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Mirage   Listen
noun
Mirage  n.  An optical effect, sometimes seen on the ocean, but more frequently in deserts, due to total reflection of light at the surface common to two strata of air differently heated. The reflected image is seen, commonly in an inverted position, while the real object may or may not be in sight. When the surface is horizontal, and below the eye, the appearance is that of a sheet of water in which the object is seen reflected; when the reflecting surface is above the eye, the image is seen projected against the sky. The fata Morgana and looming are species of mirage. "By the mirage uplifted the land floats vague in the ether, Ships and the shadows of ships hang in the motionless air."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mirage" Quotes from Famous Books



... I perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where reality ended and mirage began. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... the next morning, much to our surprise, the tents and yaks had vanished; nor, on marching in the direction where we had seen them the previous night, were we able to find traces of them. It must have been an effect of mirage. Some fourteen miles away, in a grassy plain at the foot of the range extending from north-west to south-east, and with lofty snowy peaks in a direction of 72 deg. (bearings magnetic), we came upon a very large Tibetan ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor

... is a finely conspicuous island, for upon the north end there is a lofty barn-roofed jebel or hill. From the summit of Jebel Royan, at an altitude of 600 feet, can be seen 40 miles away the outlines of Omdurman and Khartoum—that is in the morning or evening, when the distorting freaks of the mirage are not in evidence. The steamboat skippers who had ten-horse power steam sirens, used them, after the manner of their kind, and made night doubly hideous. At 3 a.m. began our orchestra in the 2nd British brigade lines. All ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... moment two or three officers on the cruiser's deck put their heads together, several glasses were directed toward the now dim mirage-like shadow of the island, and the next instant the sharp ring of a boatswain's whistle was heard, followed by a gruff call of, "Away there! ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... that this body is like froth, and has learnt that it is as unsubstantial as a mirage, will break the flower-pointed arrow of Mara, and never ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various

... a mirage occasionally observed in the Strait of Messina, in which, from refraction in the atmosphere, images of objects, such as men, houses, trees, etc., are seen from the coast under or over ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... the object of his appetites, as well as of the reality of the celestial qualities under which this object appears to him, or with which it pleases him to adorn it. Two persons mutually excited by sexual passion are fascinated by the illusions of a mirage, which often vanishes soon afterward, so that it is not rare to see them on the following day hurling the most violent abuse at ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... mean,' said Mrs. Morgan; 'I haven't noticed any, but I happened to look up this morning as I was putting on my stockings, and I saw through my port-hole the most lovely mirage.' ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... brief distance—invisible thread of land, with the dark waters rolling around them far and near, they presented an insubstantial dream-like aspect, seeming rather like castles floating between air and ocean than actual fortifications—a deceptive mirage rather than reality. There was nothing imaginary, however, in the work which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... butter, and other luxuries, of which we have almost forgotten the very taste; and that when things come to the worst we shall turn the corner, and enter into a period of universal abundance. These stores seem to me much like the mirage which lures on the traveller of the desert, and which perpetually recedes as he advances. But the great difficulty of the moment is to procure fuel. I am ready, as some one said, to eat the soles of my boots for the sake of my ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... of the MIRAGE," said the doctor, "and nothing else—a simple optical phenomenon due to the unequal refraction of light by different layers of the atmosphere, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... through the Worst, She feels the sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer through the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wailed "mirage." ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... cannot be decided by examining only your state of mind: it is necessary also to ascertain whether your sensation is having those correlates which past experience causes you to assume, or whether the table happens, in this case, to be a mirage. And, as I explained in my first lecture, I do not believe that there is any "stuff" of consciousness, so that there is no intrinsic character by which a "conscious" experience could be distinguished from ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... exhalations of the speculator's brain, which I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and cities along those lines of railroad, built with Government subsidies, luring the unwary settlers as the mirage of the desert lures the famishing traveler on, and ever on, until it fades away in the darkening horizon,—or whether it is a real bona fide, substantial city, all "staked off," with the lots marked with their owners' ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various

... and passing her hand over her eyes she murmured faintly but audibly, "Cruel, cruel mirage to taunt me thus! Vanish, thou image of a fevered brain, thou absurd memory! Come not to mock me!" The actors in the wings, taking their cue from her speech, found the string to which the sandwich was tied and ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey

... darker markings on the surface of the expanse which the workman at the salines declared to be the ruins of old buildings and quite inaccessible nowadays, but they may well have been small ridges of sand, magnified by mirage: those oasis-Arabs have rather indifferent eyesight. Plainly visible, however, was a line of palms about eight miles distant to the east; it was one of a group of oases of Oudiane. I looked at it, wondering whether I should pass that ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... of being analysed into its elements; but there is no means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a mirage produced by an invisible object according to ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... of objects on the earth, like the images one sees in glass or water, but they were not generally upright, as in the case of this ship, but reversed—turned bottom upwards. This appearance in the air is called a mirage. He told a sailor to go up to the foretop and look beyond the phantom-ship. The man obeyed, and reported that he could see on the water, below the ship in the air, one precisely like it. Just then another ship was seen in the air, only this one was a steamship, ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... beauty on the Sea Islands. We had a world of profuse and tangled vegetation around us, such as would have been a dream of delight to me, but for the constant sense of responsibility and care which came between. Amid this preoccupation, Nature seemed but a mirage, and not the close and intimate associate I had before known. I pressed no flowers, collected no insects or birds' eggs, made no notes on natural objects, reversing in these respects all previous habits. Yet now, in the retrospect, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... to spend our lives in it. Thank goodness we have two nights here, on the golden shore of the blue Birket Karun, all that's left of Lake Moeris of which Strabo and Herodotus raved. From the dune-sheltered plateau where our white tents cluster, the glitter of water in the desert is like a mirage: a mysterious, melancholy sheet of steel and silver turning to ruby in the sunset, with dark birds skimming over the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... that if He alone really exists who is one and eternal and unchangeable, all else is not only inferior to Him, but is only a semblance, and that mankind, earth, sky, plants, and animals are only a vast illusion—phantoms, a mirage, which would disappear, which would no longer exist, and would never have existed if we could ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... route had an air of adventure in better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey which for so many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour and promise, but always retreating, elusive like an enticing mirage. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... thing, and I fancy you will find, when we do know the explanation, that anyone else standing where you were at that time would have seen exactly the same thing. The rock stands out of the water; it is just above a deep pool, and probably it was a sort of mirage effect, and not by any means a figment ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux

... was blooming on the moorlands; the shepherd boys sat on the tumuli and played their flutes, which were manufactured out of the bones of sheep; the FATA MORGANA, the beautiful mirage of the desert, with its hanging seas and undulating woods, showed itself; and that bright, wonderful phenomenon in the air, which is called the "Lokeman ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen

... O Time!" I cried in my heart, "and give me but one hour's youth again—sweet, ecstatic youth with the bounding pulse, led by the purple mirage of Hope, whose sirens whisper that the world's sweets are sweet and its crowns worth winning. Let me for a space be free from this dastard age creeping through the veins, dulling the perspective of life and leadening the brain, whose carping companions draw attention ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... "Oh, Lolita!" she cried; "a tenderfoot is sure funny. The chances are, Mr. Hanson, that if you started to walk around those dunes you'd never get back. Goodness! ain't that mirage pretty?" ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... boy seen a mirage and gone mad? We could see nothing but the broad hollow about us, barren and dry as ever. But still the boy continued to shout, "Water! water!" and presently he appeared round the bend, running ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... was already standing close to him, her eyes shut, waiting, with her heart beating wildly, to know what she would feel when his lips had spoken, perhaps touched her face or hand. And she had a sort of mirage vision of herself, with eyelashes resting on her cheeks, lips a little parted, arms helpless at her sides. Yet, incomprehensibly, his figure was invisible. She discovered then that she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... that vile ennui, the precursor of storms, which she had so much reason to dread? In any event, she suffered herself to be deceived and had been living for several days in a state of delicious unrest, for love is so strong, so beautiful, that its semblance, its mirage, takes us captive and may move us as ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... you will never reach more nearly than the man who watches a change in the skies or a sunset across the ocean! To you, with boundless wealth, there will be depths of happiness which you will never probe, joys which, if you have the wit to see them at all, will be no more than a mirage to you." ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... realized what they had just witnessed. The mirage of the desert! That enticing promise of water that had been the undoing of many a pioneer ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm

... watched him with all her eyes, all her mind; and by giving herself up to hopes that were sometimes flourishing, sometimes blighted, she had brought the matter to such enormous proportions that she saw all things in a mental mirage. To use a common but excellent expression, by dint of looking intently she saw nothing. Alternately she repelled, admitted, and conquered the supposition of this rivalry. She compared herself with Pierrette; she was forty-two ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... had not fuel to burn nor food to eat, and did not know where to get a morsel of food from one day to another, unless it was sent in to them." We can neither justify nor condemn their father. Imagine Columbus within sight of the new world, and his obstinate crew declaring it was only a mirage, and refusing to row him ashore! Never was mortal man surer that he had a fortune in his hand, than Charles Goodyear was when he would take a piece of scorched and dingy India-rubber from his pocket ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... first meeting: the mysterious light of the picture gallery, the stillness of the old house, the presence of their elders, all contributed to trace upon their hearts the delicate lines of this vaporous mirage. The many confused thoughts that surged in Marguerite's mind grew calm and lay like a limpid ocean traversed by a luminous ray when Emmanuel murmured a few farewell words to Madame Claes. That voice, whose fresh and mellow tone sent nameless ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac

... furthered also by the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic symbolism all the details of the Bible narratives. But from whatever cause, the tendency hardened into a ruling convention; thousands upon thousands of medieval manuscripts seem to declare that the world is a mirage of shadowy forms, or that it exists merely to body forth remote and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... people passed in throngs all day, just across the narrow road, stood the loveliest, most perfect little white clapboard cottage that ever was built on this earth, with porches all around and a big tree growing up through the roof of one porch. It stood out against the night like a wonderful mirage, like a heavenly dove descended into the turmoil of the pit, like home and mother in the midst of a rushing pitiless world. He could have cried real tears of wonder and joy as he stood there, gazing. He felt as though he were one of those motion pictures in which ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill

... likely that a picture so precise in its outlines, and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous details, should have had behind it something, probably a great deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though with a grandeur which is homely and simple. ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... at first to do was to trace with slow and unexpecting step the narrow margin of the lake. Sometimes a heavy swell gave it expression; at others, only its varied coloring, which I found more admirable every day, and which gave it an air of mirage instead of the vastness of ocean. Then there was a grandeur in the feeling that I might continue that walk, if I had any seven-leagued mode of conveyance to save fatigue, for hundreds of miles without an obstacle and without ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... he saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations of any orator had ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams

... crossing this sandy waste, thirsty travellers are deceived by the effects of the curious mirage, when lakes glittering in the sun, with towers, domes, and minarets reflected on their surface, appear before their eyes, to vanish suddenly as ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... outgrown the little rural school scraps of poetry returned to her to rewaken the enthusiasm of childhood and to teach her again to "hear the lark within the songless egg and find the fountain where they wailed, 'Mirage!'" ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... was buried near by, it stated by whom &c. I have never learned any more, but I hope the murderer may meet his reward, sooner or later. [May 24—41st day] The day being clear & still, as we passed over the 16 mile desert, to the head waters of the L. Blue[41]; we saw a mirage, at first we thought we were near a pond of water which we saw just over the ridge, & remarked that the guide had said there was no water here; but when we came near, it was gone, and then suspecting what it was, we looked around (for here you can see any distance in all directions) we saw beautiful ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell

... deceived By a tale, hast believed A mirage to be truly a lake, Though I ne'er had expected My fraud undetected, Or doubtful my meaning ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... believe my eyes. Clyde, who was helping to draw water from the eighty-foot well without a pulley, thought I was bereft as I ran from the camp toward the advancing rider. But although I thought what I saw must be a mirage, still I knew Mrs. ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart

... was a question of manhood, of life, and of that which gives the highest value and incentive to life. It was inevitable, therefore, that Marian Vosburgh should become a mirage to more than one man; and when at last the delusion vanished, there was usually a flinty desert to be crossed before the ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... des fins et je remonte aux causes. A mes yeux l'univers n'est qu'un spectacle vain. Duss-je m'abuser, au mirage des choses ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... No beacon, far or near! No chart, no compass, and no anchor stay! Like melting fog the mirage melts away In all-surrounding darkness, void and clear. Drifting, I spread vain hands, and vainly peer And vainly call for pilot, — weep and pray; Beyond these limits not the faintest ray Shows distant coast whereto the ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... saw all his castles in the air destroyed: his beautiful house, his cargo-ships on the Danube, the lighted church with the brilliant company, they were only a fata morgana, blown away with the mirage of the Monostor forts by the first puff of wind—melted into nothing, like the light cloud ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... cynical and bitter he became. Pessimism set a cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart. He became the most miserable of men, and knew no freedom from ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various

... she knew its graven sign, Squando's bird and totem pine; And, a mirage of the brain, Flowed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... Timocles was not devoid of sense. Though blind, he knew he was deprived of light. His reasoning was much better than that of these idolaters, who cry from the depths of their thick darkness, 'I see the day!' Everything in this world is mirage and moving sand. God ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... the lake. As we cleared the margin of the water-plants, we found ourselves on a glassy surface, extending away towards the west as far as the eye could see, and bordered on all sides by gorgeous mountains and ranges of snow. Around the edges of the lake a sunny mirage was playing tricks with the cattle and the objects on the banks, and as we glided lazily on with the stream, and the splashing paddles, and even the foiled mosquitoes, made music about us, we began to enter more into the spirit of our situation, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... Kingswood—and which of the alternatives happened did not appear to him to matter seriously. The whole affair was fantastic; it was unreal, in addition to being silly. But, real or unreal, he would finish it. If he was a phantom and Kingswood a mirage, the phantom would reach the mirage or sink senseless into astral mud. He had Colonel Hullocher in mind, and, quite illogically, he envisaged the Colonel as a reality. Often he had heard of the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... took new force in view of the sudden barriers that rose between him and the tender, graceful, confiding, charming Adele, whose image had so long and (as he now thought) so constantly dwelt in the dreamy mirage of his future. Under the spur of these feelings, he presently gave over his excited walk up and down the study, and, coming close to the Doctor, whispered, with a grave earnestness that made the old gentleman recognize a man in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... not wish you to understand," said Norman; and yet he seemed impelled to go on; for, after a hesitating silence, he added, "When the wanderer in the desert fears that the spring is but a mirage; or when all that is held dear is made hazy or distorted by some enchanter, what do you ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... are standing in, what in the name of sense is it?" I told them that what they saw was nothing more than merely buffalo at a distance on the plain; that what they saw that resembled water was simply an optical illusion, called the "mirage." Webster describes the word as follows: "An optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere and causing remote objects to be seen double, as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as if ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus

... Friday, we joined the rest of the column at Sumaikchah. The Cherub with his scouts went ahead to find a road. All the field was jumping with grasshoppers, on which storks were feeding. Scattered bushes looked in the mirage like enemy patrols. We were escorted by Fritz, whose kindly interest in our movements never flagged. We started late, at 6.50 a.m., and without breakfast, the distance being under-estimated. A zigzagging course made the journey into over ten miles, in dreadful heat; ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... welter of Paris. The Pilgrim's soul hungers and thirsts for her. After the great Sahara of imprisoned loneliness, how near the Oasis of love and rapture! How beautiful the prospect, if not indeed Mirage! ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... thought it was a mirage. They turned away from it by mutual assent. But the horses had scented drink, and they became unmanageable. Five minutes later the animals were up to their knees in the muddy water, and the men were floundering ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand

... that the name of Philosophy now to most suggests is that of a Utopian ideal of knowledge so wide and so high that it must be by sane and sober minds pronounced for ever set beyond the reach of human faculty, an ideal which perhaps we cannot help forming and which constantly tempts us forward like a mirage, but which like a mirage leads us into waste and barren places, so much so that it is no small part of human wisdom to resist its subtle seductions and to confine our efforts to the pursuit of such ends as we may reasonably regard as well within ...
— Progress and History • Various

... discounted; it is far rarer than facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list to which it is akin is Eve ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... inanition," Van replied to Mrs. Grendon, "that—like the traveller in the desert, isn't it?—I only make out, as an oasis or a mirage, a sweet green rustling blur. I ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... who was requested to mentally see the arrow as it was turned round. In these circumstances it was found that when the arrow-head pointed to the right, it was read off as pointing to the left, and so on. This led some to imagine that there was a mirage in the inner as well as on the outer plane of optical sensation. But the real explanation of the phenomenon ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... matter how successful it may prove. If you were selfish and heartless as other women, adulation and celebrity and the praise of the public might satisfy you. But you are not, and I have studied your nature too thoroughly to mistake the result of your ambitious career. My darling, ambition is the mirage of the literary desert you are anxious to traverse; it is the Bahr Sheitan, the Satan's water, which will ever recede and mock your thirsty, toil-spent soul. Dear little pilgrim, do not scorch your feet and wear out your life in the hot, blinding sands, struggling ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... desert of Arizona over again. There were the same high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and mirage; the same occasional strips of green marking the watercourses and oases. As to smaller detail, we saw many interesting divergences. In the foreground constantly recurred the Bedouin brush shelters, each with ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... classes of society,—and the philosophic minority also, by the powerful lights which are shed on the phenomenon. It is true contemporary history, which other books are not, and you have fairly set solid London city aloft, afloat in bright mirage in the air. I quarrel only with the popular assumption, which is perhaps a condition of the Humor itself, that the state of society is a new state, and was not the same thing in the days of Rabelais and of ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... it fall and fade from sight, whence come, where gone no Thought can tell,— Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... columns of white spray against the black face of the cliffs, away to the yellow sand dunes near the Dovey's mouth, and the reaches of wet sands where we noted on summer days "the landscape winking through the heat," almost with the effect of a mirage. These sands, firm and sound under foot, were a famous walking-ground at all times; but they changed their character very much with the seasons; at one time retreating and laying bare a beach of shingle under the pebble ridge; at another, swinging back to cover them up again. In the former ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine

... by wireless. Luck was with him. Half an hour after leaving the harbor he sighted a ship flying a red flag, which showed him at once that she was carrying a cargo of powder. He badly needed the ammunition, and he prepared to capture her. But this operation was interrupted by a mirage, which caused the small French destroyer Mosquet to appear like a huge battleship. When he discovered the truth, Von Mueller closed with the Frenchman, who came to the rescue of the Glenturret, the powder ship. Destroyer ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... of sombre dusk,—and so on for more than a page, until finally, step by step, through laboriously elegant sentences, I worked my way up to the top of a lofty hill, the view from which to be graphically described as a picture and a poem dissolved together into mingled glory and mirage, and inundating with a billowy sea of beauty the landscape below;—and then further depicting to the delighted fancy of the reader, how on one side was a most remarkable river,—such as was never heard of before, probably,—in fact, a web ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... seemed to float behind a veil of sparkling gauze, unreal as a mirage; but toward noon it brightened and sharpened in outline, until at last the tall trees took individual form, bunches of unripe dates beneath their spread fan of plumes hanging down like immense yellow fists at the end of limp, thin arms cased ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... much, if he considers the meats the best part of the dinner. The beauty of the beautiful Aurelia I see and worship as she drives by. The vision of many beautiful Aurelias driving to dinner, is the mirage of that pleasant journey of mine along the avenue. I do not envy the Persian poets, on those afternoons, nor long to be an Arabian traveller. For I can walk that street, finer than any of which the Ispahan architects dreamed; and I can see sultanas as splendid ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... the churches and convents it encloses. On another side, strange as the architecture of dreamland, stands the chimerical and impossible church of Vassili-Blagennoi, which makes your reason doubt the testimony of your eyes. Although it appears real enough, you ask yourself if it is not a fantastic mirage, a building made of clouds curiously coloured by the sunlight, and which the quivering air will change or cause to dissolve. Without any doubt, it is the most original building in the world; it recalls nothing ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... never occurs except in the attempted passage of a ray from a more refracting to a less refracting medium; but in this case, when the obliquity is sufficient, it always occurs. The mirage of the desert, and other phantasmal appearances in the atmosphere, are in part due to it. When, for example, the sun heats an expanse of sand, the layer of air in contact with the sand becomes lighter and less refracting than the air above it: consequently, the rays from ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... teachings of this school is pure nihilism, or the non-existence of both self and of matter. There is an utter absence of substantiality in all things. Life itself is a prolonged dream. The objects about us are mere delusive shadows or mirage, the product of the imagination alone. The past and the future are without reality, but the present state of things only stands as if it were real. That is to say: the true state of things is constantly changing, yet it seems as if the state of things were existing, even as ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... summoning whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that—for deliverance from one impending disaster simply ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... Mustapha! It is no lake,—it is a device of Satan. What you behold is the mirage, spread by devils for ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... heralding the approach of the sun, and daily the twilight lengthens, until early in March, the sun, a flaming disk of fiery crimson, shows his distorted image above the horizon. This distorted shape is due to the mirage caused by the cold, just as heat-waves above the rails on a railroad-track distort the ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson

... dull misery. I can even dream with a light heart, for my fair dreams will not be spoiled by waking, and my bad dreams will be cured the moment I open my eyes. I can look up at that blue sky without seeing trailed across it a mirage of the long horror, a film picture of all the things that have been done by men to men. At last I can gaze up at it, limpid and blue, without a dogging melancholy; and I can gaze down at that far gleam of sea, knowing that there is no murk of murder ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... And then the unlimited freedom of it, its infinite expansion, its air like wine to the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues, of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the accustomed again, to the fields of verdure and ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... at it, I felt sceptical, quite unprepared to believe that what once was a dream could be coming true by any chance of my drift through the years. Yet there it remained, right in our course, on a floor of malachite which had stains of orange drift-weed. It could have been a mirage. It appeared diaphanous, something so frail that a wind could have stirred it. Did it belong to this earth? It grew higher, and the waves could be seen exploding against its lower rocks. It was a ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... victim—was carried by the wind into the unknown. All day long my coat became more and more beautiful. The texture was solid smoke and the stripes were shafts of moonlight. How it shimmered through the mirage of my regrets. ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco

... limitless as its extent. She had supposed that the whole world would be like this oasis, and the only necessity ever imposed on her would be that of choice from its rich profusion. But ere she was aware she had lost herself in a desert; the oasis had vanished like a mirage, and she had no choice at all. That which her heart craved with an intensity which fairly made it ache, seemed as hopeless as a sudden bloom and fruitage from ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... broke up its mass into innumerable lofty white pillars of about one size, and ranged these across the firmament, in receding and fading perspective, in the similitude of a stupendous colonnade—a mirage without a doubt flung from the far Gates ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... change to us—worst of all, change in themselves. This is the inexorable Death in Life, and in this Death we cannot dream of a fair consoling Hereafter. The thing we loved has not only perished—alas! we realise that it has never existed! What we worshipped was the shadow of our own making, a mirage conjured up by our heart's desire. To those who love most, love ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... hard as the stones of the street. Even the pictures on the walls seemed to him but things for sale, representing money values; and money appeared the beginning, middle, and ending of the world's creed. Like the unsubstantial mirage had vanished the beautiful, happy life of the past few weeks. Around him were the rocks and sands of the desert, through which he must toil with weary, bleeding feet till he reached the land watered by the river ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... he could scarcely comprehend that this languid world of sea and palm, of heavy odour and slow breezes, was his own land still. Under the spell the Occident vanished; it was the Orient—all this dreamy mirage, these dim white walls, this spice-haunted dusk, the water inlaid with stars, the fairy foliage, the dew drumming in the stillness like the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... These white specks diminish swiftly,— dwindle to the dimensions of salt-grains,—finally vanish. Then the island grows uniformly bluish; it becomes cloudy, vague as a dream of mountains;—it turns at last gray as smoke, and then melts into the horizon-light like a mirage. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... sparkling eyes, the natural beauty and the beauty of enamel, the vague perfumes, the low murmur of voices, the soft rustle of silks, the music of ringing gold, all combine to produce a picture and ensemble as beautiful as a mirage and as false. Nothing is real in Monte Carlo but the little pieces of gold and the passion to win them. The two renewed their tickets of admission and passed on into the famous atrium, stared a while ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... road skirting the base of a barren range covered with heaps of lava blocks, and its foot marked by piles of stones, the memorials of deeds of blood, the lofty conical peak of Jebel Seearo rose in sight, and not long afterwards the far-famed Lake Assad, surrounded by its dancing mirage, was seen sparkling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... better to announce her engagement to Ted, or still keep it a secret, still drift on indefinitely as they had done for the last four months? If Audrey had formed any idea of the future at all, it was as a confused mirage of possibilities: visions of express trains in which she and Ted were whirled on for ever through strange landscapes; visions of Parisian life as she pictured it—a series of exquisite idyls, the long days of quivering sunlight under blue skies, the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... might have been two or twenty. The deceit of rarefied air was intensified by the dazzle of the merciless sun beating down on powdered alkali, on snaky flows of weathered lava, on mock lakes that sparkled and dissolved in mirage. The broken mesa, across which ran the road to the deserted mining camp, mysteriously changed form before their eyes; unsubstantial masses in pastel lights and shades of saffron, mauve and rose. Over all was the hard vault of the sky-like ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... the minister, was shot by the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great city!—for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural effect I hate ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had reconstructed it; he means Madame Bovary. That perfect book is perfect because Flaubert had, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... they thought it. Again and again it seemed to be in as direct conflict with duty as with inclination; so that they were driven to wonder also whether what they conceived to be duty were not also a mirage—a marsh-light leading them ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... excited by another mirage of riches as these thoughts went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a grip on the coffer—which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes and held together—and managed by a good deal of straining to lift it up through the hatch into the cabin, where I could examine ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier

... desert," she replied, bitterly. "Ambition is its mirage, ever beckoning, ever receding—love its Dead Sea fruit, fair without and dust within. You look surprised. You did not expect such gloomy theories from me—yet I am no cynic. I have lived; I have suffered; I am a woman—voila tout. When you are a few years older, and have trodden some of ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... done, in this world since the Fall! It stands at the end of each sentence we learn; It flits in the vista of all we discern; It leads us, forever and ever, away To find in to-morrow what flies with to-day. 'Twas the same little fatal and mystical word That now, like a mirage, led my lady and lord To the waters of Ems from the waters of Marah; Drooping Pilgrims in Fashion's blank, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith

... Indian knew his loss, he gave a harsh cry and stooped, and, gathering a handful of dust from the ground, sprinkled it on his head. Then with arms outstretched he cursed the thief who had robbed him of what had been to him like a never-fading mirage, an illusion blinding his eyes to the bitter facts of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... this happy anticipation, this belief, an intuition almost, that some delightful surprise awaited him, was the result of many lonely musings under the cold remote stars in virgin forests and wide deserts, a fleeting mirage born ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... he was going to look for would be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records; when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... account of the prevailing west wind, and the pavement of the Jungfernstieg damp and muddy. A thin veil of yellow fog lay over the Binnen Alster, giving the objects far and near the indefinite, wavering appearance of a mirage. Above the dark masses of houses to the right rose four sharp spires, from the points of which, smoke-wreaths seemed to rise and trail away. Far away in front the Lombardsbrucke was just distinguishable, its three arches ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... mass of the Ghost Mountains. Hare had seen them several times, though never so distinctly. The purple tips, the bold rock-ribs, the shadowed canyons, so sharp and clear in the morning light—how impossible to believe that these were only the deceit of the desert mirage! Yet so they were; even for the Navajos ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... world of desperate means it is. What a mirage of towering ambition is the whole of life! I have so often wondered why men, great men of heart and brain, should ever die out, though they pass on to live forever ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... whole fortune of Tomlinson vanish in a night, even as the golden palace seen in the mirage of a desert sunset may fade before the eyes of the beholder, and leave no ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... fill his soul's dark place, Not the fair child, the waters clear, the flowers Golden with sunset—not the birds, the bowers— No; 'neath that eye, those fatal brows that keep The fathomless brain, like ocean, dark and deep, There, as in moving mirage, should one find A fleet of ships that go before the wind: On the foamed wave, and 'neath the starlight pale, The strain and rattle of a fleet in sail, And through the fog an isle on her white rock Hearkening from ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... the foremost travellers send word along the file that water is in sight. Though each little party that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of Life, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... you' (John xv. 7). Far be it that we should even seem to disparage the Lord Jesus, but the horizon of His early worshippers is too narrow for us to follow them, and the critical difficulties are insuperable. The mirage of the ideal Christ is all that remains, when these obstacles have been ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... him with an admiration I could not repress. There was, indeed, something of the hero about this simple-minded Saharaman. We were at the edge of the oasis, in a remote place looking towards the quivering mirage which guards dead Okba's tomb. A tiny earthen house, with a flat terrace ending in the jagged bank of the Oued Biskra, was crouched here in the shade. From it emerged a pleasant scent of coffee. Suddenly Safti's bare legs ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... fountain, the flower, Toward which thou'rt pressing with wearying haste. Are but the mirage that floats for an hour, Glowing and green o'er the desolate waste; Yet from the distance come tender home-melodies Borne from the Summer-land over the flood, Lovingly wooing thee homeward and Heavenward To the sweet rest of thy Saviour ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)

... by now nearly noon. The sun shone clear and hot; the heat shimmer rose in clouds from the brown surface of the hills. In all directions we could make out small gameherds resting motionless in the heat of the day, the mirage throwing them into fantastic shapes. While the final disposition was being made of the defunct rhinoceros I wandered over the edge of the hill to see what I could see, and fairly blundered on a herd of oryx at ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... by a wondrous mirage an effect very common in high latitudes, the American Coast, though separated from Siberia by a broad arm of the sea, loomed so close that a bridge might seemingly be thrown ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... of the Limfjord, which connects the North Sea and the Cattegat. Pop. (1901) 31,457. The situation is typical of the north of Jutland. To the west the Linifjord broadens into an irregular lake, with low, marshy shores and many islands. North-west is the Store Vildmose, a swamp where the mirage is seen in summer. South-east lies the similar Lille Vildmose. A railway connects Aalborg with Hjorring, Frederikshavn and Skagen to the north, and with Aarhus and the lines from Germany to the south. The harbour is good and safe, though ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... is a work—any or every work—but a desert with fountains, and, perhaps, a grove or two every day's journey? To be sure, in mademoiselle, what we often mistake and 'pant for' as the 'cooling stream,' turns out to be the 'mirage' (critice, verbiage); but we do, at last, get to something like the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and then the waste we have passed is only remembered to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... That's not quite civil, Porphyrius Petrovitch; I won't quite allow that yet! I'll make a stand and tell you some plain truths to your faces, and then you shall find out my real opinion about you!" He had some difficulty in breathing. "But supposing that all this is pure fancy?—a kind of mirage? Suppose I had misunderstood? Let me try and keep up my nasty part, and not commit myself, like the fool, by blind anger! Ought I to give them credit for intentions they have not? Their words are, in themselves, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... the Cathedral is present to us from the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to that central building by character after character. It is purely an effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit of the Scott-tourist to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost offended at finding nothing more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... seemed to be a smudge there at the left, a black, lumping shadow, shapeless against the background of sea; yet he could not be sure. Even as he gazed at it doubtfully, the dim object disappeared, fading away like a mirage. No sound reached him to cause the vision to seem real—no voice, no creak of oars, no flap of a sail; yet something told him that mysterious shadow was a boat, a boat filled with men, creeping away silently into the night, fleeing from ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish

... the multitude to do all the evil which he saw being done around him; it looked a joyous and delightful prospect. He gazed on the bright vision of sin, on the iridescent waters of pleasure; and did not know that the brightness was a mirage of the burning desert, the iridescence a film of corruption over ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... see it; but I had never read of another person seeing a double at the same time with the person doubled. During the next few days I sought hard for some possible explanation of what had occurred, but could find nothing parallel to it within the scope of my knowledge. I tried fata morgana, mirage, parhelion, and whatever I had learned of recognized illusion, but in vain sought satisfaction, or anything pointing in the direction of satisfaction. I was compelled to leave the thing alone. My uncle kept silence about it, but seemed to brood ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald

... Slowly, deliberately, without excitement or more than the most casual interest, he followed the course of the strange stream toward the sky-line and saw it emptying into a bright and shining sea. He was still unexcited. Most unusual, he thought, a vision or a mirage—more likely a vision, a trick of his disordered mind. He was confirmed in this by sight of a ship lying at anchor in the midst of the shining sea. He closed his eyes for a while, then opened them. Strange how the vision persisted! Yet not strange. He knew there were no seas or ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London

... darkness and not the darkness of life. It is not well for us who in the beginning came forth with the wonder-light about us, that it should have turned in us to darkness, the song of life be dumb. We close our eyes from the many-coloured mirage of day, and are alone soundless and sightless in the unillumined cell of the brain. But there are thoughts that shine, impulses born of fire. Still there are moments when the prison world reels away a distant shadow, and the inner chamber of clay fills full with fiery visions. We choose ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... with his brain in a whirl. Love had come, late, but with tremendous fury. He gained no sleep that night. The star of his desire shone like a mocking mirage before his mind's eye. It was all impossible, hopeless, but to love and lose were better than to live in ignorance of life's strongest passion. To dally with the impossible were sheer madness, he knew that. But what was to be done but obey the yearnings of his ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... with some apprehension; not knowing how far it carries into the hearts of others its affecting power; how vividly it calls up before them that mood of desolate loneliness when the whole vision of human love and joy hangs like a mirage in the air, and only when it seems irrecoverably distant seems also intolerably dear. But, however this particular passage may impress the reader, it is not hard to illustrate by abundant references the potent originality of Wordsworth's ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... and looked away from him. His tone stirred what little blood there was still left in me to rebellion; but when I saw the shore with its swamps and ragged palms, I felt how perilously near it was, and Panama became suddenly a distant mirage. I was as helpless as a sailor clinging to a plank. I felt I was in no position to take offence, so I bit my lips and ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... this: that the romantic genius of Britain is beginning to see the contour of Gallipoli invested with a mist of sadness, and presenting an appearance like a mirage of ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... discharged. The river 'came down' from the heads and filled the gully with a roaring flood. The lagoon was again almost level with its banks. The dry water-course on the plain sparkled in the distance, like a mirage—only that it was no mirage. No one who has not seen the extraordinary rapidity with which a dry river out West can be changed into a flooded one, could credit the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... fortune in giving pleasure to his friends. From this lack of self-poise, too, comes the tremendous reaction later, {194} when he learns that his imagined world of love and friendship and popular applause was a mirage of the desert, and finds himself poverty-stricken and alone, the dupe of sharpers, the ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... life. As we advanced mile upon mile the mysterious tower seemed to get further away, an illusion possible in flat countries. I have often observed a similar phenomenon in Holland. Perhaps in this case mirage had something to do ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell

... that some strange thing had happened. It seemed to him during those next few minutes that everything which had passed that night was a dream, that this vivid picture of a life more intense, making larger demands upon the senses than anything he had yet experienced, was a mirage, a thing which would live only in his memory, a life in which he could never take any part. He had blundered; he had come into a new world and he had blundered. A sense of guilt was upon him. He had a sudden wild desire to cry out that ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... is called Vendsyssel. Curious effects of mirage may be seen in summer-time in the extensive "Vildmose"[7] ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson

... the silt and weeds Lifting thy golden filaments and seeds, Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest! White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting In air their ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... Oriental tales, appear the imitation, and not a very good imitation. The true genius of the East breathes in Meredith's pages, and the Arabian Nights, at all events in the crude literality of Sir Richard Burton, pale before them like a mirage. The variety of scenes and images, the untiring evolution of plot, the kaleidoscopic shifting of harmonious colours, all these seem of the very essence of Arabia, and to coil directly from some bottle of a genie. Ah! what a bottle! As we whirl along in the vast and glowing ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... else in Nature, an end object. Shall the soul be immortal, and its best essence but a thing of air? Shall the one thought by day and the one dream by night, the ethereal star which guides us across life's mirage, and which will still shine serene at the moment of our fall from the precipice of Time: shall this alone, amidst all that makes us what we are, be chosen out to see corruption, to be cast off and forgotten in the grave? Never! There, by the workings ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... no longer any hope; his plans were wrecked past mending. Persuading Miss Carstairs to keep her engagement to-morrow, his one great problem this morning, had become an unimportant detail now. Charlie Hammerton, with his merciless knowledge, filled the whole horizon like a menacing mirage. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... dread spot save the lizard. A desert forty miles wide is not a particularly large one; but when one is in the middle of it, it might as well be as extensive as Sahara itself, for anything he can see to the contrary, and away off to the right I behold as perfect a mirage as one could wish to see. A person can scarce help believing his own eyes, and did one not have some knowledge of these strange and wondrous phenomena, one's orbs of vision would indeed open with ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... Africa, shrouded in gloom, so long robbed of her children, but now at last finding that, like Joseph, they were taken from her that they might come back to save life. So our Nation shall be not a mirage awakening the hopes and aspirations of mankind but to mock them, and leaving the sands of human experience still more arid and barren; but it shall be a mountain of God, its base resting on the eternal foundations of law and liberty; its summit drawing down from the willing ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 1, January, 1890 • Various

... I didn't know whom I had there, opposite me, busy now devouring a slice of pate de foie gras. Not in the least. It never entered my head. How could it? The Rita that haunted me had no history; she was but the principle of life charged with fatality. Her form was only a mirage of desire decoying one ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... there; so we marched and marched, but no lake appeared; the men, worn and fatigued, lagged behind, some straggling back for five miles, and curses, loud and deep, were heard on every hand,—the lake turned out to be a mirage, a sight not uncommon in this region. Failing to arrive at the lake, we finally camped in the prairie grass, without wood or water; and, the rations being short, we went to sleep, supperless, after marching until 10 ...
— History of Company E of the Sixth Minnesota Regiment of Volunteer Infantry • Alfred J. Hill

... little;" and he went to the northern extremity of the island, where there was a little, narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland; and the devil, who is always playing pranks with us, got up a mirage, and when he looked over to the mainland, such hills and dells, vales and dales; such mountains, crowned with silver; such cataracts, clad in robes of beauty, did he see there, that he went back and told Heva: ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... Intense clearness, whether, in the north, after or before rain, or in some moments of twilight in the south, is always, as far as I am acquainted with natural phenomena, a notable thing. Mist of some sort, or mirage, or confusion of light or of cloud, are the general facts; the distance may vary in different climates at which the effects of mist begin, but they are always present; and therefore, in all probability, it is meant that we should ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... see a girl, to have mamma plant herself in the room and mount guard. Keith knew now that Mrs. Yorke had mounted guard, and that no power but Providence would dislodge her. The thought of the cool woods of the Ridge came to him like a mirage, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page

... vicinity of Paris, and for a time the prospect of reconciliation was bright and encouraging. The king's envoys consented to the re-establishment of the Edict of Amboise, without any past or future restrictions, until the decision of the religious question by that mythical assembly which, like a mirage of the desert, ever and anon arose to entrance and disappoint the longing eyes of thoughtful men in this century—a free, universal, and legitimate council of the Church. But the hopes founded on these promises were as illusory as any previously ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... was attended with dangers. Winds, drouth, sand storms beset the way; and there were beasts always hungry, and robbers always watchful. The sun beat upon the hills, curtained the levels with mirage, and in the fiumuras kindled invisible fires; so in what the unacclimated breathed and in what they drank of the waters of the land there were diseases ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... probably in a temper of fretfulness and exasperation. A sudden knock at the door may drive an artist into hysterics. He is always working at the end of his tether. There is nothing more tantalising than an eternal quest after the ideal; like the horizon, it recedes from the traveller; like the mirage, it vanishes before the claims of hunger and thirst. On the other hand, it has enjoyments all its own. The idealist is always face to face with a great expectation. Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it will be much nearer; and as for the third day, it will be realised ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... notwithstanding the cold January weather, and a comfortable, middle-aged, plump woman, evidently a superior type of caretaker, was sitting on the sill, polishing an inner pane. The scene was as vivid as a mirage, and it was like the mirage in that it was projected from some point which ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan

... steadily fiercer; all distant objects were visibly shimmering and palpitating under it. At noon a mirage appeared on the hills to the northwest. McTeague halted the mule, and drank from the tepid water in the canteen, dampening the sack around the canary's cage. As soon as he ceased his tramp and the noise of his crunching, grinding footsteps died away, the silence, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... fantastic creation of his disordered mind would be gone. Again he glanced up in the direction of the kopjie. The apparition was still there, a horrible, monstrous, distortion of himself, standing still, speechless, staring at him. That it was only a mirage there could be no doubt. He had heard of such mirages at sea and also in the Sahara where wandering Arabs have beheld long caravans journeying in the skies. But he had never heard of a mirage lasting as long as this one. Would it never disappear? It must be a nightmare which still obsessed ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow

... constantly kept in mind as running parallel to his scientific industry and particularity; for it was these two powers, used systematically for many years before the event, that prepared the ground for the overthrow of that wild papacy and wandering empire which so long hung in the desert, like a mirage to ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton

... Trail lures you on. And somehow you're sick of the highway, with its noise and its easy needs, And you seek the risk of the by-way, and you reck not where it leads. And sometimes it leads to the desert, and the tongue swells out of the mouth, And you stagger blind to the mirage, to die in the mocking drouth. And sometimes it leads to the mountain, to the light of the lone camp-fire, And you gnaw your belt in the anguish of hunger-goaded desire. And sometimes it leads to the Southland, ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service

... were at that time innumerable, and a steady stream of immigration was pouring westward by rail and wagon into the high and dry plains of the country, where at that time farming remained a doubtful experiment. In the course of our travels, we saw one morning, rising before us in the mirage of the plains, what seemed to be a series of crenelated turrets, castles peaked and bastioned. We knew this was but the mirage, and knew that it must have some physical cause. But what was a town doing in that part of the world? ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough

... unfit him for a preacher. Many years afterward he wrote of that disappointment as follows: "For five years I saw myself sitting idly by the wayside, hopeless and discouraged. I felt somewhat like a traveler, parched with thirst, on a wide and weary desert, who sees the mirage of green trees and springs of cool water that has mocked his vision, slowly fade away out of his sight. So seemed to perish my castles in the air. At that time making proclamation of the ancient gospel was too vigorous a work, and too full of hardship and exposure ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... morning that what appears to us impossible is often an impossibility altogether subjective. Our mind, under the action of the passions, produces by a strange mirage gigantic obstacles, mountains or abysses, which stop us short. Breathe upon the passion and the phantasmagoria will vanish. This power of mirage, by which we are able to delude and fascinate ourselves, is a moral phenomenon worthy of attentive study. We make for ourselves, in truth, our own spiritual ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... completed with the names of their original owners and the amounts for which they had been bought. A deep sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment, took the place of his late anxiety. Even the weather changed, became complacent—the valley was filled with the blue mirage of Indian summer, the apparent return of a warm, beneficent season. The decline of the year seemed to halt, relent, in still, sunny hours. It was as though nature, death, decay, had been arrested, set at naught; that man might dwell forever amid peaceful memories, slumberous vistas, lost ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... was a pleasant day in early winter. He could see the curls of smoke rising from the neighbours' houses into the frosty air, and the long gray wreath of it that the morning train had left still lay on the Tiger Hills. A mirage had lifted the old spruce bush on the Assiniboine into vision. Every mark on the landscape stung him with remembrances of happy days when youth and love and hope were weaving for him a ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung

... frosty night, the day came, hot and clear, with the sun beating down from a cloudless sky and the mirage dancing upon the distant horizon. To the men from the north, it was a bit of a shock to exchange Christmas greetings, while the thermometer went sliding up to the mark of one hundred degrees. Nevertheless, they hailed one another lustily, and threw themselves into the spirit of the holiday feast ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... mirage is not common; but on broad expanses, as at many points between Cairo and Suez, and in Wadi el Araba, it mocks you with lakes and land-locked bays, studded with inlands and fringed with trees, all painted with an illusory truth of representation absolutely indistinguishable from the reality. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... then, to become implanted in you; scruple cannot resist being told as soon as it begins. The moment you formulate it before the priest it dissolves; it is a kind of mirage ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... and sand-dry, pouring its wealth of waters far away. The change was right, just, natural; not a word could be said: but I loved my Rhine, my Nile; I had almost worshipped my Ganges, and I grieved that the grand tide should roll estranged, should vanish like a false mirage. Though stoical, I was not quite a stoic; drops streamed fast on my hands, on my desk: I wept one sultry shower, heavy ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... "Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity—vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!" To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... down upon a rustic seat, and gave herself up to one of those delicious day-dreams which lure the spirit as the mirage lures ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous



Words linked to "Mirage" :   optical illusion



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