches? Possibly some ties had been ruptured in making his escape, which must be knit again before he could enter into the joy he had so fairly won. For you and me it would hardly be perfect happiness to feast at great men's tables, while the faces we love best, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... candidates in training for the teaching profession, all university men. I listened patiently to their diatribes concerning the perfidy of English Statesmen, and then pointed out, giving chapter and verse in German biographies, that Bismarck's record was exceedingly tortuous; the forgery of the Ems telegram was ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Lee was shrouded in fog, and, as morning had dawned without the expected signal, he concluded that some mishap had befallen the force which was to make it. By a tortuous path he went down the side of the mountain low enough to have a distinct view of the camp. He saw the men, unconscious of the near presence of an enemy, engaged in cleaning their arms, cooking, and other morning occupations; then returning to his command, he explained to his senior ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... rest. In and out the tortuous streets of Paris he roamed during the better part of that night. He was now only awaiting the dawn to publicly demand the right ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Pundits—believe they can. The claim, however, is pronounced unworthy of attention. Of the late Smriti (traditional history) which, for those who know how to interpret its allegories, is full of unimpeachable historical records, an Ariadne's thread through the tortuous labyrinth of the Past—has come to be unanimously regarded as a tissue of exaggerations, monstrous fables, "clumsy forgeries of the first centuries A.D." It is now openly declared as worthless not only for exact chronological but even for general historical purposes. Thus by dint of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... stream of 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, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... and the sun was but three hours set. In the fondak called El Oosaa, a group of the town Moors, who had fasted through the day, were feasting and carousing. Over the walls of the Mellah, from the direction of the Spanish inn at the entrance to the little tortuous quarter of the shoemakers, there came at intervals a hubbub of voices, and occasionally wild shouts and cries. The day was Wednesday, the market-day of Tetuan, and on the open space called the Feddan many fires were lighted at the mouths of tents, and men ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... 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 ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... far or near, or the absence of water altogether—all these enter immediately into the manner in which the lawn of a house should be laid out, and worked, and planted. But as a rule, all filagree work, such as serpentine paths, and tortuous, unmeaning circles, artificial piles of rock, and a multitude of small ornaments—so esteemed, by some—should never be introduced into the lawn of a farm house. It is unmeaning, in the first place; expensive in its care, in the second place; unsatisfactory and annoying altogether. Such ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... near neighbors of Argentina, Uruguay continued along the tortuous path of alternate disturbance and progress, losing many of its inhabitants to the greater states beyond, where they sought relative peace and security; while Paraguay, on the other hand, enjoyed ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... seeming jungle ran tortuous paths, and the carved stone benches of the open garden gave place to rustic seats, and swings suspended from the branches ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... scrupulous judgment and 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
... 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 impenetrability not too obscure for the divination of the right man. Her speech ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the other sides there is usually the grim, silent forest. When the house is built with a view to defense, trees are felled all around in such a way as to make a regular abatis. Ordinarily there are at least two trails, one, a main trail, so tortuous and difficult, in the generality of cases, that it would lead one to imagine that the owner of the house had deliberately selected it for its difficulties, the other, a trail leading to the watering place. In approaching ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... 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 ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... dexterously obtaining the reluctant consent of a people who would be maddened at the mere suspicion of an inconceivable intervention. When he thinks fit, he will peacefully violate the secret of the sacred chambers, and the elaborate, tortuous policy of the palace. He will five or six times in succession deprive the bees of the fruit of their labour, without harming them, without their becoming discouraged or even impoverished. He proportions the store-houses and granaries of their dwellings ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... intervals instead of continuously boiling, because their long, narrow, and often tortuous conduits do not permit a free circulation of the water. After an eruption the tube is refilled and the water again gradually becomes heated. Deep in the tube where it is in contact with hot lavas the water sooner or later reaches the boiling point, and ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... amused at dinner to watch the cool deliberation with which Clarence studied Mrs. Watson and her tortuous conversation, and, as he would have expressed it, "took stock of her." The result was ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... in height. These floods of cold wind find their appropriate channels in the characteristic canons which everywhere furrow the whole Rocky-Mountain system to its very base. Most of these are exceedingly tortuous, and the descending winds, during their passage through them, acquire a spiral motion as irresistible as the fiercest hurricane of the Antilles, which, moreover, they preserve for miles after they have issued from the mouth of the canon. Every little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... 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
... furnish scanty water supply to the inhabitants of this region are found generally at great distances apart, and there are usually but few natural indications of their location. They often occur in obscure nooks in the canyons, reached by tortuous trails winding through the talus and foothills, or as small seeps at the foot of some mesa. The convergence of numerous Navajo trails, however, furnishes some guide to these ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... have great ends in view, he was often unscrupulous as to the means which he employed, and, as Burckhardt very truly remarked, would probably have been surprised at being held responsible for the means by which he attained his object. Trained from early youth in the most tortuous paths of Italian diplomacy, he acted on the principle laid down by the Venetian Marino Sanuto, that the first duty of the really wise statesman is to persuade his enemies that he means to do one thing and ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... they sailed eighty leagues, which would have carried them far above Lake Monroe; but it is certain that his reckoning is grossly exaggerated. Their boat crawled up the hazy St. John's, no longer a broad lake like expanse, but a narrow and tortuous stream, winding between swampy forests, or through the vast savanna, a verdant sea of brushes and grass. At length they came to a village called Mayarqua, and thence, with the help of their oars, made their way to another cluster of wigwams, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress. They could not have said which delighted them more—the houses in the immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives and the background; but all were like the painted scenes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... startled to hear that Henry Clairville had left his room, walked all over his house and even reached half-way to the bridge one afternoon. But as they were both cold and fatigued, madame led them (and shortly after Dr. Renaud and Poussette as well), by dark and tortuous paths, to her kitchen, a large room built on the generous scale of the seventeenth century, with a deep overhanging fireplace, and thick, arched recesses serving as closets, and furnished with swinging shelves and numerous bins where the provisions sent ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... can get even two inches above that the job'll be easier." With the above figures in mind, Rand and Dick plunged into the shallows of the broad channel. Working from rock to sandbar, and bar to boulder, they followed the deepest pools in a tortuous path that corkscrewed nearly from one shore to another, and in an hour's time were able to report to Swiftwater that they could find passageway sufficiently wide for the boats with a ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... attractive, or insidiously alluring. The shadow of expiation, remorse, punishment, retribution is ever present, like a death's-head at a feast. The day of reckoning comes, and bitterly do the culprits realize that the tortuous game of vice is not worth the candle. Casuistical theologians may attempt to explain away the notions of punishment in the life to come, of retribution beyond the grave. But the shallowest thinker will not deny the realities of remorse. To how many confessions, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... picture of what Old England truly was in days before she became "a nation of shopkeepers." It is no use to go to the flourishing commercial cities to find traces of earlier England; these cities have usually swept away the traces of antiquity they once possessed—tortuous streets are straightened and widened, quaint old houses are thrown down, the picturesque makes way for the useful; even the old churches are looked at askance, as occupying ground that might be devoted to warehouses and offices. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... a worn and 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
... and the brown-paper parcel, having been conveyed to his bedroom, he retired in company with a japanned candlestick, to one side of the house, while Mr. Pickwick, and another japanned candlestick, were conducted through a multitude of tortuous windings, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... we found some of our fellow-passengers, who, like myself, seemed casting a last look to Heaven, whilst they were yet on the French soil. We embarked, however, and left these happy shores. In descending the tortuous course of the Charente, contrary winds so impeded our progress, that we did not reach the Medusa till the morrow, having taken twenty-four hours in sailing four leagues. At length we mounted the deck of the Medusa, of painful memory. When we got on board, we found our births not provided ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... straggling fence running with all sorts of lists and bends, going on and on endlessly, according to the belief of the boys of Waddy. The road was overhung by tall gums and nourished many clumps of fresh green saplings, about which the tortuous cart-track wound in deep yellow ruts, baked hard in summer, washed into treacherous bog in winter. Here caution was not necessary, and there were divers fierce hand-to-hand attacks on clumps of scrub representing a vindictive and merciless police, out of which Moonlighter and his men issued ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... was unbroken forest, quiet and isolated, abounding in game as the waters did in fish. The pass issues again half way down the eastern side, through an opening so shut in with trees that it can scarcely be seen a hundred yards away, and pursues a tortuous course of twelve or fourteen miles to the Coldwater River, the upper portion of the Yazoo. In this part of the route, which never exceeds one hundred feet in width and often narrows to seventy-five or less, the forest of cyprus and sycamore trees, mingled with great cottonwoods ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... alone suffices for a familiar passport,—the circles above fashion itself the circles of POWER,—with every facility of augmenting information, and learning the world betimes through the talk of its acknowledged masters,—Randal had but to move straight onward, and success was sure. But his tortuous spirit delighted in scheme and intrigue for their own sake. In scheme and intrigue he saw shorter paths to fortune, if ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fancies and romantic thoughts, I lost count of streets and passages, turning this way, that and the other, through many narrow and tortuous byways and alleys, until I realized I was hopelessly lost. With my fair guide in front and my good sword by my side, lightly I recked of streets or houses. Yet I dared not forget I was on an errand for the Governor and must not ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... are forests, so far extending that their limits are almost unknown. Gangoil was surrounded by forest, in some places so close as to be impervious to men and almost to animals in which the undergrowth was thick and tortuous and almost platted, through which no path could be made without an axe, but of which the greater portions were open, without any under-wood, between which the sheep could wander at their will, and men could ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... was a low one. Another, narrow and high, protected it in the street. The sun shone upon and brightened the chimney-tops. The tortuous Rue Saint Antoine wound before ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... consequence; and Jones was near shouting with relief when the Indian shrank backward. Suddenly he saw Cumnor let his can drop, and without stopping to see why, he caught it up, and, slowly rattling both, approached each Indian in turn with tortuous steps. The circle that had never uttered a sound till now receded, chanting almost in a whisper some exorcising song which the man with the fillet had begun. They gathered round him, retreating always, and the strain, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... knew nothing of this as they were hurried along through the tortuous ways of the vast stretch of hovels, tents, and mud huts, till they reached the outskirts, and then the wide-stretching plain, where they had ample opportunity of learning the truth. For on every side, streaming towards Khartoum, where it lay whitened in the distance, were the routed dervishes, ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... pointed, all turned to look in the direction he indicated with blank surprise and astonishment. Such a sight had never met their eyes before, for the Australasian was the very first steamer to take the eastward route, through the dangerous and tortuous Boupari Channel. So their awe and surprise at the unwonted sight knew no bounds. Fire on the ocean! Miraculous light on the waves! Their god must, indeed, be a mighty deity if he could send flames like that ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a man," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the endless human files, streaming ever up and down, crossing and recrossing, seemed mere rushing chains of flesh and blood, working upon unseen wheels; but the dim, weary, lifeless streets—the dark, tortuous roots, as I fancied them, of that grim forest of entangled brick. Mystery lurked in their gloom. Fear whispered from behind their silence. Dumb figures flitted swiftly to and fro, never pausing, never glancing right nor left. Far-off footsteps, rising swiftly into sound, as swiftly ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... and other luxuriant epiphytal growths. Such is the typical North Borneo river, to which, however, the Brunai is a solitary exception. The mouth of the Brunai river is approached between pretty verdant islets, and after passing through a narrow and tortuous passage, formed naturally by sandbanks and artificially by a barrier of stones, bare at low water, laid down in former days to keep out the restless European, you find your vessel, which to cross the bar should not draw more than thirteen or fourteen feet, in deep water between ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... paddled on the lake to its southern end, out of which flowed a shallow brook, which afforded water enough in places to float the frail craft. The shoal water, and the obstructions made by fallen trees, necessitated frequent portages. This wild and tortuous stream led the voyagers to the Alleghany River, where an ample depth of water and a propitious current ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... in such contrast to the tortuous paths they had just followed, that the horses gained a fresh impetus and galloped forward as freely as though the ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... more tortuous saving of floor creaks and the interminable opening and closing of a door that Carrie Samstag, the beaded bag in her hand, found herself face to face with herself in the mirror of ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... seven, and nine; it was also the simplest train of reasoning to apply these figures to the column of dots. Only, I hadn't the remotest idea what the dots themselves represented. Nor did it occur to me that the tortuous turnings of any of the passageways of Hynds House might follow the pattern of the Greek key, until The Author called your attention to the design over the outside windows. Clever ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... swamp was split by the light's white sword, and softer beams from its sharp radiance illumined the pitch-dark gloom for a few yards to either side of the tortuous path. The shadows of the man and the woman were cast in monstrous grotesquely floating shapes behind ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... has frankly confessed the real grievance of his class of mischief makers. They are impatient and easily bored; while the business of establishing a healthful and vigorous society is complicated, tortuous, and slow. Their talent for letters, their love of vivid pictures, sharp contrasts, and concise dramatic situations, cannot adapt itself to the real bulk and complexity of life. Civilization is too promiscuous, too prolonged and monotonous, for these rare spirits. And ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... book of river maps, and together they looked down the tortuous stream; he rested the tip of his pencil on Yankee ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... ancient gentlewoman, whose actions did not square altogether with my notions of the rule of right. The unanimous surprise of the company before whom I uttered these words soon convinced me that I had confounded mental with bodily obliquity, and that there was nothing tortuous about the ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... discreetly at her plate, for she knew along what a tortuous path of inchoate ideas and breezy caprices Mrs. Grahame Fenlow, upon the sightliness of whose new chauffeur she and her sister were basing their hopes of keeping their maid of all work, had led the architect in his attempt to design a ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... (which rises in Lake Baikal to join the river Yenisei just below Yeniseisk), and the small and unimportant Irkut river. It is an unfinished, slipshod city, a strange mixture of squalor and grandeur, with tortuous, ill-paved streets, where the wayfarer looks instinctively for the "No-thoroughfare" board. There is one long straggling main street with fairly good shops and buildings, but beyond this Irkutsk remains much the same dull, dreary-looking place that ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... and of his tortuous train Curled many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, To lure her eye; she, busied, heard the sound Of rustling leaves, but minded not, as used To such disport before her through the field, From every beast; more duteous at her call, Than at Circean call the herd disguised. He, bolder ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Johnson's position at West View; one through Harrisonburg; the second by Port Republic, Cross Keys, and Mount Sidney; the third, the river road, by Port Republic and Staunton. The first of these was already occupied by the Federals; the second was tortuous, and at places almost within view of the enemy's camps; while the third, though it was nowhere less than ten miles distant, ran obliquely across their front. In fact, to all appearance, Banks with his superior force blocked Jackson's march on Staunton ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... from Jerusalem, with a troop of cavalry and Kavasses in gorgeous array. The office lasts from 10 o'clock on Christmas Eve until long after midnight. "At the reading of the Gospel the clergy and as many of the congregation as can follow leave the church, and proceed by a flight of steps and a tortuous rock-hewn passage to the Grotto of the Nativity, an irregular subterranean chamber, long and narrow. They carry with them a waxen image of an infant—the bambino—wrap it in swaddling bands and lay it on the site which is said to be ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... indeed in a dangerous predicament, for the passages leading out of the lake were narrow and tortuous. In order to learn just what force he had to meet, he sent his swiftest boat scouting through the inlet, while his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... 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 dark. They entered; and Hugh ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... and the still more dangerous rush outside Shoreham, and the absurd bar at Littlehampton that strikes out of the sea, and the place to lie at in Newhaven, and how not to stick upon the Platters outside Harwich; and the very tortuous entry to Poole, and the long channel into Christchurch past Hengistbury Head; and the enormous tides of South Wales; and why you often have to beach at Britonferry, and the terrible difficulty of mooring ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... learn wisdom from him? Was it for this, that students at the bar, acute, inquisitive, sceptical (here only wild enthusiasts) neglected for a while the paths of preferment and the law as too narrow, tortuous, and unseemly to bear the pure and broad light of reason? Was it for this, that students in medicine missed their way to Lecturerships and the top of their profession, deeming lightly of the health of the body, and dreaming only of the renovation of society and the march of mind? ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... money from all quarters, without any distinction between just and unjust actions; he never attempted to lead back the misguided prince into the path of equity, as mild and wise rulers often have done; but rather followed his lead through all his winding and tortuous paths. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... his post unshaken, throwing his great strength on the sweep this way and that—endeavoring to keep it in the centre of the current—in the middle of the tortuous channel through which the boat was racing like mad. And the hind-sweepman, doing his part, responded, with all the weight of body and strength he possessed, to Bruce's low-voiced orders almost before ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... Artomonov was saying that the Soviet Union could weather the storm, and with another he was hinting that it probably wouldn't. But Sam Bending could see the point in spite of the Russian's tortuous logic. ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the dark and tortuous places of this life, the human heart is the most dark and tortuous; and of all human hearts none are less clear, more intricate than the hearts of all that class of people among whom Bianca had her being. Pride was a simple quality ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her tortuous passage among the easels without meeting with any mishaps in the shape of Cremnitz-white or crimson-lake. She had paused occasionally and had bestowed a critical nod upon the one "blocked-in" countenance, or ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... affectionate and subtly penetrating—that the disagreeable feeling of repugnance, which the first sight of him generally inspired, wore off little by little, and he almost always finished by involving his dupe or victim in the tortuous windings of an eloquence as pliant as it was honeyed and perfidious; for ugliness and evil have their fascination, as well as ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... should step on or over a grave. A breeze stirred the forest as if all the thousands buried in its shades had heaved a long deep sigh. With chattering teeth Jeff stopped to listen, then, reassured, continued to pick his tortuous way. Suddenly there was an ominous rustling in a thicket just behind. He broke into a headlong flight across and over everything, when the startled grunt of a hog revealed the prosaic nature of this spook. Scarcely any other sound could have been more reassuring. The animal suggested ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... course, the gentlemen of the day followed the mode; and then the folds and folds of white muslin that swathed the chins and necks of the sitters; and the coats, with fanciful collars and lapels; and the waistcoats, many-topped and many-hued, winding about in tortuous lines. It is not to be much marvelled at that such items of costume as 'Cumberland corsets,' 'Petersham trousers,' 'Brummel cravats,' 'Osbaldistone ties,' and 'Exquisite crops,' should be only sketchily rendered in ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... which they had to deal with was sheer unmanageable. It was distressing to watch them during those eventful months groping and floundering through a labyrinth of obstacles with no Ariadne clue to guide their tortuous course, and discovering that their task was more intricate than they had imagined. The ironic domination of temper and circumstance over the fitful exertions of men struggling with the partially realized difficulties of a false position led to ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... and once more they continued their climb. Up and up they slowly made their tortuous way, and at length Reynolds, who was leading, gave a shout as his eyes fell upon the desired cave. With a bound he sprang forward, reached the place and was standing before the opening when his ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... Pass is at all times dreaded by travellers, native and European, even in summer, when there are no avalanches to fear, snow-drifts to bar the way, or ice to render the narrow, tortuous pathway even more insecure. A serious inconvenience, not to say danger, is the meeting of two camel caravans travelling in opposite directions on the narrow track, which, in many places, is barely ten feet broad, and barely ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... offer, which he refused; but two gifts he accepted. One was full permission to explore the Venetian archives, and the other was a little doorway, cut through the garden wall of his monastery, enabling him to reach his gondola without going through the narrow and tortuous path he had formerly taken on his daily journey to the public offices. This humble portal still remains. Beneath few triumphal arches has there ever passed as great or as ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... glance around the room was more deliberate. To my right were the big generators and the switchboards, gleaming with copper bus-bar, and intricate with their tortuous wiring. Directly before me was the long work-bench that ran the full length of the room, littered with a dozen set-ups for as many experiments. At my left was a sizable piece of apparatus that was strange to me; on a small enameled table beside it was a rather large ...
— The Infra-Medians • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... taken pleasure in tangling up their threading ways. You ascend, you descend, you seem to go out of the building, you seem to return, twisting about a cornice to follow the curves of a bell-tower, and walking through thick walls in tortuous passages that might be compared to the capillary tubes of madrepores, or to the roads made by insects in the barks of trees. After so many turnings and windings, your head swims, a vertigo seizes you, and you wonder if you are not a mollusk ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Arkansas settlements, and at least a dozen times carrying on past the point where I left him at Nephi. It were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and so, without prejudice to the verity of my account, I shall skip much that is vague and tortuous and repetitional, and give the facts as I have assembled them out of the various times, in whole and part, as ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... dangerous to walk among; no water in the course, scarce 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 quantity; perhaps thirty or forty cubic feet, with pools and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... city or its environment, he visited the 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 ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... 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
... More and more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of Nature. For several days more they followed the writhings of the great river, on its tortuous course through wastes of swamp and canebrake, till on the thirteenth of March they found themselves wrapt in a thick fog. Neither shore was visible; but they heard on the right the booming of an Indian drum and the shrill outcries ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... indispensable for him to have, as supports to this, knowledge and theories from countless sources. "It must be as a noble river," he said of the pursuit of music; "though small and unobserved in its source, winding at first alone its tortuous way through opposing obstacles, yet ever broadening and deepening, fed by countless streams on either hand till it rolls onward in a mighty sweep, at once a glory and a ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in the town, save where some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices of house-shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting drinking-songs. The streets were all white ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... 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 ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to take longer drives; and she found strange, lonely canyons, wild and beautiful, where yellow waters burst through rocky barriers with roar and fury,—tortuous, terrible places, such as she had never dreamed of. Coming back from one of these drives, two days after her conversation on the piazza with Peter Roeder, she met him riding a massive roan. He sat the animal with that air of perfect unconsciousness which is the attribute of the Western man, ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... descended the bank, following a tortuous foot-path until they reached the water's edge. Then they proceeded to the mouth of an immense cave, some fifty feet above the river, under the cliff. A little stream of limpid water trickled down from a spring within the cave. The little watercourse served as a sort of natural ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... 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 ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 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, and ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... she had gone back to the cottage, at risk of having to walk back all alone and along a dark and dreary road, bore a weird significance to this man's tortuous mind. Editha, troubled with a mass of vague fears and horrible conjectures, had, mayhap, desired to have them set at rest, or else to hear their ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... Naida had told him the case would be, he found both sides of the nave surrounded by arches similar to the one under which he was standing. Everywhere, dim and tortuous corridors led to cells like the one he had just left. Then, in one end of the nave, loomed a closed door from behind which the Duca and caciques would appear when the couple to be wedded were in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... good time to secure herself 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 ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... 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 in bringing forward charges nor ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... in robes in the bottom of the sled, idly watched the panorama of tree-trunks between which the road twisted in an endless succession of tortuous windings. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... rise to many ingenious inventions in getting the oil to market. The wells extend along Oil Creek for a distance of about fourteen miles from its mouth. The ground is not favorable for land carriage, as the valley is narrow and the stream tortuous. The creek itself is too small for navigation under ordinary circumstances, and a railroad with steam power would be in the highest degree dangerous. To compensate for all these difficulties, a system of artificial navigation has been adopted. Throughout ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... else. She had changed her course. The boat seemed to be drawing away from him! His heart sank, but almost at once, the boat turned again, following the tortuous channel of ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... interminable perspectives? How frightfully the way lengthens before one's eyes! In the twists and curves of the old Paris one was relieved from the pain of seeing how far one had to go from one spot to another,—each tortuous street had a separate idiosyncrasy; what picturesque diversities, what interesting recollections,—all swept away! Mon Dieu! and what for,—miles of florid facades staring and glaring at one with goggle-eyed pitiless windows; house-rents trebled, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my congealing dish, snatched up my hat, and joined the attenuated chase. It was making in one direction—a point, apparently, to the east of the town. As I sped excited through the narrow and tortuous streets, a great bulge of acrid dust bellied upon me suddenly at a corner; and, turning the latter, I plunged into a perfect fog of the same gritty smoke. In this, phantom figures moved, appeared, and vanished; hoarse cries resounded, and a general air of wild confusion ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Scandinavian, but its origin is somewhat uncertain. The late Professor Skeat thought that the substantive was derived from the verb, and as in old times to be mazed or amazed was to be "lost in thought," the transition to a maze in whose tortuous windings we are lost is natural ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... 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
... was in commotion. Faces appeared at windows; girls flew up and gathered in a frightened flock, circling about the burning building; boats miraculously appeared from everywhere. Lua was steering their boat on its tortuous way between the houses. She put the boat nearly to full speed, and as they swept past a house nearly collided with a punt that ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... upon either side or down the center of long and tortuous Grand Avenue to arouse enthusiasm, nor was Billy particularly enthusiastic about that more ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... imprisonment of his young friend, to whom he was bound by strong and vital bonds of gratitude and friendship, was a source of genuine anguish. But what could he do? As Lafayette said, America was far away and the politics of Europe were tortuous. In them Washington had no part and no influence; and he could not go to war for he had no equipment ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... obscure streets; I looked up at the lights in all its windows, all those mysterious family nests; I watched the passing carriages; I saw man jostling against man. Oh! what solitude! How sad the smoke on those roofs! What sorrow in those tortuous streets where all are hurrying hither and thither, working and sweating, where thousands of strangers rub against your elbows; a cloaca where there is only society of bodies, while souls are solitary and alone, where all who hold out a hand to you are prostitutes! "Become corrupt, ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... brewers, who had only about fifty public-houses, had refused to meet at dinner a learned French chemist who had written books. Mrs Martin could not make friends with the Hopgoods, nor enter the cottage. It would have been a transgression of that infinitely fine and tortuous line whose inexplicable convolutions mark off what is forbidden to a society lady. Clearly, however, the Hopgoods could be requested to co-operate at the 'Crown and Sceptre;' in fact, it would be impolitic not to put some of the townsfolk on the list of patrons. So it came about that Mrs Hopgood ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... of robbery. And after all, as he said to himself, it could not be called a genuine robbery, as everything belonging to his wife was his by right of the marriage service, and he was only going to have his own again. With this comfortable thought he climbed slowly up the broken tortuous path which led to the Black Hill, and every now and then would pause to ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... of a very tortuous political career, he has kept the advancement and civilization of Servia steadily in view, and has always shown himself regardless of sordid gain. He is one of the very few public men in Servia, in whom the Christian and Western love ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... great distance from the "big bell," down a tortuous little lane, we come to what is undoubtedly a very ancient work of art. This is a pagoda, made of solid marble, and adorned with beautiful carvings all the way up to the top. To me this pagoda seemed to be of Chinese origin, but, though much speculation ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... 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 ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... continued their ramble through the house, going through tortuous passages, up and down little flights of steps, and entering chambers that had all the charm of discoveries of hidden regions; loitering about, in short, in a labyrinth calculated to put the head into a delightful confusion. Some of these rooms contained their time-honored furniture, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had throughout been tortuous and immoral, and she thought she could treat Russia with defiance, secure in the support of her German ally. Similarly the policy of Germany had been an equivocal and double-faced policy, and it mattered little whether the German Government knew or ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... they could not tell, but the shape of the creek they believed to be that of a bow—at least so the Malays had described it; and as the two ends of the bow must rest upon the river, they were sure, unless they struck up some narrow tortuous way, to come out at the other mouth and join ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... 'is your conduct to be explained? In some parts of England it is quaintly said when a drunken man is seen reeling home, that he has business on both sides of the road. Observing your Lordship's tortuous path, the spectators will be far from insinuating that you have partaken of Mr. BOURKE'S intoxicating bowl. They will content themselves, shaking their heads as you stagger along, with saying that you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... what philosopher it was who said, "it's no disgrace to be poor, but it's often confoundedly unhandy!" But, we have little or no sympathy for poor folks, who, ashamed of their poverty, make as many and tortuous writhings to escape its inconveniences, as though it was "against the law" to be poor. It is the cause of incalculable human misery, to seem what we are not; to appear beyond want—yea, even in affluence and comfort, when the belly is robbed ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... as it is called here, just as if it were a placid lake or land-locked bay, though it is a tortuous and swift- running stream. The scenery was still picturesque, in some places very grand and romantic. There was one great amphitheatre just before reaching the village of Stow which was peculiarly interesting. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... after another to evade the proposition; and finally, from the written declaration of August 19, he could draw no other inference than that Russell had resorted to the only defensive weapon left to him, in order to avoid the avowal of his true motives and policy[255]." The motive of this tortuous proceeding, the author believed to have been a deep-laid scheme to revive, after the American War was ended, the earlier international practice of Great Britain, in treating as subject to belligerent seizure enemy's ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... who covered a temperament of terrific violence with a masque of Venetian dissimulation and the most icy reserve, met with no opposition, unless it were occasionally from Father Anselm, the confessor. He delighted in the refinements of intrigue, and in the most tortuous labyrinths of political manoeuvring, purely for their own sakes; and sometimes defeated his own purposes by mere superfluity of diplomatic subtlety; which hardly, however, won a momentary concern from him, in the pleasure he experienced at having found an undeniable occasion ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Regulation, as its name implies, is an attempt to improve the navigation of the river. The Danube, which in this part of its course has a general flow from north-west to south-east, approaches within a few miles of Vienna. Here, at Nussdorf, it breaks into two or three shallow and tortuous channels, which meander directly away from the city, as if in sheer willfulness, and reunite at the Lobau, as far below the city as Nussdorf is above it. The "regulation" consists in a new artificial channel, cut in a straight line from Nussdorf to the Lobau. In length it is about nine miles, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... sat in the dark, and far apart, some sense all his own, cultivated through years of deprivation, came to his aid. Peter brought him down the street and round the corner; and Randolph's Chinaman, fascinated by his green shade and his tortuous method of locomotion (once out of his wheeled-chair), did the rest. "You had better stay all night," Randolph had suggested; and he was glad to avoid a second awkward ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... depths of Egypt's pyramids. He came forth into a vast cathedral and stood before the high altar. As the acolyte swung the thurible and incense floated upward to the Cross, he, too, arose seraphic and alighted upon the very top of the dome. Below him stretched a maze of tortuous streets, thronged with men and women of a thousand ages and of all the races of mankind. Minaret, pagoda, dome, propylon, arch, portico jutted up from the labyrinth like tares amid a cornfield. Then a mist crept darkly ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... 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, and the tufts of ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village. I could not find my way. I hurried towards the broken end of a street, where the sunshine and the olive trees looked like a mirage before me. And there above me I saw the thin, stiff neck of old San Tommaso, grey and pale in the sun. Yet I could not ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... at her with hot hungry eyes. His brain in its feverish intensity took note of trifles—the tortuous pattern of the braid on her gown, the gold sleeve-links at her wrists, the specks of brine that glistened on her temples under the wind-woven strands of her black hair; it recorded these things and remembered them afterward. And all the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... only for a moment; then she plunged resolutely forward into the gloom. Slipping, stumbling, falling, rising again, the wind beating in her face, the branches catching like angry hands at her garments—still she hurried on. It was a long, long, tortuous path, but it came to an end. The roar of the sea sounded awfully loud as it rose in sullen majesty, the flags of the stone terrace rang under her feet. Panting, breathless, cold as death, she leaned against the iron railing, her hands pressed hard ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... the river, I found that its channel was at first extremely tortuous and irregular, but that it held a general N.W. course, and bore much the same appearance as it had done since our descent ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... he, and I knew by the sudden scream and plunge of his horse that spurs were dug into raw sides. We turned down that steep, break-neck, tortuous street leading from Upper Town to the valley of the St. Charles. The wet thaw of mid-day had frozen and the road was slippery as a toboggan slide. We reined our horses in tightly, to prevent a perilous stumbling of ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... small things-small things that were yet large for him—flowered in the air of the 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 gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... by—slow, tortuous hours in which the souls of those who watched and waited for his return were tried to the utmost. A restless, uncanny feeling prevailed: as if they were prisoners waiting in dead silence for the sickening news that the trap on the scaffold had been dropped ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... became 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 ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... afternoon. He asked him to step in and instantly turned round and walked up the dimly lit aisle, and O'Hagan understood that he had to follow. In silence they passed through a small arch in the chancel and mounted a narrow oak staircase with many corners and tortuous turns and arrived at a small landing with a studded door set in it. Quite inexplicably O'Hagan's heart sank at the sight of it. However, the priest unlocked and opened it, and held it open for him to enter, and without coming in himself, ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... to the patriotism of the French people with the following exhortation: "Let us show to Europe that we understand our own resources; let us immediately take the broad road to our liberation instead of dragging ourselves along the tortuous and obscure paths of fragmentary loans." It concluded by recommending an issue of paper money carefully guarded, to the full amount of four hundred million livres, and the argument was pursued until the objection to smaller notes faded from view. Typical in the ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... Cochrane had nominated as the likeliest man to beat down the factions and override the jealousies that had hitherto wrought such grievous mischief to Greece—began by acting up to the anticipations which had induced his selection. Schooled in Italy and Russia, he practised both tortuous diplomacy and straightforward tyranny in attempting to turn divided Greece into a united nation, in which a hundred rival claimants for power should be made humble instruments of the authority of their one master. Thereby the State was enabled ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... from a quarter I did not expect. As I passed along the tortuous way between the ponderous stones of the pyramid, which led to the apartments that had been given me by Phorenice, a woman glided up out of the shadows of one of the side passages, and when I lifted my hand lamp, there ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... long before the boys, who had mounted aloft with their glass to watch the deck of the foe, were able to announce that boats were being manned for lowering, and the tortuous nature of the channel now began to lead the schooner ominously near; but both the skipper and the mate were of opinion that at the rate they were sailing they would be able to evade ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... contracting the passage. He had to stoop to pass under them. No speed was possible in that corridor. Any one trying to escape through it would have been compelled to move slowly. The passage twisted. All entrails are tortuous; those of a prison as well as those of a man. Here and there, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left, spaces in the wall, square and closed by large iron gratings, gave glimpses of flights of stairs, some descending and ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... all over him, as is the way with missteps, and two more sharp 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 Ronald ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... are tortuous, straight or zigzag, dotted, slightly elevated, dark-gray or blackish thread-like linear formations, varying in length from an eighth ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... up the Kongone branch it was found that, by keeping well in the bends, which the current had worn deep, shoals were easily avoided. The first twenty miles are straight and deep; then a small and rather tortuous natural canal leads off to the right, and, after about five miles, during which the paddles almost touch the floating grass of the sides, ends in the broad Zambesi. The rest of the Kongone branch comes out ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... rapidly vanishing. As a rule, the depressions were swampy, and as they sped across them Prescott could see the huge locomotive rocking, while the rails, which were spiked to ties thrown down on brush, sank beneath the weight and sprang up again as the cars jolted by. As they rushed down tortuous declivities, the cars banged and canted round the curves, while Prescott held on tight, his feet braced against a rail. It was better when they joined the graded track, and toward noon he was given a meal with the others at a camp where a bridge was being ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... 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 to them. The laws of nature are of no ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... has this death to do with the Atonement? A great deal; but the best way to answer the question will be to obtain a clear idea as to what the Atonement really means and always has meant to Christian experience, notwithstanding the tortuous ways in which the doctrine has been articulated. I am convinced that underneath every genuine attempt to explain the Atonement which has ever held the field for any length of time in Christian history the same truth is always to be found. It is so even with the statement ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... she was teeming with fishes and sharks. O king! she directing her course towards the sea, separated herself, into three streams; and her water was bestrewn with piles of froth, which looked like so many rows of (white) ganders. And crooked and tortuous in the movement of her body, at places; and at others stumbling at it were; and covered with foam as with a robe: she went forward like a woman drunk. And elsewhere, by virtue of the roar of her waters, she uttered ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... destruction of the Merrimac, and the possession of Norfolk by General Wool's forces, first reached us, and our hearts swelled with joy at our successes. On the 13th we resumed the march; winding along the banks of the tortuous Pamunkey, enchanted by the lovely scenery which constantly met our gaze. The profusion of flowers in the forests, the bright green meadows, and the broad fields of newly springing wheat, offered a perpetual charm; and as we passed along, ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... don't intend to write down here the tortuous financial history of Moggs' Limited, which was our first development of Moggs and Sons; nor will I tell very much of how from that we spread ourselves with a larger and larger conception throughout the chandlery ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... of their ministers, greatly to the displeasure of the Pope and of Philip the Second, as well as of the Cardinal of Tournon and other bigots at the French court who could not follow the tangled thread of his tortuous policy.[1206] It was difficult for him to convince them that he had made this extraordinary concession simply in order to induce Antoine and his more intractable queen in their turn to attend the Roman Catholic services. Navarre was ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... tried to think what she should say when the girl appeared; but she had never been more conscious of her inability to deal with the oblique and the tortuous. She had lacked the hard teachings of experience, and an instinctive disdain for whatever was less clear and open than her own conscience had kept her from learning anything of the intricacies and contradictions of other hearts. She ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... creek they believed to be that of a bow—at least so the Malays had described it; and as the two ends of the bow must rest upon the river, they were sure, unless they struck up some narrow tortuous way, to come out at the other ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... breath again, and what a pleasure to escape from the tortuous streets and the toy houses, from the twisted prettiness of the Tokyo gardens and the tiresome delicacy of the rice-field mosaic, into a wild and rugged nature, a land of forests and mountains reminiscent of Switzerland and Scotland, where the occasional croak of a pheasant fell ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... 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 secret passages ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... boarder invited, was on the ground first. He wore a white favour in his button-hole, and a bran new extra super double-milled blue saxony dress coat (that was its description in the bill), with a variety of tortuous embellishments about the pockets, invented by the artist to do honour to the day. The miserable Augustus no longer felt strongly even on the subject of Jinkins. He hadn't strength of mind enough to do it. 'Let him come!' he had said, in answer to Miss Pecksniff, when she urged ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... up the tortuous, steep stairways of the theatre, while the Germans, all talking at once, burden the air with unintelligible gutturals, you say to me—if you are the intelligent person that you ought to be—"SEEBACH is the greatest actress of this ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... Christ; and about Him they say most of all. He is the supreme Antidote. He, "considered," considered fully, is not so much the clue out of the labyrinth as the great point of view from which the mind and the soul can look down upon it and see how tortuous, and also ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... so long as the pike lasted, and they had a firm, even foundation for their feet to tread upon. But the pike ended at Crab Orchard, and then they plunged into the worst roads that the South at any time offered to resist the progress of the Union armies. Narrow, tortuous, unworked substitutes for highways wound around and over steep, rocky hills, through miry creek bottoms, and over bridgeless streams, now so swollen as to be absolutely unfordable by less determined men, starting on a ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... imagination that he loses the power of clear and logical thought, and never becomes truly creative. Free of this incubus the engineer has succeeded in being straightforward and sensible, to say the least; subject to it the man with a so-called architectural education is too often tortuous and absurd. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... not rest. In and out the tortuous streets of Paris he roamed during the better part of that night. He was now only awaiting the dawn to publicly demand the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to travel again, he took Patsy to help find the place, but the rain had washed away all scent for the dog. After a tortuous climb on the trail, made ten-fold worse by the down timber and wash-outs, Montresor discovered land-marks and knew he was on ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the wrathful force of an invisible cataract, eight, ten, even seventeen thousand feet in height. These floods of cold wind find their appropriate channels in the characteristic canons which everywhere furrow the whole Rocky-Mountain system to its very base. Most of these are exceedingly tortuous, and the descending winds, during their passage through them, acquire a spiral motion as irresistible as the fiercest hurricane of the Antilles, which, moreover, they preserve for miles after they have issued from the mouth of the canon. Every little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... selection of places they were more anxious to escape observation than to obtain a good view of the approaching fight. In the dark patches of shadow thrown by the overhanging balconies, in the recesses of deep and gloomy portals, or peering out from the entrance of some narrow and tortuous alley, these men were grouped, silent, scowling, and alone, and apparently known to none of the surrounding crowd. But suspicious as were the appearance and deportment of the persons in question, Antonio's thoughts were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... and adjacent coves scarcely exists in the length and breadth of the State of Tennessee. The physical possibilities were arrayed against the project, so steep was the comblike summit on either side, so heavy and tortuous the outcropping rock that served as the bony structure of the great mountain mass. True, the river pierced it, the denudation of solid sandstone cliffs, a thousand feet in height, betokening the untiring energy of the eroding currents of centuries agone. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... until their fire burned low and Roy realized, as he had never before realized, what good company Pee-wee was. They slept as only those know how to sleep who go camping, and early in the morning continued their journey along the upper and tortuous reaches ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... all 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 family. Therefore the ablest Malatesta for the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... shut in on either hand by luxuriant evergreen hedges; for here the dark clay soil was all under cultivation, and carefully laid out into garden, orchard, or field. They passed under the arches of the great aqueduct that stretched its tortuous length across the undulating vale; they paused to admire its peculiarity of style and structure, and the greatness of the work; to wonder at the crooked course it ran, and yet more at the little use the people of Elvas made of its waters for cleaning purposes. Then, hastening on, ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... he said to himself, it could not be called a genuine robbery, as everything belonging to his wife was his by right of the marriage service, and he was only going to have his own again. With this comfortable thought he climbed slowly up the broken tortuous path which led to the Black Hill, and every now and then would pause to ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... 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 ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... 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 and vehicles of all sorts find their way along as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... last he rose to his feet and took the Englishman's letter from his breast. The envelope was unclosed, and with smooth, deliberate touch he opened the letter and read it by the light of the candle at the dead man's head, of which the rays were to illuminate the wandering soul upon its tortuous way. The priest read each word slowly and carefully, for his knowledge of English was limited. Then he stood for some seconds motionless, with arms hanging straight, staring at the flame of the candle with weary, ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty, self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... lunatics. It was not for the Bearnese, with all his valour, his wit, and his duplicity, to obtain the prize which Charles IX. and Henry III. had thrown away. Yet to make himself sovereign of the Netherlands was his guiding but most secret thought during all the wearisome and tortuous negotiations which preceded the truce; nor did he abandon the great hope with the signature of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... through an open sink hole, though the descent may at first be somewhat tortuous, the explorer soon finds himself swinging freely in the air, it may be at a point some hundred feet above the base of the bottle-shaped shaft or dome into which he has entered. Commonly the neck of the bottle is formed where the water has ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... blazed up suddenly. A sad-looking group of men trailed in and made for a corner where certain bulky, shapeless bundles were soon revealed as those glittering and tortuous instruments which go to make a ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... hallucination; the promises of unlimited 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" ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... French, and such a spot was Night Hawk Lake, whose shining waters found a tortuous escape four miles away by Night Hawk Creek into the South ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... as he moved round the table ore in curiosity now than in fright. He puzzled her, and she still had a feeling at the back of her mind that there must be something more definite and more evil lurking at the back of that tortuous brain. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... made, that an artist of small ingenuity could easily contrive to get the better of their fastenings upon the same principle. The daylight found its way to the subterranean dungeon only at noon, and through a passage which was purposely made tortuous, so as to exclude the rays of the sun, while it presented no obstacle to wind or rain. The doctrine that a prisoner was to be esteemed innocent until he should be found guilty by his peers, was not understood in those days of brute force, and ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... visible world discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and events. This was the particular shape taken by his inspiration; it came to him directly, honestly in the light of his day, not on the tortuous, dark roads of meditation. His realities came to him from a genuine source, from this universe of vain appearances wherein we men have found everything to make us proud, sorry, exalted, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... weeks we spent manoeuvring to the south through the tortuous mazes of the pack it was necessary often to split floes by driving the ship against them. This form of attack was effective against ice up to three feet in thickness, and the process is interesting enough ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... seen for miles; but others are forests, so far extending that their limits are almost unknown. Gangoil was surrounded by forest, in some places so close as to be impervious to men and almost to animals in which the undergrowth was thick and tortuous and almost platted, through which no path could be made without an axe, but of which the greater portions were open, without any under-wood, between which the sheep could wander at their will, and ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... the robed and wigged wiseacres was, that the case, Napier versus Napier, was a puzzle which no man could read or solve. It seemed fated to be as famous as the old Sphinx, the insoluble Moenander, or the tortuous labyrinth, or the intricate key of Hercules—ne Apollo quidem intelligat; and if it had not happened that Lord Kames suggested the possibility of getting an additional piece of evidence through the examination of the coffin wherein Mrs. Napier was buried, the court might have been ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... fragments; and a great expanse of them, mossy and weed-covered, stretching on his left to the water's edge. He was aware of them, too, ahead of him, extending in the gloom indefinitely. And soon he had to pick out a tortuous way between the mighty heaps on one hand and the far-spread belt ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... most impressive feature of the jungle—that which takes fast hold, clings most tenaciously, and leaves the most irritating remembrances—is what is known as the lawyer cane or vine (CALAMUS). It is a vegetable of tortuous ambitions, that defies you, that embarrasses with attention, arrests your progress, occasionally envelops you in a net work of bewildering, slender, and cruelly-armed tentacles, that everywhere bristles with points, that curves back on itself, and makes loops and wriggles; that springs from ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... runs between two rocky buttes, and strikes the Mormon trail, which leaves Green River at the same place, but is very tortuous. Water not permanent here; good grass three fourths of a ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... admired and even enthusiastically praised by literary judges whose verdict we shall not presume to dispute. To translation, however, the choric odes hardly lend themselves. Their dithyrambic character, their high-flown language, strained metaphors, tortuous constructions, and frequent, perhaps studied, obscurity, render it almost impossible to reproduce them in the forms of our poetry. Nor perhaps when they are strictly analysed will much be found, in many of them at least, of the material whereof modern poetry is made. They are, in fact, the libretto ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... wind was very light and baffling, but the river was not so tortuous in its course, and the progress of the boat was rather more satisfactory than it had been during the afternoon. Ethan was very considerate of his fair companion, and neglected her injunction to call her in a few ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... seaport, and it is one still. More than that, it is the most inland port in Britain, owing to the Berkeley Ship Canal, which enables ships to dispense with the awkwardness of a voyage up and down the tortuous and dangerous Severn. It is to this canal that Gloucester owes much of its present trade, as, by sea-going vessels, corn and timber, its staple commodities, are brought in to the many wharves in ever-increasing quantities. To the railways—the Great Western ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... of hours we followed the tortuous windings of the track, without we white men having the faintest conception where we were going, though the troopers and Lizzie declared that we were pushing straight through. At length a ray of sunlight became visible, and in a few minutes we emerged from ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... talking with her where no one could see or hear. For old Mendoza knew the world and the court, and he foresaw that sooner or later some royal marriage would be made for Don John of Austria, and that even if Dolores were married to him, some tortuous means would be found to annul her marriage, whereby a great shame would darken his house. Moreover, he was the King's man, devoted to Philip body and soul, as his sovereign, ready to give his life ten times for his sovereign's ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... appointment, causing his pachydermatous hide to know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only last Sabbath she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young woman capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might be made useful in a variety of ways—some of them tortuous, all of them secret, as the Slabbertian ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... held him fascinated. Knowing nothing of the city or its environment, he visited the 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 ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... usual, for the best public thoroughfares remained uncleansed in those times of terror—he stopped at a chemist's shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands. A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill thoroughfare, by a ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... 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
... not far apart. What could he do? Escape was utterly impossible. For weeks he and Jeekie had considered it in vain. Even if they could win out of the Gold House fortress, what hope had they of making their way through the crowded, tortuous town where, after the African fashion, peopled walked about all night, every one of whom would recognize the white man, whether he were masked or no? Besides, beyond the town were the river and the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... of state affairs. This man, who covered a temperament of terrific violence with a masque of Venetian dissimulation and the most icy reserve, met with no opposition, unless it were occasionally from Father Anselm, the confessor. He delighted in the refinements of intrigue, and in the most tortuous labyrinths of political manoeuvring, purely for their own sakes; and sometimes defeated his own purposes by mere superfluity of diplomatic subtlety; which hardly, however, won a momentary concern from him, in the pleasure ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... 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
... figures of the Holy Mother decorated the street corners, or were enshrined over the portals of the doors of the merchantmen, the light burning before each serving the double purpose of religion and utility, in a city of dark tortuous lanes. The ingenuity of the mason and sculptor was taxed in varied inventions for the further adornment of the homes of the wealthy; and the numerous specimens of artistic ironwork still remaining attest the taste and opulence of the merchant princes ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... with their streams and hill- sides winding seaward; up the precipitous spurs of the Apennines, with their old baronial castles perched like vultures' nests on inaccessible crags; passing through gloomy, tortuous defiles, guarded by Roman strongholds; and then drawn up by white bullocks over Monte Somma, and to the mountain cities of Assisi and Perugia, older than Rome itself; by Lake Trasimenus, still ominous of the name of Hannibal; over hill- sides silver-gray with olive orchards; ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... it would be an audacious spirit who should say of any particular arm or leg, "It is mine," and all the breath is in common. Nothing, it would seem, could add to our misery; but we discover our error when the conductor squeezes a tortuous path through us, and collects the money for our transportation. I never can tell, during the performance of this feat, whether he or the passengers are ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... still seething in soul, and full of the bitter wrong inflicted upon him by the man he had till lately considered his dearest friend. At each bend of the footpath, as it threaded its way through the tortuous dell, following close the elbows of the bickering little stream, he expected to come full in sight of Nevitt. But, gaze as he would, no Nevitt appeared. He must have gone on, Guy thought, and come out at the other ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... narrow and tortuous, but a rapid survey of it satisfied me that the wind was free enough to allow the ship to traverse it, and I at once determined to make the attempt. There was no time for hesitation; whatever was to be done must be done at once. ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... warning, lifted upon a headland, and suddenly there was disclosed intimately the brilliant, shimmering surf breaking on the tortuous coral reef that banded the island a mile away. It was like a circlet of quicksilver in the sun, a quivering, shining, waving wreath. Soon we heard the eternal diapason of these shores, the constant and immortal music of the breakers on the white ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Not on the same plane with the rest: composition quite futile, but will translate well and appreciate what he reads. Not a quick brain, but possessed by a slowly moving tortuous imagination. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... resolve adopted by the majority. A document at once puerile, jesuitical, and made unintelligible, as I think, from design, to conceal the palpaple contradictions and absurdities of which it is full. I can compare it to nothing better than to a serpent, which hides its ugly head under the tortuous folds of its horrible body. The protest, on the contrary, is the finest document of its kind, that I remember to have seen. As precise as it is luminous, it presents at once, and gathers, so to speak, into a single focus, all the reasons for the opposite sentiment, in a manner to strike ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... and he was tempted to throw himself over. He had regained the friendship of Flamin, but it seemed to him that he had now lost all hope of winning Clotilda. For Lord Horion had explained the whole of the strange, tortuous policy which he had used in regard to Prince January. He informed Victor that he had introduced Flamin to the prince, and had proved to him that the young man was his heir. "They asked me, my dear Victor," Horion went on to say in his letter, "a question which I was surprised at your ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the valley-ward slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts with the long-leafed Pinus jeffreyi, sighing its soul away upon the wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here begins the manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the sharp waste of boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek, ruddy, chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet, burnished laurel, and the million unregarded trumpets of the coral-red pentstemon. Wild life is likely to be busiest about the lower pine borders. ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... tapir path, groping his way in the darkness. But he remembers it well, as well he may; and without going astray arrives at a spot he has still better reason to recall; that where, but a little more than twelve hours before, he supposes himself to have committed murder! Delayed along the narrow tortuous track, some time has elapsed since his entering among the sumacs. Only a short while, but long enough to give him a clearer light, for the day has meanwhile dawned, and the place is less shadowed, for it is an open spot where ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... St. Charles, which flows into the St. Lawrence on the northern side of the promontory, is called in the Indian language (Algonquin?) Kabir or Koubac, significant of its tortuous course, and it is from this, according to La Potherie, that the city ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... whose acquaintance is best 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, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... last. He had seen him go down the road with the vicar till they were both out of sight, and he had seen him come back and enter the cottage. This proceeding, he argued, betrayed that the squire did not wish to be seen going into Mary's house by the vicar. The tortuous intelligences of bad men easily impute to others courses which they themselves would naturally pursue. Three words on the previous evening had sufficed to rouse the convict's jealousy. What he saw to-day confirmed his suspicions. ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... of Longacres stood on the balcony of the hotel, looking down at the cortege which had escorted the wife of the Sheik el-Umbar from the House 'an Mahabbah some way out in the desert and which was making its way as best it could through the tortuous, narrow, unpaved streets ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... will be hereafter to refer to your journal, and see the rapid development, not only of your mind, but of your moral growth; only do not fail to record all your shortcomings; they will not stand as reproaches, but as mere snags in the tortuous river of your life, to be avoided in succeeding trips farther down the stream. They beset us all along the route, from the cradle to the grave, and if we can only see them we ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... wall: green to the summit, if by any chance 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... green tufts with that light on them put Ranny more and more in mind of palm trees. He was more and more in love with the brand-new Paradise. He expressed all the charm of Southfields, of Acacia Avenue, when he said it was "so open, and so up-to-date." It made Wandsworth High Street look old and tortuous ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... tracts; losing the margins, that have been recommended, outside of the dykes, and building the necessary additional length of these, rather than to contend with a large body of water. But, frequently, a very large marsh is traversed by a tortuous stream which occupies a large area, and which, although the tidal water which it contains gives it the appearance of a river, is only the outlet of an insignificant stream, which might be carried along the edge of the upland in an ordinary mill-race. In such case it is better to divert ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... it in summer. The district is pestilential to a degree, and, in no sense of the word, a white man's country. It possesses a feature of considerable importance in the river Jordan itself, almost the only river in Palestine with a perennial flow. The river is tortuous and rapid and not adapted to navigation. These features indicate this area as a difficult one in which to hold a fighting line, and a no less difficult one across which to maintain communications. In the summer of 1918, ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... job'll be easier." With the above figures in mind, Rand and Dick plunged into the shallows of the broad channel. Working from rock to sandbar, and bar to boulder, they followed the deepest pools in a tortuous path that corkscrewed nearly from one shore to another, and in an hour's time were able to report to Swiftwater that they could find passageway sufficiently wide for the boats with a minimum depth ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... the presence of water, either in stream, pond, or lake, far or near, or the absence of water altogether—all these enter immediately into the manner in which the lawn of a house should be laid out, and worked, and planted. But as a rule, all filagree work, such as serpentine paths, and tortuous, unmeaning circles, artificial piles of rock, and a multitude of small ornaments—so esteemed, by some—should never be introduced into the lawn of a farm house. It is unmeaning, in the first place; expensive in its care, in the second place; unsatisfactory ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... buildings, and so catch the breeze which would otherwise be intercepted. The build of the boats also is peculiar; they are very wide and flat bottomed, and the rudders are unusually large, so as to enable them to turn quickly in the narrow channels, which are often tortuous. The bow rises in a splendid curve high out of the water, and throws the spray clear of its low body, for the Egyptian loads his boat very heavily, and I have often seen them so deep in the water that a little wall of mud has been added to the ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... exasperating for the reason that we were in sight of our goal. The ice pack was in the bay, and it was quite impossible to cross it until the wind might shift and blow the pack out. It is true that by a tortuous trail some thirty miles around we could with dogs reach Cape Charles, just below Battle Harbour; but none of the few drivers that knew the trail was anxious to undertake the journey, and as the probabilities were that even if we did succeed in reaching ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... hurried forward to join the others. They had progressed much farther than he imagined they would have, and this was owing to the fact that the floor of the gorge afforded easy travel. It was gravel on rock bottom, tortuous, but open, with infrequent and shallow downward steps. The stream did not now rush and boil along and tumble over rock-encumbered ledges. In corners the water collected in round, green, eddying pools. There were patches of grass and ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... Charta, Frederick had already lived long enough to comprehend, at least in outline, what is meant by the spirit of modern culture.[2] It is true that the so-called Renaissance followed slowly and by tortuous paths upon the death of Frederick. The Church obtained a complete victory over his family, and succeeded in extinguishing the civilisation of Sicily. Yet the fame of the Emperor who transmitted questions of sceptical philosophy to Arab sages, who conversed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... lay behind the visible contours from the experience of years. Deep barrancas might crop up in their path, massed thickets of cactus that had to be ridden around for loss of time. The mesa, looking like a solid block of rock at a distance, was, he knew well, broken into tortuous ravines and canyons, eroded into wild thrusts of the mother rock, its central part eaten away by ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... in "Hamlet," is by no means obsolete. But who can write such a colloquy? It would be easier, we fancy, for a clever man to give a sketch of Lord Bacon, with all his rapid and profound generalization, than to follow the slow and tortuous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... a narrow, tortuous vicoletto, lighted only by a single lamp burning in the niche of a Madonna. The purity and transparency of the air gave a celestial softness and clearness to the very darkness itself; and one could find one's way without difficulty under such a limpid night. But in ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... ultimate evils and sorrows wrought by continued excess in drink are, of course, identical in both cases: moral sensibilities blunted; manhood degraded; mind wrecked; worldly substance dissipated; health shattered; strength sapped; every mendacious and tortuous bent of one's nature ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... consistent and probably sincere display of goodwill towards England, the apparent complacency with which the French nation acquiesced in his rule, and the outward prosperity accompanying it, did their natural work in conciliating approval, and in making men willing to forget the obscure and tortuous steps by which he had climbed to power. One day he and France were to pay for these things; but meanwhile he was a popular ruler, accepted and approved by the nation he governed, anxious for its prosperity, and earnest in keeping it ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... That the tortuous channel of Wimbledon river be made straight, and the tyrant man be compelled to perform the labor with three-inch ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... may be held aloft. At the proper time the rags are lighted, and the flame is fed from time to time by pouring oil into the cup. Each processionist carries such a lamp, and the many separate lights dancing and crossing each other, and changing places as the bearers advance on the undulating and tortuous path, impart great liveliness to ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... mine of the gold of human excellence in these good people," he said; "but the avenues to it are so tortuous and difficult, it seems hardly worth while seeking for. They are capable of the most stupendous sacrifices provided they are out of the common; but it is the regular system and uniformity of the natural and human law that they despise. But have ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... occurred, is to be found by descending the face of the cliff, beyond the Lion's Den, and entering a cavern in the rocks, called "Daw's Hugo" (or Cave). The place is only accessible at low water. Passing from the beach through the opening of the cavern, you find yourself in a lofty, tortuous recess, into the farthest extremity of which, a stream of light pours down from some eighty or a hundred feet above. This light is admitted through the Lion's Den, and thus explains by itself the nature of the accident by which that chasm ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... was immediately rent to pieces. One shrewd critic, in particular, tore the veil aside, and in the pages of the Quarterly Review revealed the truth. He plainly showed the imposture, both by direct and collateral evidence, and traced the sham Stuarts through all the turnings of their tortuous lives. By him Commodore O'Haleran, who is said to have carried off the child, is shown to be Admiral Allen, who died in 1800, and who pretended to have certain claims to the earldom of Errol and the estates of the Hay family. This gentleman, it seems, had two sons, Captain John Allen ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... to examine from the same standpoint, also, what occurred in the southern states of Europe, remote as they were; otherwise the course of affairs at the opposite extremities of Europe seems utterly mysterious. If the path followed at St. Petersburg was tortuous, what shall be said of the policy pursued in the Papal States, in Tuscany, in Portugal and in Spain? During the diplomatic reconnaissance led by Caulaincourt, the statesmen of these countries had been busy at Fontainebleau. What Cardinal Bayanne seemed anxious to obtain for Pius VII—namely, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... The puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame." "Delicious essence," exclaims Sterne, "how refreshing thou art to poor human nature! How sweetly dost thou mix with the blood, and help it through the most difficult and tortuous passages to the heart." "He that slanders me," says Cowper, "paints me blacker than I am, and he that flatters me whiter. They both daub me, and when I look in the glass of conscience, I see myself disguised by both." And ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... it to a projecting stone and he carried the coil in the breast of his coat, paying it out as he advanced. Kennedy saw that it was no unnecessary precaution, for the passages had become more complex and tortuous than ever, with a perfect network of intersecting corridors. But these all ended in one large circular hall with a square pedestal of tufa topped with a slab of marble ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... paragraphs, without breathing places, pages of minute and refined analysis—there is a high intellectual pleasure in reading them, but there is a mental strain as well. It is as though one wandered in tortuous passages, full of beautiful and curious things, without ever reaching the rooms of the house. What I want, in a work of imagination, is to step as simply as possible into the presence of an emotion, the white heat of a situation. ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... beyond himself to the future of his descendants. Measured by our modern standards, his religious professions seem only hypocrisy; but as we analyze his character we find that a faith in Jehovah, narrow and selfish though it be, was ever his guiding star. Out of the tortuous windings of his earlier years it ultimately led him to a calm old age. Imperfect though his character was, like that of the race which he represented, the significant fact is that God ever cared for him and was able to utilize him as ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... in short, no justification in the creation of a process so long as the end at which the process is aiming can be reached by a less tortuous method. As Mr. F. C. S. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... separating from the rest of the Brotherhood. Too good. The spaceline schedules showed only one departure in the next month, a Shortliner for Earth, and from Earth the road to Kardon was long and tortuous, involving a series of short jumps from world to world and a final medium-range hop from Halsey to Kardon. If everything went right and he made every connection he would be in Kardon four months after he left Beta. Kennon sighed as he left Travelers Aid. Morality ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... indeed an awful pass! a road roughly hewn through the bottom of a deep, narrow, tortuous cleft in the mountains where, at some remote period, by some tremendous convulsions of nature, the solid rocks had been rent apart, leaving the ragged edges of the wound hanging at a dizzy height between heaven and earth! The dark ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... her with hot hungry eyes. His brain in its feverish intensity took note of trifles—the tortuous pattern of the braid on her gown, the gold sleeve-links at her wrists, the specks of brine that glistened on her temples under the wind-woven strands of her black hair; it recorded these things and remembered them afterward. And all the time ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... regularise his "uncertificated" relations with the glorious damozel, and resigned, when concession is fruitless, to sink those objections to America which Belle had disavowed, but which he had been proud to share with disbanded soldiers, sextons, and excisemen. To this decision his tortuous conferences with Jasper, and his frank soliloquy in the dingle, had bent him fully forty-eight hours before Belle's ultimate departure, unwilling though he was to incur the yoke ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... 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, sire, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... south-east coast of America with great rapidity. The 3rd of July we were at the opening of the Straits of Magellan, level with Cape Vierges. But Commander Farragut would not take a tortuous passage, but doubled ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... 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; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the long row of the Treasury columns half lost in darkness, and you will remember pictured scenes of bivouacs among the ruins of Baalbec. And if it is in the morning that you arrive, fresh from the turbulence of Broadway, from the quaint and tortuous hillside lanes of Boston, from the elegant monotony of Philadelphia, the impression made upon you is still not very different. Though you are in the heart of the place, it seems to lie before you like a city in the distance. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... and, it may be, to remove the unhealthy granulations lining it, by means of the sharp spoon, or to excise it bodily. To encourage healing from the bottom the cavity should be packed with bismuth or iodoform gauze. The healing of long and tortuous sinuses is often hastened by the injection of Beck's bismuth paste (p. 145). If disfigurement is likely to follow from cicatricial contraction—for example, in a sinus over the lower jaw associated with a carious tooth—the sinus should ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... of the nobility and of the Third Estate—which as may be imagined were all 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... abundant 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 expert ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... by the captain in high finance. He was at pains always in his stupendous robberies to keep within the law. To that end, he employed lawyers of mighty cunning and learning to guide his steps aright in such tortuous paths. ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... a very tortuous political career, he has kept the advancement and civilization of Servia steadily in view, and has always shown himself regardless of sordid gain. He is one of the very few public men in Servia, in whom the Christian and Western love of community has triumphed over the Oriental allegiance ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... store. She found nothing that she cared for after all. The garments that looked chic in the windows or on manikins in the shops, were absurd on her. Her insistent bosom bulged, straight lines became curves or tortuous zigzags, plackets gaped, collars choked her or shocked her by their absence. In the mirror of Marie Jedlicka, clad in familiar garments that had accommodated themselves to the idiosyncrasies of her figure, Mrs. Boyer was a plump, rather comely matron. Here before ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Immediately afterwards Murch went out alone: Tregellan could guess the direction of his visit, but not its object; he wondered if the artist was making his difficult confession. Presently they brought him in a pencilled note; he recognised, with some surprise, his friend's tortuous hand. ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
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