"Brackish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on one side, and Old Harry on the opposite? And was it sawn asunder merely by the age-long gnawing of the waves? You must ask—Where did the great river which ran from the west, where Poole Harbour is now, and probably through what is now the Solent, depositing brackish water- beds right and left—where, I say, did it run into the sea? Where the Straits of Dover are now? Or, if not there, where? What, too, is become of the land to the Westward, composed of ancient metamorphic rocks, out of ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... the dark passage by the fidley he fell to tremorous weeping. But the brackish hydrant water that stopped his nose-bleed saved him from hysterics. He climbed to the top deck, and now he could again see his ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... lay on its bilge, in the middle of the boat, where more or less sea-water always collected. And ever and anon, dipping his finger therein, my Viking was troubled with the thought, that this sea-water tasted less brackish than that alongside. Of course the breaker must be leaking. So, he would turn it over, till its wet side came uppermost; when it would quickly become dry as a bone. But now, with his knife, he would gently probe the joints of the staves; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... same common embouchure. Mitchell's experience too proved that the pastoral country through which the Darling ran was by no means unfit for habitation, nor was the river a salt one; true some of his men had noticed that the water was brackish in places, but this brackishness, it was seen, ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... Singapore jail in Brass Basa Road was originally a piece of low ground saturated with brackish water; and the convicts themselves were, as we have elsewhere stated, employed in conveying red earth from the side of Government Hill to reclaim most of this marsh, in order to erect thereon the necessary buildings for their occupation. The site had to be raised from two to four feet, ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... from the sea," the professor began, "there is a great deal of hesitation among them sometimes before they go up the river to spawn, and we want to find out whether they go back to the sea again, whether they swim directly up the stream, or whether they remain in the brackish water at the mouth ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... that his father had to drag him across the short dividing space. It was a small oasis, and not very fertile; its well was shallow and scanty, but no ice-cooled sherbet ever seemed more delicious than did its brackish waters to the parched tongues of ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... cucumbers and pomegranates, both of which we carried with us on the long desert stretches. Melons, too, the finest we have ever seen in any land, frequently obviated the necessity of drinking the strongly brackish water. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... which is properly the Swan River; the other from the south-east, called Canning's River. Captain Stirling examined them both: the former to its source, the latter beyond the point where the water ceased to be brackish. They are both sufficiently convenient for boat navigation, even at the end of the dry season; and any obstruction might easily be removed to make them more so, by which the productions of an immense extent of country ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... dear maidens, a girl who lived in a mill on the Sidlesham marshes. But in those days the marshlands were meadowlands, with streams running in from the coast, so that their water was brackish and salt. And sometimes the girl dipped her finger in the water and sucked it and tasted the sea. And the taste made storms rise in her heart. Her name ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... her back to him and kissed her salt-sweet mouth. Her kiss was brackish on his lips as life was. She felt a kind of assault in the fervor of his kiss, but she did not resist. He was a stranger who sprang at her from the dark, but he was also very like a poet she had loved poetically ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... strikes upon motives, sympathies, faculties, that run through the common humanity. Surely, you will not calculate any essential difference from mere appearances; for the light laughter that bubbles on the lip often mantles over brackish depths of sadness, and the serious look may be the sober veil that covers a divine peace. You know that the bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches, and how many blithe hearts dance under coarse wool. But I do not allude merely to these accidental contrasts. ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... with waste from the reef and from the land. It is invaded by various grasses and reeds which have learned to grow in salt and brackish water; the marsh, laid bare only at low tide, is built above high tide by wind drift and vegetable deposits, and becomes a meadow, soldering the sand ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... there a few days and then returns. In less than two years he has sailed as far as the entire circumference of the globe, and he has seen land but once. It is true that during a voyage of eight or ten months he has drunk brackish water, and lived upon salt meat; that he has been in a continual contest with the sea, with disease, and with the tedium of monotony; but, upon his return, he can sell a pound of his tea for a halfpenny ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... of a sanjak of the Konia vilayet in Asia Minor. It is called by the Christians Polydorion. Its altitude is 3150 ft. and it is situated in the midst of gardens, about 2 m. from the brackish lake, Buldur Geul (anc. Ascania Limne). Linen-weaving and leather-tanning are the principal industries. There is a good carriage road to Dineir, by which much grain is sent from the Buldur plain, and a railway connects it with Dineir and Egirdir. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... night settled down around them—sounds indicative of a Florida coast camping ground began to make themselves manifest—mullet jumped up out of the brackish water where some stream emptied its tide straight from the Everglades into the gulf, to fall back again with resounding splashes. Now and then there was a rush, and a great deal of agitation of the water close to one of the mangrove islands, showing where some fierce piratical ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... disease. "I," he said, "on my view of Virginia, disliked Virginia, most of it being seated scatteringly ... amongst salt-marshes and creeks, whence thrice worse than Essex, ... and Kent for agues and diseases ... brackish water to drink and use, and a flat country, and standing waters in woods bred a ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... constant toward noon; and she was obliged to surrender her infant wholly to my charge, for the haemorrhage of the day before had returned, and she was fast drifting into unconsciousness. "Water, water!" was the only intelligible cry that left her lips, and that we had to give was warm and brackish, from the occasional lapping of the sea against the barrels, into which it ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... end of the village of Mayinit are a number of brackish hot springs, and from these the people secure the salt which has made the spot famous for miles around. Stones are placed in the shallow streams flowing from these springs, and when they have become encrusted ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... from the storms of the Polar Sea; but of these species, perhaps a couple seldom develop any flowers. The mosses, too, were in great part without fruit, with the exception of those which grew on the margin, formed of hard clay covered with mud, of a pool, filled with brackish water and lying close to the sea-margin. A large number of pieces of driftwood scattered round this pool showed that the place was occasionally overflowed with sea-water, which thus appears to have been ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Philips of Montague has in his pastures of Socke, about three miles off, a large Pool, to which Pigeons resort; but the Cattle will not drink of it, no not in the extream want of water in this drought. To the taste it is not only brackish, but hath other loathsome tasts. In a Venice-glass it looked greenish and clear, just like the most greenish Cider as soon as it is perfectly clarified. I boyl'd a Pint of it in a Posnet of Bell-Mettall (commonly used to preserve Sweatmeats:) suddenly it yeilded a thick froth, whence I scumm'd ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... And philosophize a little." Then the youthful Youkahainen Thus replied to Wainamoinen: "Know I well the titmouse-fountains, Pretty birdling is the titmouse; And the viper, green, a serpent; Whitings live in brackish waters; Perches swim in every river; Iron rusts, and rusting weakens; Bitter is the taste of umber; Boiling water is malicious; Fire is ever full of danger; First physician, the Creator; Remedy the oldest, water; Magic is the child of sea-foam; God the first ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... tertiary limestone; and an early physical connexion of the islands with New Zealand is indicated by their geology and biology. The climate is colder than that of New Zealand. In the centre of Whairikauri is a large brackish lake called Tewanga, which at the southern end is separated from the sea by a sandbank only 150 yds. wide, which it occasionally bursts through. The southern part of the island has an undulating surface, and is covered either with an open forest or with high ferns. In general the soil is extremely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... it from Alexandria. It was filthy water, full of dirt, and very brackish to taste. Also it was warm. During the two months at Suvla Bay I never tasted a drop of cold water—it was ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... of the Sabbatia tribe keep close to the Atlantic Coast in salt meadows and marshes, along the borders of brackish rivers, and very rarely in the sand at the edges of fresh-water ponds a little way inland. From Maine to Florida they range, and less frequently are met along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico so far as Louisiana. How bright and dainty they ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... their pleasure, and even guard passengers through the desert, not willing they should be robbed by any but themselves. The 30th we left Parkar, and after travelling six coss, we lay at a tank or pond of fresh water. The 31st we travelled eight c. and lay in the fields beside a brackish well. The 1st January, 1614, we went ten c. to Burdiano, and though many were sick of this water, we had to provide ourselves with a supply for four days. The 2d we travelled all night eighteen c. The 3d, from afternoon till midnight, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... is a lake of strong, brackish water, where the river empties into the natural basin, formed by the slant of the surrounding district of mountains, plain and desert, and where some of the water sinks into the ground and much of it evaporates, there being no surface ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... is only, as its name indicates, the port of the ancient Tiber. The road which leads from Transtevere runs along the river, which rolls through a plain strewn with ruins and indented with barren hills, its brackish water discolored from the sand ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... body, the brain became inflamed, followed by delirium, coma, death. It was impossible for the white soldiers to perspire unless they were near marshes where they might quench their intolerable thirst in the brackish waters. Owing to the lack of fresh vegetables and improper food, the rations of bully beef and hard-tack, and the assaults of blood-sucking insects, many deaths occurred. Even the Northwest Indian troops, accustomed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... which reaches its maximum thickness (8000 ft.) in Pennsylvania, but thins rapidly towards the west. In the Catskill region the Upper Devonian has an Old Red facies—red shales and sandstones with a freshwater and brackish fauna. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the harbour higher up, and found the ground softer, and the water not so deep; yet the wind continued to blow so hard that we could not venture to change our station. We had found a small spring of water about half a mile inland, upon the north side of the bay, but it had a brackish taste; I had also made another excursion of several miles into the country, which I found barren and desolate, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach. We had seen many guanicoes at a distance, but we could not get near enough to have a shot ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... upon their belly and allowing them to go away. The island being very dry and barren, without either trees or springs, the wretched sick inhabitants have no other sustenance, and are entirely without employment, and they are necessitated to drink of the thick and brackish water of certain wells, there being none else to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... had before passed through the Loudon Branch, we now followed the main stream, and on our way landed on the south bank, upon a piece of open forest land, abundantly clothed with luxuriant grass and moderate-sized timber. The water here began to taste brackish, but it was quite fresh about a quarter of a mile higher up, above a spit of rocks which nearly crosses the channel, leaving a passage of ten feet water, over which there is a trifling fall. About three-quarters of a mile lower ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... large collections of water; the waves danced along above, and the shadows of the trees were vividly reflected beneath the surface in such an admirable manner, that the loose cattle, whose thirst had not been slaked sufficiently by the very brackish water of Nchokotsa, with the horses, dogs, and even the Hottentots ran off toward the deceitful pools. A herd of zebras in the mirage looked so exactly like elephants that Oswell began to saddle a horse in order to hunt ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... were green, nourished by the luminous water of the surface; others had the reddish color of the deep where enters only the deadly chill of the last rays of the sun. Like fruits of the oceanic prairies, there floated past close bunches of dark grapes, leathery capsules filled with brackish water. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... god, Kamapuaa. North from Laie village, in a cane field above the Government road, is still pointed out the water hole called Waiopuka—a long oval hole like a bathtub dropping to the pool below, said by the natives to be brackish in taste and to rise and fall with the tide because of subterranean connection with the sea. On one side an outjutting rock marks the entrance to a cave said to open out beyond the pool and be reached by diving. Daggett furnishes a full description of the place in the introduction ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... generosity is to be found even amidst base motives. Some of his happiest touches are illustrations of this doctrine. His villains (with a significant exception) are never monsters. They have some touch of human emotion. No desert, according to him, is so bare but that some sweet spring blends with its brackish waters. His grasping landladies have genuine movements of sympathy; and even the scoundrelly Black George, the game-keeper, is anxious to do Tom Jones a good turn, without risk, of course, to his own comfort, by way of compensation for previous injuries. It ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... found a valuable cattle-station or sheep-station, by the first squatter coming this way. The runs about it are very extensive; the natives few and inoffensive, and the stock-yard etc., left there, renders it very complete. I must not omit, however, to mention, that the water had become slightly brackish, but not so as to be unpalatable, or even, indeed, perceptible, except to persons unused to it. The large reach had fallen two feet since the party first occupied that station. In other reaches lower down, that we passed during this day's journey, the water was ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... taken place in the ice of the harbour on its upper surface, it being covered with innumerable pools of water, chiefly brackish, except close in-shore, where the tides had lifted the ice considerably above the level of ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... the cliffs in little cascades of foam and vapor, but others spouted from the base of the rock. Dick knelt down to drink from one of the latter, but as his face approached the water he jumped away. He dipped up a little of it in his soft hat and tasted it. It was brackish and almost boiling hot. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... along the top of the limestone range, the estuary still occupying the valley which lay to the west of us." ... "At the end of a mile in a south by east direction, we found ourselves on the banks of a river, the Hutt, from forty to fifty yards wide, which was running strong, and was brackish at its mouth," etc. Such was the appearance of the estuary and of the Hutt River in the eyes of ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... end of such a march to find the enemy at their heels, put them out of heart. Besides, having to fight for every step of the way increased their distress from thirst. Those that were in the van came up to a river, the water of which was extremely cool and clear, but brackish and medicinal, and, on being drunk, produced immediate pains in the bowels and a renewed thirst. Of this the Mardian had forewarned them, but they could not forbear, and, beating back those that opposed them, they drank of it. Antony ran from ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... "It was coming on evening when I met him; and, says he, 'I 'm making for the Old-man Gilgie— haven't you come past it?' So I told him if he wanted to camp on water, he'd have to turn back five mile, and come with me to where I knew of a brackish dam. I'd just been disappointed of water, myself, at the Old-man Gilgie. It had been half-full a few days before, but a dozen of Elder's camels had called there, carrying tucker to Mount Brown; and each of them had scoffed the full of a 400-gallon tank. Talk ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... brackish wells; but especiall that of Rich. Bolwell, two quarts whereof did yield by evaporation two good spoonfulls heapt of a very tart salt. Dr. Meret believes it ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... The fisherman had an opportunity of learning that the tides of the Plym, Fal, and Dart were beyond computation better than those of the Severn; in fact, he was asked to believe that the last-named river was no better than a mud heap that got flooded with brackish water twice a day. The fisherman stoutly combated this slander, and a pretty quarrel seemed imminent, when Dan went off at a tangent, and "wondered" whether any one in Newnham had espied a tall, lean, one-eared man looking at boat or stream at any time. "He's not a native ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... coral being thus prevented growing, the pear-shaped harbours were produced.) Most authors have attributed this fact to the injurious effects of the fresh water, even where it enters the sea only in small quantity, and during a part of the year. No doubt brackish water would prevent or retard the growth of coral; but I believe that the mud and sand which is deposited, even by rivulets when flooded, is a much more efficient check. The reef on each side of the channel leading into ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... One's first impression would be that on this flat tongue of sand covered only with a sparse growth of pines and scrub live-oak, with the ocean on one side and a tidal river on the other, fresh water would be scarce and brackish. But we were agreeably disappointed to find that near us, in the middle of the sands, was a juniper swamp and pond of which the water was sweet and wholesome, though from the juniper roots it had the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... the stream to its source, the Fountain of Elisha, so called as being probably that healed by the Prophet. If so, the healing was scarcely complete. The water, which gushes up strong and free at the foot of a rocky mound, is warm and slightly brackish. It spreads into a shallow pool, shaded by a fine sycamore tree. Just below, there are some remains of old walls on both sides, and the stream goes roaring away through a rank jungle of canes fifteen feet in height. The precise site of Jericho, I believe, has not ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... He had built a house, offices, and farm buildings, laid out a garden, dug a pond, and sunk two wells; but the young trees had not done well, very little water had collected in the pond, and that in the wells tasted brackish. Only one arbour of lilac and acacia had grown fairly well; they sometimes had tea and dinner in it. In a few minutes Bazarov had traversed all the little paths of the garden; he went into the cattle-yard ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... hill country one expects to find springs, but not to depend upon them; for when found they are often brackish and unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you find the hot sink of Death Valley, or high rolling districts where the air has always a tang of frost. Here are the long heavy winds ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... erected their habitations of mud or stone, in a plain about two miles long and one mile broad, at the foot of three barren mountains: the soil is a rock; the water even of the holy well of Zemzem is bitter or brackish; the pastures are remote from the city; and grapes are transported above seventy miles from the gardens of Tayef. The fame and spirit of the Koreishites, who reigned in Mecca, were conspicuous among the Arabian tribes; but their ungrateful ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... hand has come in contact with a mug filled with a liquid that exhales an inviting odor. I raise it to my lips, which, are burning, for I am suffering such an agony of thirst that I would even drink brackish water. ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... swamp—you may go some hundreds of miles before you get there—you can see the rest of the process. The mangroves there have risen up, and dried the mud to an extent that is more than good for themselves, have over civilised that mud in fact, and so the brackish waters of the tide—which, although their enemy when too deep or too strong in salt, is essential to their existence—cannot get to their roots. They have done this gradually, as a mangrove does all things, but they have done it, and down ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... with the hounds or take waters at foreign baths, should protest that no maid was ever in so desolate a case as Mistress Hortense, I answer there are to-day many in the same region keeping themselves pure as pond-lilies in a brackish pool, at the forts of their fathers and husbands in ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... canals, whilst on the rising ground which appears in places the volcanic understructure is laid bare, often in the form of great lava sheets. The group of lakes have been elsewhere described in these pages. Lake Texcoco, whose shores are now distant from the city, is a dreary waste of brackish water with scarcely any fish-life, inhabited by water-fowl at certain seasons. During the period of overflow its rising waters cover many added square miles of ground, but in the dry season the water recedes, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... articulated coasts, showing the interpenetration of sea and land in a broad band of capes and islands separated by tidal channels and inlets, or on shores deeply incised by river estuaries, or on low shelving beaches which screen brackish lagoons and salt marshes behind sand reefs and dune ramparts, and which thus form an indeterminate boundary of alternate land and water, the zone character of the coast in a physical sense becomes conspicuous. In an anthropological sense the zone character ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... may not be a paradise, yet we are too grateful for the water that nourishes the palms and the grass, that refreshes our parched mouths and wearied bodies, to think that in other climes we might call it brackish and unclean. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... an education can have been entirely without drawbacks, it is no part of my purpose to affirm. Tossed, as one may say, to sink or swim amid the waves of life, where those waves ran turbid and brackish, Dickens had emerged strengthened, triumphant. But that some little signs should not remain of the straining and effort with which he had won the land, was scarcely to be expected. He himself, in ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Channel, even in the best of weather, and if he should escape the enemy, while his scanty supplies held out. He had nothing to subsist on but three small loaves, and a little keg of cider, and an old tar tub which he had filled with brackish water, upon which the oily curdle of the tar was floating. But, for all that, he trusted that he might hold out, and retain his wits long enough ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... grass of the varieties known as gramma, buffalo, and mezquite; and sometimes the traveller encounters a region where shallow ponds of different sizes stud the plain—a few being permanent, and surrounded by sedge. Most of these ponds are more or less brackish, some sulphurous, and others perfectly salt. After heavy rains such aqueous deposits are more numerous, and their waters sweeter; but rain seems to fall by accident over this desolate region, and after long spells of drought the greater number of ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... turned out to salute him, his native subordinate had greeted him in excellent English, and he had fairly entered into his own. It was not an exhilarating place for a lengthy residence. There was one large, bowl-shaped, grassy depression sloping down to the three pits of brown and brackish water. There was the grove of palm trees also, beautiful to look upon, but exasperating in view of the fact that Nature has provided her least shady trees on the very spot where shade is needed most. A single wide-spread acacia did something to restore the balance. Here Hilary Joyce slumbered ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hills billowing to a brick red sky, where the sun hung a dull blaze. There were tracks of the fleeing drovers having paused for a rest in the same place. It was a pebble bottom hot and dry. Wayland scooped under with his Service axe and an ooze of clay water seeped slowly up forming a brackish pool. He had to hold the little mule back from fighting the horses for that water. When the animals had drunk, he filled the water bag with the settlings. Towards three in the morning, the soft velvet pansy blue Desert dark broke to a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... arid surface of fifty or sixty leagues square—every where, in short, where the savannah is not traversed by any of the great rivers. On the borders, on the other hand, of the streams, and around the lakes, which in the dry season retain a little brackish water, the traveller meets from time to time, even in the most extreme drought, groves of Mauritia, a species of palm, the leaves of which, spreading out like a fan, preserve amidst the surrounding sterility ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... became of all the fish? In such a deluge the rivers and seas must have mingled their waters, and this, in conjunction with the terrific outpour from the windows of heaven, must have made the water brackish, too salt for fresh-water fish, and too fresh for salt-water fish; and consequently the aquatic animals must all have perished, unless, indeed, they were miraculously preserved—a contingency which anyone ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... feel well enough, But your water is brackish, unwholesome and rough; Bring a flask of your wine, dame, for Eustace and I, Let us gaily give battle and merrily die. [Enter Eric, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... threw itself upwards into broken spray, which flew to leeward at a sharp angle, blown from the summit of the wave like froth from an over-filled tankard. After a night of squally restlessness, accompanied by a driving rain that tasted brackish, things had settled down with the dawn into a steady, roaring gale of wind. In the growing light sea-gulls rose triumphantly with smooth ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... back to the road made by the Jayhawkers and found it quite level, but sandy. Following this I came to a campfire soon after dark at which E. Doty and mess were camped. As I was better acquainted I camped with them. They said the water there was brackish and I soon found out the same thing for myself. It was a poor camp; no grass, poor water and scattering, bitter sage brush for food for the cattle. It would not do to wait long here, ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... is designated as "Jack of all trades and master of none." If instead of being allowed to spread out so much, the educational stream is confined between narrow banks, it will show a deep and full current. If allowed to spread over the marshes and plains, it becomes sluggish and brackish. Our course of study for the common schools in recent years, has been largely added to and has been extended over the whole field of knowledge. History, geography, natural science lessons and drawing have been added to the old ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... we might have succeeded in driving them off, it would have been almost impossible to have carried the wounded with us, and they would have had to be left behind to die of starvation, or to be scalped and killed by the Indians. We passed several ponds, but the water was so brackish that it could not be drunk, and we therefore suffered dreadfully from thirst. Our experience showed us what an army has to endure ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... which was thirty days' voyage; that it springs out of a great rock, and makes a most violent stream; and that this rock stands so near unto the South Sea, that in storms the waves beat into the stream and make it brackish.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Little Missoula, even its brackish muddy water was welcome, and I shut my eyes to the dirt in the uninviting brown fluid, and my mind to the knowledge of the horrid things it would do to me, and drank; Tepid, gritty, foul—was it water I had ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... of the sea, carrying up over grassy flats, met their nostrils, and set Mahony hungrily sniffing. The brief twilight came and went, and it was already night when they urged their weary beasts over the Moonee ponds, a winding chain of brackish waterholes. The horses shambled along the broad, hilly tracks of North Melbourne; warily picked their steps through the city itself. Dingy oil-lamps, set here and there at the corners of roads so broad that you could hardly see across them, shed but a meagre ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... in rock and scrub by the side of the caravan-track, which, as far as Beila, is pretty clearly defined. There had been nothing else to break the dull, dead monotony of sand and swamp, not a sign of human life, and but one well (at Outhal) of rather brackish water. ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... Canoas or Proes they hale up dry, and never suffer them to be long in the Water. It is reported that those Worms which get into a Ships bottom in the salt Water, will die in the fresh Water; and that the fresh Water Worms will die in Salt Water: but in brackish Water both sorts will increase prodigiously. Now this place where we lay was sometimes brackish Water, yet commonly fresh; but what sort of Worm this was I know not. Some Men are of Opinion, that these Worms breed in the Plank; but I am perswaded they breed in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... of aspect to the eye. He found here a spring of fresh, clear, cool water, which was a source of great satisfaction to him, as the water of the lake, being in direct communication with the sea, was somewhat brackish, too much so at all events to render it a desirable liquid for drinking and culinary purposes; and the presence of this spring would avert all necessity for a search on the mainland and a possible difficulty of securing a ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... portion of the community; water is consequently brought in daily from the wells a few miles north of Massowah, and from Arkiko. The first is brought in leather bags by the young girls of the village; the latter conveyed in boats across the bay. The water in both cases is brackish, that from Arkiko highly so. For this reason, and also on account of the greater facility in the transport, it is cheaper, and is purchased only ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... by one of the terrible irruptions of savage war: the bodies of the dead lay piled in heaps among the ruins of their former habitations. For leagues beyond, the channel began to widen, and at length became so vast that one shore was no longer visible from the other. The water was now brackish, and beautiful sea-shells were seen strewn along the shore. They had reached the mouth of the Mississippi, the Father ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... "Say not, This brackish well I will not taste; Ere long thou may'st give thanks that even this Is left for thee in such a ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... tired again before she found it, some distance away, in a gully coming from a fissure in a dislocated piece of outcrop. It was beautifully clear, cold, and sparkling, with a slightly sweetish taste, yet unlike the brackish "alkali" of the plains. It refreshed and soothed her greatly, so much that, reclining against a tree, but where she would be quite visible from the trail, her eyes closed dreamily, and ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was about two miles distant to the eastward, and the crews gave way with good will, for the prospect of having a drink of pure water after the brackish and ill-smelling stuff we had been drinking for a fortnight, was very pleasing. Although but a little past nine o'clock in the morning the day was intensely hot, and windless as well, and the perspiration was streaming down ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... winterlike gloom across the countryside. To the constant sound of birdcalls Ross tramped heavily through small pools, beating a path through tangles of marsh grass. He stole eggs from nests, sucking his nourishment eagerly with no dislike for the fishy flavor, and drinking from stagnant, brackish ponds. ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... owners. None of ours were due, yet we looked over the "arrivals" with interest, and continued on down the trail to Red Fork. The latter was a branch of the Arkansas River, and at low water was inclined to be brackish, and hence was sometimes called the Salt Fork, with nothing to differentiate it from one of the same name sixty miles farther north. There was an old Indian trading post at Red Fork, and I lay over there while Edwards went on south to meet the cows. His work for the summer was ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... business; now, so far from there being a commodious public edifice, there is not a decent house in all Vigo. Bay! yes, they have a bay, but have they water fit to drink? Have they a fountain? Yes, they have, and the water is so brackish that it would burst the stomach of a horse. I hope, my dear sir, that you have not come all this distance to take the part of such a gang of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... to detest us, Herrick!" said Mr Brooke, after we had been waiting patiently for about a quarter of an hour, impatiently another, but not quite in idleness, for, after tasting the river water to find that it was very slightly brackish now, the tub and the jar were both ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... palatable. This was a great temporary inconvenience, though the heavy showers of the past night had done a good deal towards sweetening the face of the rock, and had reduced most of the pools to a liquid that was brackish rather than salt. A great many fish lay scattered about, on the island, and Mark hastened down ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... clear that they were not to starve in idleness. As soon as they had been started to their feet each of them was set to a task; one to collect camels' dung for the cooking fires; another to fetch water from the brackish muddy pool which had caused the oasis to become a place of encampment; while the third was called upon to assist in the loading of the tent equipage, along with the salvage of the wreck,—an operation entered upon as soon as the sangleh ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... back with a large lump. Bits of it were broken off and put in the bumper, and held over the fire. The water thus obtained and cooled with ice was not salt exactly. Still it was not, as has sometimes been affirmed, pure fresh water, by any means: it had a brackish taste. ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... prayer within; shade and damp always clung round the spot; in this funereal Close, where the trees were green only in proportion as they were distant from the church, lay two microscopic ponds like the mouths of two wells; one covered to the brim with yellow-green duck-weed, the other full of brackish water of inky blackness, in which three goldfish lay ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... profitable industry which cannot be carried on without a smart boat. The gondola is a source of continual expense for repairs. Its oars have to be replaced. It has to be washed with sponges, blacked, and varnished. Its bottom needs frequent cleaning. Weeds adhere to it in the warm brackish water, growing rapidly through the summer months, and demanding to be scrubbed off once in every four weeks. The gondolier has no place where he can do this for himself. He therefore takes his boat to a wharf, or squero, as the place is called. At these squeri gondolas are built as ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and fast on the shoal, when we came up. Nothing to nibble on but knobs of anthracite. Nothing to sleep on softer or cleaner than coal-dust. Nothing to drink but the brackish water under their keel. "Rather rough!" as they afterward ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the violent air by stooping ragged pinions, so furious was the rush of wind when any power awoke the clouds; or sometimes, when the air was jaded with continual conflict, a heavy settlement of brackish cloud lay upon a waste of ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... if they were to find sweet water or alkali. Sweet, likely, since it was in the hills; Midnight was sure he hoped so. The best of these wells in the plains were salt and brackish. Privately, Midnight preferred the Forest Reserve. It was a pleasant, soft life in these pinewood pastures. Even if it was pretty dull for a good cow-horse after the Free Range, it was easier on old bones. And though Midnight was not insensible to the compliment ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... strong current. The tide comes up for about thirty miles so full, that there is nothing but salt water in the river, the fresh water being driven back with its force; and above that, for some miles, the water is brackish; but a little higher, as it runs by the town, it is quite fresh; and when the tide ebbs, it continues fresh all along to the sea. There is a bridge cast over the river, not of timber, but of fair stone, consisting of many stately arches; it lies at that part of the ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... in manures—and with the carbonic acid, ammonia, and water from the atmosphere—to supply him with a never-ending succession of harvests. The practical agriculturists of Oude, however, say, that brackish water in irrigation is only useful to tobacco and shama; and where the salts which produce it superabound, rain-water tanks and fresh-water rivers and canals would, no doubt, be much better than wells for irrigation. All these waters contain carbonic acid gas, atmospheric air, and solutions ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... put the large canoe into the water, and placed the firewood in her, with the stock of flour, frozen meat, and the bears' flesh; then with the kettle and frying-pan they baled eight or ten buckets of water into her, for Godfrey did not know how soon the river would become brackish. They spread the bear-skin over all, then having carefully repacked the canoe, they put her also into the water, stepped the mast, took their places in her, hoisted the sail, and with the boat in ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... ludicrously misnamed the Malayan Caviare. It needs all the violence of the fresh, strong, monsoon winds to even partially purge these villages of the rank odours which cling to them at the end of the fishing season; and when all has been done, the saltness of the sea air, the brackish water of the wells, and the faint stale smells emitted by the nets and fishing tackle still tell unmistakable tales of the one trade in which every member of these communities is ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... the dead stock, serving out two ounces to each, and half a pint of beer for the day. Nothing but brackish water could be obtained by digging in the sand. We collected all the provisions together near the tent, and formed a kind of storehouse, setting an officer to guard them from plunder, to which indeed some of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... convey the water out of the Valley of Siloam, and to supply the means of irrigating the little gardens still cultivated in that spot. Notwithstanding the dirty state of the water, and its harsh and brackish taste, it is still used by devout pilgrims for ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... born at Brackish-Pond, in Bermuda, on a farm belonging to Mr. Charles Myners. My mother was a household slave; and my father, whose name was Prince, was a sawyer belonging to Mr. Trimmingham, a ship-builder at Crow-Lane. ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... became less and less, until finally they were living on three dry biscuits a day each. The water, too, was getting lower and lower in the one cask that remained, and it had a warm, brackish taste. Still it was the ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... the natives of the lake. Discovery of the Jerboa in Australia. Different habits of the savage and civilized. A range visible in the south. Peculiarities in the surface of the country near the river. Water of the lakes brackish, or salt. Natives fly at our approach. Arrival in the dark, on the bank of a watercourse. Dead saplings of ten years growth in the ponds. Discovery of Mount Hope. Enter a much better country. Limestone. Curious character ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Suant and Flownder, covet chiefly to be in or near the Salt or Brackish Waters, which ebb and flow: The last, viz. the Flownder, have been taken in fresh Rivers, as coveting Sand and Gravel, deep ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... span of two months, conditions changed drastically. The Indians became cautious and distrustful, and provisions, not sufficiently augmented from the country, began to run low. Spoilage destroyed some food, and, with the coming of the hot, humid weather, the brackish drinking water proved dangerous. In August, death struck often and quickly, taking among others the stabilizing hand of Captain Gosnold. Inexperience, unwillingness, or inability due to insufficient food, to do the hard work that was necessary and the ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch
... there he stands, moping all the day long on that everlasting one leg of his. He turns with disgust from the mouldy corn before him, and the brackish water in his little trough. He mourns no doubt his lost companions, literally snatched from him one by one, and never seen again. But his days of mourning will be few for Mungo, our black cook, told me ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... an animal diet, which, in all probability, would soon prove fatal alone. On the few cocoa-trees upon the island, the number of which did not exceed thirty, very little fruit was found; and, in general, what was found, was either not fully grown, or had the juice salt, or brackish. So that a ship touching here, must expect nothing but fish and turtles, and of these an abundant supply ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... then they give less trouble than anywhere. For though they soon go sick on good corn, which a horse must have, they thrive and grow fat on desert gleanings; and whereas sweet water will make their bellies ache oftener than not, the brackish, dirty stuff from wells by the Dead Sea ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... six hours we reached the Rio Puerco, and forded its roily, brackish current to a camping-place on the other side. Harry, who with daylight and warmth had recovered his good-humor, examined the odometer and reported the distance travelled to be 18.65 miles. He entered in his note-book that the ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... think that oysters are not best when quite fresh from their beds, and that their flavour is too brackish and harsh, and is much ameliorated ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... of the metropolitan complexities, the widening brackish and salt portions of the Potomac estuary form a generally healthy body of water, though changes loom as the metropolis moves inexorably outward from its center and as hitherto remote Tidewater areas are brought more and more ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... we now learnt that over the vast plain before us for seventy miles in that arid region no water could be found but such as was brackish and fetid, and no kind of food but southernwood, wormwood, dracontium, and other bitter herbs, we filled the vessels which we had with sweet water, and having slain the camels and the rest of the beasts ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the army struck the Little Colorado River, the stream was quite wide and of sufficient depth for navigation. The water was brackish and the banks were fringed with timber. Here the whole army concentrated before attempting to cross. The army was not accompanied by a pontoon train, and at that time the troops were not instructed in bridge ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... pulled off my stout gloves with the hope of getting my fingers to tingle by handling the snow; but it was frozen so hard I could not scrape up with my nails as much as a half-dozen of flakes would make. What I got I dissolved in my mouth and found it brackish; however, I suspected it would be sweeter and perhaps not so stonily frozen higher up, where there was less chance of the salt spray mingling with it, and I resolved when the light came to fill my ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... in this place to have but little current, flowing to the south-west. About two miles from the town to the southward, it runs between two high mountains, apparently as high as the mountains which Adams saw in Barbary; here the river is about half a mile wide. The water of La Mar Zarah is rather brackish, but is commonly drunk by the natives, there not being, according to the report of Adams, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... The shallow creek was surrounded by a scrub of various myrtaceous trees, particularly Melaleucas. The creek afterwards divided into water-holes, fringed with Stravadium, which, however, lower down gave way to dense belts of Polygonum. The water was evidently slightly brackish; the first actual sign of the vicinity of the sea. A young emu was killed with the assistance of Spring; and a sheldrake was shot by Brown. Native companions were very numerous, and were heard after ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... I was roused by the beat of rain, and I crawled from hole to hole, lapping up the rain or licking it from the rocks. Brackish it was, but drinkable. It was what saved me, for, toward morning, I awoke to find myself in a profuse perspiration and quite ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Away from the fiendish clamour of Indian gods, One man preaching the truth against the huge Bray of the gongs and horns of the Indian priests! A cup of wine poured in the sea were not More surely lost in the green and brackish depths, Than the fire and fragrance of my doctrine poured Into that multitudinous pond of men, India.—Shipman! Master of the ship!— I have thought better of this journey; now I find I ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various |
