"Quicksand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Moreover, when the boat returns, you will most certainly be rifled at." He stood over me in the dim light of the dawn, chuckling and laughing to himself. Suppressing my first impulse to catch the man by the neck and throw him on to the quicksand, I rose sullenly and followed him to ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... and muddy, gave Gerome and myself some anxiety. The stream was about fifty yards across and much swollen by the snow. Landing on the other side ahead of my companions, I rode on alone, and presently found myself floundering about girth-deep in a quicksand. It was only with great difficulty that we extricated the pony. These quicksands are common on the shores of the Caspian, and natives, when travelling alone, have perished from ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... arrange my defence without knowing in what way they would try to trip me, and I had to think faster than I ever have thought before. I had no more time to be scared, or to regret my past sins, than has a man in a quicksand. So far as I could make out, they were divided in opinion concerning me. Rupert of Hentzau, who was the adjutant or the chief of staff, had only one simple thought, which was to shoot me. Others considered me a damn ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of the lower oolite, and the works were let accordingly. But they had scarcely been commenced when it was discovered that, at an interval between the two trial-shafts which had been sunk, about 200 yards from the south end of the tunnel, there existed an extensive quicksand under a bed of clay 40 feet thick, which the borings had escaped in the most singular manner. At the bottom of one of these shafts the excavation and building of the tunnel were proceeding, when the roof at one part suddenly gave way, a deluge of water burst in, and the party of ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, something goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... the drawbridge of the ruin. The few other cottages thereabout—all as if carved from the solid rock—were in darkness, but from the upper window of Avice's tiny freehold glimmered a light. Its rays were repeated from the far-distant sea by the lightship lying moored over the mysterious Shambles quicksand, which brought tamelessness and domesticity into due position ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... a river which Burke named the Cloncurry. A few hundred yards below the camp Billy got bogged in a quicksand bank so deeply as to be unable to stir, and they had to undermine him on the creek side and pull him into the water. About five miles farther on he bogged again, and afterwards was so weak that he ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... the course of the day; we struggled for nine miles through a line of country that baffles all description: we were literally up to the middle in water the whole way, and two of the horses were obliged to be unladen to get them over quicksand bogs. Finding a place sufficiently dry to pitch our tent on, though surrounded by water, we halted, both men and horses being too much exhausted to proceed farther. Mr. Evans thinking we could not be very far from the river, went ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... Michael Comnenus, driven from the throne of Constantinople, left their names within the heart and memory of Greece; they had ruled the West with a gentle sceptre, and in a people's grateful remembrance they had their reward. My ancestors, their descendants, held sway in Trebizond, a quicksand which gave way beneath their tread. From adversity to adversity, from country to country, we were finally driven to seclusion in the Isle of Candia, part of the quondam Minos territory. Venice had allowed Candia to fall ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was one of the largest of the rivers emptying into the Cumberland Basin. It was a great undertaking to dam its waters with an aboideau, and to make matters worse, the place chosen proved to have a quicksand bottom, which made it almost impossible to build a firm foundation. For nearly four years they worked at this aboideau, and finally had to abandon it. Dated Dec. 27th, 1808, there is this entry in the journal: "Working ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... sea-shore with his brother and the duke and a train of nobles, when several of the knights became caught in a quicksand and would have been lost had not Harold rushed forward, and with his unaided strength dragged each one of them into safety ...
— Stories from English History • Hilda T. Skae
... sands of sinking presumption. These are in all men's mouths; and no question they are very dangerous, so hazardous, as many fools make shipwreck either of the faith, or a good conscience,—of the faith, by running upon and dashing upon the rock,—of a good conscience, by sitting down upon the quicksand. But I fear that which is commonly confessed by all is cordially believed by few, and so, little regarded in our course and conversation. All Christians pretend to be making a voyage heaven-ward, and that is only home-ward. Now the gospel ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... and the whole of the next day, when the tide suited, we were endeavouring to weigh the ship's anchors; but they were together with the cables so imbedded in the bottom, which must have been a quicksand, that this proved impossible. Had the ship been fitted with Captain Charles Phillips', R.N., capstan, there would have been a better chance of succeeding. As it was, after heaving down the ship nineteen inches by the head, and splitting the hawse pipes, we were ultimately obliged ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... Silas Boyd, his deep bass voice lowered to a whisper. "I be 'feard ter quit the trail furder. 'Pinnock's Mis'ry' be hyar-abouts somewhar, a plumb quicksand, what a man got into an' floundered an' sank, an' floundered agin, an' whenst they fund him his hair war white an' his mind deranged. Or else we-uns mought run off'n a bluff somewhar, an' git our ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... but fifteen 8-hour shifts to reach bedrock in some of these, while it required as many as 21 to 25 shifts to reach rock in the others, rock being at the same elevation. In fact, the digging all the way to rock in some was the best that could be wished for, while in the others boulders and quicksand were encountered, and the progress was slower, ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... checked his impulse. Let Denver go, and the thought of his father with him. For the influence of Black Jack, he felt, was quicksand pulling him down. The very fact that he was his father's son had made him shoot down one man. Again the shadow of Black Jack had fallen across his path today and tempted him to crime. How real the temptation had been, Terry did not know until he was alone. Half of ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... person to talk to!" said Mr. Motley with a glance at the handsome face. "Like a quicksand—closing around one. Mrs. Linden, do you not find it so? Ah George!—talking to Miss Pet as usual. Permit me—Mrs. Linden, Mr. Alcott. George, you cannot have forgotten Mrs. Linden?" That George ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... Knight to the Spear Point Caves by moonlight," she said. "He's doing a moonlight study, and he doesn't know the lie of the quicksand." ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... hair seemed all a-bristle. Her black eyes flamed. Her dark face worked like a quicksand. Her skirts were wet to the waist. Her jacket was open at the top, as though she had wrenched at it in a fit of choking. Her strong bare throat throbbed convulsively. Her hands, half closed at her side, looked as though they wanted something ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... through which the tunnels were to be constructed differed greatly in the two rivers. The bed of the North River, at the level of the tunnels, consists of silt composed principally of clay, sand, and water, while that of the East River is formed of a great variety of materials, such as quicksand, sand, boulders, gravel, clay, and bed-rock. When the method of construction had to be decided there were no thoroughly satisfactory precedents to follow in the case of either river, although the Gas Tunnel under the East River, the partly constructed Hudson Tunnels under the North ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles W. Raymond
... believed in witchcraft as a fact, and when charged with it, they probably became insane. In their insanity they confessed their guilt. They found themselves abhorred and deserted—charged with a crime that they could not disprove. Like a man in quicksand, every effort only sunk them deeper. Caught in this frightful web, at the mercy of the spiders of superstition, hope fled, and nothing remained but the insanity of confession. The whole world ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... cheating Death in quicksand fords, of day-long battles with naked Apaches in the malapi, of fighting off bandits from the stage while the driver kept the horses on a run up Dragoon Pass, of grim old ranchmen stalking cattle-thieves by night, of frontier sheriffs and desperadoes ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... fire gained the rim of the green bottomland. Our oxen were exhausted and in a bad plight, so we fortified and camped here for several days to recuperate before we forded the river. This took up several days, as the water was quite high and the river bottom a dangerous quicksand. To stop the wheels of a wagon for one moment meant the loss of the wagon and the lives of the cattle, perhaps. The treacherous sands would have engulfed them. Forty yoke of oxen were hitched to every vehicle, and we had no losses. On the other side we found the ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... his glass and watched Dalrymple as the latter did likewise, with that deliberate intention which few but Scotchmen can maintain on such occasions. The wine might have been poured into a quicksand, for any effect it had ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... about her from the first; he had always acknowledged that strain of insincerity, but he had fallen into the error of believing that underneath all those shifting sands there was at last bedrock and that it was his hand which was to discover it. He now knew that it was nothing but sands, and a quicksand at that, yet the knowledge made the death of his love no easier. Love cannot be killed—it always dies a natural death; and natural deaths are slow processes. Of all the things Blanche had said to him one at least was very true, and that was on ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... assertion, when he followed it up by assuring me that there were what he called sand-sinks under the mud, and that whatever was placed on the surface would not only sink through the mud, but also into a mysterious quicksand of unknown depth and extent below it. This may be true, but sounds very strange, although I remember that the frequent occurrence of large patches of quicksand was found to be one of the principal impediments in the way of the canal speculators ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... she has not to learn you admire. You admit she has helped to trim and polish, and the rest. She declares you're incorruptible. There's the ground open. I fling no single sovereign more into that quicksand, and I want not one word further on the subject. I follow you to Esslemont. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Molle, the wet grass; the grass was luxuriant, the flora was varied and beautiful; in appearance it was a field, in reality it was a morass; to all people of the Valdedera it was dreaded and avoided, as quicksand are by ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... railroad service upon the foundation of a bridge that was then being erected across the Connecticut river at Springfield, Mass., of 1260 feet in length. It was regarded as a very difficult undertaking, as the bed of the river was composed mostly of quicksand, and a rise of 25-1/2 feet in the river had to be provided for, and floating ice, its full width, fifteen inches in thickness. Maj. George W. Whistler, the first of his profession, was chief engineer of the work, and he had as advisers Maj. McNeal, Capt. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... been fast in quicksand, up to his body, for all the movement he could make. He could move only his head. He held that up, his eyes wild, showing the whites, his foaming mouth wide open, his teeth gleaming. A sound like a scream rent the air. Terrible fear and hate were expressed in ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... now they crushed down through flying gravel and sand. He faced straight in, pawing the yielding bank with his forehoofs and suspended over the roar of the torrent. It was like striving to climb a hill of quicksand. The greater his struggle the more swiftly the treacherous soil ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... more difficult, and sunshine an almost forgotten benediction!—let them go their own foolish way till they learn wisdom of themselves—no one could ever teach them what they refuse to learn, till they tumble into a bog or quicksand of dilemma and have to be ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... half stunned, to earth, where the sands got him in their hold before he could recover himself. With dreadful screeches, he was sucked down, but his fellows paid no attention to his fate. And meanwhile, in a ring about the islet, not daring to come near for terror of the quicksand, crocodiles and alligators and ichthyosaurs, with upturned, gaping snouts, watched ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... harshly. "We got the three piers in—good and solid on dry bottom. Then along comes the rain—and our work melts into the quicksand. Since then we've been trying ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... catastrophe in the Bride of Lammermoor, where [Edgar] Ravenswood is swallowed up by a quicksand, is singularly grand in romance, but would be inadmissible in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... father began to ascend the river. There was so much tangled growth still unburnt wherever there was room for it to grow, and so much swamp, that my father had to keep almost entirely to the river-bed—and here there was a good deal of quicksand. The stones also were often large for some distance together, and he had to cross and recross streams of the river more than once, so that though he travelled all day with the exception of a couple of hours for dinner, he had not made more than some five and twenty miles when he reached a suitable ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... on other gamblers and the public—he did not call it by that homely name, though he knew others would if they found him out—was moving smoothly. Still very, very deep down his self-confidence was underlaid with quicksand. But Herron was adroit and convincing to the degree attainable only by those who deceive themselves before trying to deceive others; and James' cupidity and conceit were enormous. He ended by persuading himself that his house, directed and protected by his invincible self, could carry with ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... sudden cessation of the wind at sunrise, coinciding with a spring tide (it was full moon), would immediately convert the low, flat sand-banks, first into a quicksand, and then into a mass of waters, in a time far less than would suffice for the escape of a single chariot or horseman loaded with ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... and go and make inquiries myself. This house is a place of mysterious disappearances. I wonder if the beach below is of quicksand, and does it ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... from previous rains, and it soon became a vast sea of mud. I have already spoken of Virginia mud. It beggars description. Your feet sink into it frequently ankle deep, and you lift them out with a sough. In some places it seemed as bottomless as a pit of quicksand. The old-established roads were measurably passable, but, as I have heretofore explained, most of the troops had to march directly across the fields, and here it proved absolutely impossible to move the wagon-trains and artillery any distance. This was the main reason why ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... to cover the interest of the war-loans which he was obliged to contract? How far did his cheerful manifestoes deceive himself? What might he not really have accomplished if the royal support had been anything more solid than a shifting quicksand? These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily. Neither Necker, nor anybody else, knew exactly what the government owed, or what it borrowed. The loans contracted by Necker himself are believed to have amounted to five hundred and thirty million livres. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... he had never in his life made a definite assertion of fact to one of the opposite sex. When it became absolutely necessary to change a woman's preconceived notions as to what she should do—as, for instance, discouraging her riding through quicksand—he would persuade somebody else to issue the advice. And he would cower in the background blushing his absurd little blushes at his second-hand temerity. Add to this narrow, sloping shoulders, a soft voice, and a diminutive ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... was in waist deep and then I was scared, you can bet. If there's one thing that gets me scared it's quicksand. As long as I could get my legs out I was all right, but when I began sinking as low as my waist and had to drag myself out by squirming and catching hold of bushes and things, then I lost my nerve—I have to ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... finding the boat too fast aground for him to stir it, hallooed out for the rest, who were straggling about: upon which they all soon came to the boat: but it was past all their strength to launch her, the boat being very heavy, and the shore on that side being a soft oozy sand, almost like a quicksand. In this condition, like true seamen, who are, perhaps, the least of all mankind given to forethought, they gave it over, and away they strolled about the country again; and I heard one of them say aloud to another, calling them off from the boat, "Why, let her alone, ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... in the present case, no. You could tell the age of a trail in that way if the ground around it had not been disturbed. This country about here is all quicksand, and you can take your stand almost anywhere along the banks of this stream, and by jumping up and down shake the ground for ten feet on all sides of you. When our heavy column crossed the ford and climbed this bank, it shook the earth, and that was what set the ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... filled with snare and quicksand, pilgrim? Do pitfalls lie where roses seem to grow? And have you sometimes stumbled in the darkness, And are you bruised and scarred by many a blow? Pilgrim, I know, I know! I, too, ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following EXCEPTIONS." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... such a wide range of soils, that it is really easier to list those on which it should not be set than it is to enumerate those on which it may be planted. Of the soils not adapted to it, deep sandy lands, soils underlaid with quicksand close to the surface, soils with hardpan subsoil, wet, sour, poorly-drained lands, and stiff, pasty clays, ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... a confounded blackguard—a living quicksand, and nothing else. Lanty, my lad, if the Mississippi was brandy grog, she'd dry the river—drinking at this hour!—well, never mind, I was drunk myself last night, and I'm half drunk yet. Here, you devil's tinder box, mix me a glass of brandy ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Californian valley, bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at getting our team off, and our wagon. There was a four or five-foot jump to make, and the horses didn't know how about it, at first. But with one of us pulling, and the other slashing them over the rump, they made it, one at a time. The sand was soft and acted something like quicksand, too, and we hustled them to shore and tied them to some bushes. The bank was steep there, and we didn't know how we were going to make the climb, but we left that to worry over afterward; we still had our rig to get ashore, and it began to ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... limbs of her own body, and so being short lived to boot she remains from century to century to human eyes in statu quo. Her body never becomes machinate, whereas this new phase of organism which has been introduced with man into the mundane economy, has made him a very quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation; certain fundamental principles will always remain, but every century the change in man's physical status, as compared with the elements around him, is greater and greater. He is a shifting basis on which no equilibrium ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... second class, cold water or brine being used for the cooling of candles, the separation of paraffin, the crystallization of salts, and for many other purposes. In the same way cold brine has been used with great success for freezing quicksand in the sinking of shafts, the excavation being carried out and the watertight tubing or lining put in while the material is in a solid state. In a paper such as this it would be quite impracticable to enter into details of construction, and the author has therefore confined himself ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... a whisper of deep flowing waters, and a farther glimmer of more sands beyond them challenged our advance. We had come to a "grapevine ferry." The scow was on the other side, the water too shoal for the horses to swim, and the bottom, most likely, quicksand. Out of the blackness of the opposite shore came a soft, high-pitched, quavering, long-drawn, smothered moan of woe, the call of that snivelling little sinner the screech-owl. Ferry murmured to me to answer it and I sent the same faint horror-stricken ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... "Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither, Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me, Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-poss'd soul, eludes not, One's self must ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... once visited by kings. In 1200 John was there, shaking like a quicksand. He brought a piece of our Lord's sepulchre, which had been wrested from Palestine by Richard the Lion Heart, and laid it with tremulous hands on the altar, hoping that the magnificence of the gift might close Heaven's eyes towards ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Marsh to him; the ominous hints whispered about the mysterious interviews at the Arlington; the hurried exposure; the frantic efforts to avoid it; the malignant gratification shown by the Marshses, "we built the foundation on which they grew; we'll hurl them from it into a quicksand from which they will never emerge;" the admissions of guilt made by the unhappy Secretary at a moment when, as it had been suggested, he was contemplating suicide; the imprisonment in his own house; their style of living; the fact of their appearance ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... under cover of darkness by the old woman from the mansion-house. Northmour and the young lady, sometimes together, but more often singly, would walk for an hour or two at a time on the beach beside the quicksand. I could not but conclude that this promenade was chosen with an eye to secrecy; for the spot was open only to the seaward. But it suited me not less excellently; the highest and most accidented of the sand-hills immediately adjoined; and from these, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... adventure was in a river. The leading mule sank in a quicksand. The carter, shoes and all, jumped into the water; in a few seconds I had stripped all but a cinglet and pants, and was in the river too. We got out ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... from a ditch into a quicksand. It is quite as hard to account for her dissimulation as for her sincerity. Why should she pretend to suspect you of so black a deed, or me of ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... what to say or do. It seems that I but sink myself the deeper in the quicksand of thy disapproval at every struggle to escape. Do thou ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... of me," he wrote, "but greater ruin. I am like a horse in a quicksand: every effort I make ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... sandy soil; quicksand, syrtis; arena (Med.). Associated words: dune, downs, arenicolous, burst, sabulosity (sandiness), psammophilous, ammophilous, medano, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Greek author says: a woman's head is like a quicksand; for pray, mark well this argument, which is most weighty: As the head is the chief of the body, and as the body without a chief is worse than a beast, unless the chief has a good understanding with the body, ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
... my room without reply. I had put my foot on quicksand, and could not now withdraw it. Struggling would only send ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... love to Christ, but Christ's to John that made his safety. He did not say: 'I love Thee so much that I cannot betray Thee.' For all our feelings and emotions are but variable, and to build confidence upon them is to build a heavy building upon quicksand; the very weight of it drives out the foundations. But he thought to himself—or he felt rather than he thought—that all about him lay the sweet, warm, rich atmosphere of his Master's love; and to a man who was encompassed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Durward—utterly the Fair Maid of Perth: and culminating in Bizarro, L. x. 149. It suggested all the deaths by falling, or sinking, as in delirious sleep—Kennedy, Eveline Neville (nearly repeated in Clara Mowbray), Amy Robsart, the Master of Ravenswood in the quicksand, Morris, and Corporal Grace-be-here—compare the dream of Gride, in Nicholas Nickleby, and Dickens's own last words, on the ground, (so also, in my own inflammation of the brain, two years ago, I dreamed that I fell through the earth and came out on the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... for another step came down on a slippery surface, and he fell forward as his legs were engulfed in the trap burrow of a strong-jaws. With a startled cry the man dropped the needler again, clawed at the ground about him. Already he was buried to his knees, then his mid-thighs, in the artificial quicksand. But he had not lost his head and was jerking from side to side in an effort ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... he started. Instead of mud he found dangerous quicksands, into which his army plunged and sank almost out of sight. And there was no better weather on the Peninsula than at Manassas. His cavalrymen, when they had got their sea-legs off, and mounted, cut a sorry figure in the quicksand. And his artillery sunk above its boots. Indeed it was with the greatest difficulty his army could be kept on the surface. There was no getting ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... Indeed, the only difference between it and the surrounding swamp was that on the road the soil was comparatively firm, that is to say, one seldom sank into it above the knee, whereas on either side of it quagmires were often apparently bottomless, and what is more, partook of the nature of quicksand. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the alighting of that bird upon the sinking end of the log. How free and independent that bird! How easy its escape. How impossible the escape of any mortal. To carelessly pause upon a log that was going down in quicksand and then to fly away. There was blitheness in the face ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... river, and observing some islands in it, my plan was instantly formed. If I could only reach the river, I would swim out and get behind one of the islands. And the river being high and turbid, with a quicksand bottom, I did not believe they would venture to come after me. (I had learned to swim when a boy, and that now was my means of salvation.) I started for the river as soon as the last Indian had passed me, "double quick," but as I started, I glanced towards the west, and, to my dismay, ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... plaintive cry, flee from a farmer's barn when summer lightning stabs the roof. There was a twist in Faneuil Hall, and the doors could not open wide enough for Liberty to regain her ancient Cradle; only soldiers, greedy to steal a man, themselves stole out and in. Ecclesiastic quicksand ran down the hole amain. Metropolitan churches toppled, and pitched, and canted, and cracked, their bowing walls all out of plumb. Colleges, broken from the chain which held them in the stream of time, rushed towards the abysmal ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. "keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope" [Macbeth]; fronti nulla fides[Lat]; "ah that deceit should steal such gentle shapes" [Richard III]; "a quicksand of deceit" [Henry VI]; decipimur specie recti [Lat][Horace]; falsi crimen[Lat]; fraus est celare fraudem[Lat]; lupus in fabula[Lat]; "so smooth, he daubed his vice with ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... material was encountered in the deeper excavations, beds of quicksand being passed through, varying in thickness from 1 to 18 ft., the latter, in 31st Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, in the deepest excavation made. After encountering the fine sand in that trench, no headway was made until a tight wooden cylinder was sunk through the sand by excavating ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Site of the Terminal Station. Paper No. 1157 • George C. Clarke
... with the fact that when they raise the level of a railway by heaping stone or gravel on a foundation of marsh, quicksand, or other yielding formation, the new mound often sinks for a time as fast as they attempt to elevate it; when they have persevered so as to overcome this difficulty, they frequently find that some of the adjoining ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... falls, there a luxuriant growth of moss succeeds: a little peat-bed forms itself underneath: generations after generations of mosses and watery plants succeed one another; and in time the prostrate trunk is entirely buried under a bright-green bed, soft as down, but treacherous to the foot as a quicksand. Often may the wanderer amid these wild glades think to throw himself on one of these inviting couches; and, bounding on to it, he sinks five or six feet through moss and weed and dirty peat, till his descent is stopped by the skeleton of the vast tree that lies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... adventures," I said; "hair-breadth adventures—not even as wide as that, some of them. I know a fellow that got buried in a book; it was absorbing just like quicksand, and he got absorbed in it. What were you going to do, Kid? Throw the coffee-pot at him if he didn't join? You didn't intend to hack him to pieces with your scoutknife, did you? Because a scout is ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... large and fair of flesh, and in proper weather they rose pretty freely, and could be taken by an angler wading from the shore. There was no boat. The wading, however, was difficult and dangerous, owing to the boggy nature of the bottom, which quaked like a quicksand in some places. The black water, never stirred by duck or moorhen, the dry rustling reeds, the noisome smell of decaying vegetable-matter when you stirred it up in wading, the occasional presence of a dead sheep by the ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... rapture. The boaster stood speechless, seeing his sledge transformed into reed grass and willows, his beautiful steed changed to a statue, his dog to a block of stone, and he himself fast sinking in a quicksand. Then comprehending his folly, he begged his tormentor to free him. Each precious gift he offered for a ransom was refused, until he named his beautiful sister Aino. Wainamoinen, happy in the promise of Aino for ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... attention, expressed his concern that an honest seaman should be so taken in stays; but he imputed all his calamities to the wife. "For why?" said he; "a seafaring man may have a sweetheart in every port; but he should steer clear of a wife, as he would avoid a quicksand.—You see, brother, how this here Clewline lags astern in the wake of a snivelling b—-h; otherwise he would never make a weft in his ensign for the loss of a child—odds heart! he could have done no more if he had sprung a ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... place, I must explain how I came to be without money in mine, so soon after arriving in Paris, where so much of the article is necessary. My woes all arise from vanity. That is the rock, that is the quicksand, that is the maelstrom. I presume you don't know anybody else who is afflicted with that complaint? If you do, I'll but teach you how to tell my story, and that will cure him; or, at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... we yielded to it, and were driven along. (16)And running under a certain small island called Clauda, we were hardly able to come by the boat; (17)which when they had taken up, they used helps, undergirding the ship; and, fearing lest they should be cast away on the quicksand, they lowered the ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... generally cast away his art with him. If it was first-rate she did not condemn it as bad. She contented herself with saying that she was "sick of it." And very soon a great many of her friends, and their friends, were sick of it, too. She was a quicksand because she was a singularly complete egoist. But very few people who met her failed to come under the spell of her careless charm, and many, because she had much impulse, swore that she had a large heart. Only to her husband, and occasionally, in a fit of passion, to ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... or willing to see that the Church could not accept this deity because the Church required a God who caused the universe. The two deities destroyed each other. One was passive; the other active. Thomas warned Descartes of a logical quicksand which must necessarily swallow up any Church, and which Spinoza explored to the bottom. Thomas said truly that every true cause must be proved as a cause, not merely as a sequence; otherwise they must end in a universal energy or substance without ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Sam?" Nancy asked. "It's easy to say. 'It wasn't me; some space monster made me do it.' But you really know better, don't you, Sam? Don't take the easy way out! You'll only get deeper and deeper into your makebelieve world. It will be like quicksand. Admit your mistakes—face up to ...
— The Last Place on Earth • James Judson Harmon
... Dorrit is merely the sad spectacle of a dotard dragged about Europe in his last childhood. The tragedy of Steerforth is only that of one who dies suddenly; the tragedy of old Dombey only that of one who was dead all the time. But Rick is a real tragedy, for he is still alive when the quicksand ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the contents of the subterranean gallery were to be brought to the surface. This interesting work was in busy progress, when, all of a sudden, it was ascertained, that, at about 200 yards from the south end of the tunnel, there existed, overlaid by a bed of clay, forty feet thick, a hidden quicksand, which extended 400 yards into the proposed tunnel, and which the trial shafts on each side of it had almost miraculously just passed without touching. Overwhelmed at the discovery, the contractor instantly took to his bed; and though he was justly relieved ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... roses, lost now and then in the salter fragrance of the night breeze sweeping over the marshes, the magic of a wonderful, white-clad presence, the low words, the sense of a world apart, a world of speechless beauty.... What empty dreams! A palace built in a poet's fancy upon a quicksand. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there is some process by which matter has been brought from one state to the other. Whether, however, the nebular hypothesis lays down the road travelled to this transfiguration, we are not sure. Some of it seems like solid rock, and some like shifting quicksand. Doubtless there is a road from that chaos to this fair cosmos. The nebular hypothesis has surveyed, worked, and perfected many long reaches of this road, but the rivers are not bridged, the chasms not filled, nor ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... the Wappetoe, or the bulb of the Sagitifolia or common arrow head, which grows in great abundance in the marshey grounds of that beatifull and firtile valley on the Columbia commencing just above the entrance of Quicksand River, and extending downwards for about 70 Miles. this bulb forms a principal article of traffic between the inhabitants of the valley and those of this neighbourhood or sea coast. The instrument used by the natives in diging their ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... subjected to a stress of about 25 tons each, or nearly one-half of their ultimate strength. In only one or two instances, covering stretches of 100 ft. in one case and 200 ft. in another, where there were large areas of quicksand sufficient to cause semi-aqueous pressure, or pockets of the same material causing eccentric loading, did these wall-plates show any signs of heavy pressure, and in many instances they were in such good condition that they could be ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... turns down a gallery, and informs them that they cannot get out unless they cross a pool about five feet wide. When he has his victim upon his back, he seizes the opportunity to levy blackmail, for the pool is a quicksand and he suddenly affects great fear. After he has sunk to the knees in the yielding sand, the tourist is glad enough to give him ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... famous resistance from the King's forces in 1648, large mill-stones having been rolled down upon him from the rising grounds, so that the republican general was in considerable danger, and he only escaped with life by making his horse plunge into a quicksand. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... June 13, I made one of my customary trips to White House, in the company of O'Ganlon. The latter individual, in the course of a "healthy dash" that he made down the railroad ties,—whereby two shoes shied from his mare's hoofs,—reined into a quicksand that threatened to swallow his steed. He afterward left his sword at Summit Station, and I, obligingly, rode back three miles to recover it. We dined at Daker's, where Glumley sat beside the baby-face, pursuant to his art-duties, and the plump, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... said Miriam, with a touch of bitterness. "I have always been a stranger and an alien here. Strangely enough, Celia, I have felt as if I—I have been walking on quicksand that might swallow me up at any moment. Oh, I have been as unhappy as I deserve. All the time, I have felt a sense of—of—oh, I can't explain; but it seemed to me as if my treachery to Derrick would come back on me. And it has! If you knew"—she shuddered—"but ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... soon changed to dismay, when he found that, exert himself as he might, he could not move a limb! He at once perceived the cause, for there was no mystery about that. He perceived that both his legs were fast in a quicksand, into which, while engaged with the meshes of the net, he had been gradually sinking. The surface of the sand was already above his knees, so that he could not even bend the joints, and there he stood as firmly as if ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... be at least five or six people about the cart, some on foot, others on horseback; the former lent assistance whenever it was in danger of upsetting, or sticking fast in the quicksand; the others rode before and acted as guides, often changing the direction of the vehicle as the precarious state of the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... advent of the Messiah. All about them was the prairie, its long grass gently billowed by the spring breeze. On the far right, blue in the haze, was a continuous range of lofty bluffs. On the left the waters of the Platte, muddied by the spring freshets, flowed over beds of quicksand between groves of cottonwood that pleasantly fringed its banks. The hard labour and the constant care demanded by the dangers that surrounded them prevented any from feeling the ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... quickly as I could, but it did not quench my thirst. I was feverish and would have given anything in the world for something to interest me suddenly and have absorbed me and lifted me out of that slough in which my heart and my brain were being engulfed, as if in a quicksand. I did not venture to avow to myself what was making me so dejected, what was torturing me and driving me mad with grief, or to scrutinize the muddy bottom of my present thoughts sincerely and courageously, to question myself ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Dis; Mad Murder raves and Horror holds her hell. Hades up-heaves her whelps. In human forms Up-flare the Furies, serpent-haired and grin Horrid with bloody jaws. Scaled reptiles crawl From slum and sewer, slimy, coil on coil— Danton, dark beast, that builded for himself A monument of quicksand limed with blood; Horse-leech Marat, blear-eyed, vile vulture born; Fair Charlotte's dagger robbed the guillotine! Black-biled, green-visaged, traitorous Robespierre, That buzzard-beaked, hawk-taloned octopus ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... Frenchman, "Stick-in-the-Mud" arrived alone, drenched and miserable. His load was again "stuck in the muskeg, a matter of two mile off, he guessed." If left there all night, it would sink so deep in that quicksand-like marsh that there would be little hope of ever extracting it. The poor lad said his team was too done up to be of any use, and he was so "dead tired, he hadn't a leg to stand on." Still, he didn't object to go back if men and teams were sent ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... opinion. Very carefully has he gone over the whole of the line surveyed. He is sorry to say that the gradients are utterly impossible, and the curves approaching to a circle. Tunnelling is out of the question. How are two miles of quicksand and two of basaltic rock to be gone through? The first is deeper than the Serbonian bog, and would swallow up the whole British army. The second could not be pierced in a shorter time than Pharaoh took to construct the pyramids of Egypt. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... be hoped," he said, drearily; "it is so to be believed. Woman's love-memory is a kind of quicksand that can swallow a score or so of gallant gentlemen and show ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... women and children there," came the swift reply. "We seek to lay foundations of permanence and without the family we build on quicksand." ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... parted by Lucy's mother, Lady Ashton. The fourth and last act shows a room at Ravenswood, wherein is portrayed the betrothal of Lucy to Bucklaw, culminating in Edgar's sudden irruption; and finally, it shows the desolate seaside place of the quicksand in which, after he has slain Bucklaw, Edgar of Ravenswood is engulfed. The house that Scott, when he wrote the novel, had in his mind as that of Sir William Ashton is the house of Winston, which still is standing, not many miles from Edinburgh. The tower of Wolf's Crag was probably suggested to him ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... dierchesthai] (in place of the uncompounded verb), assigning as his reason, that 'If St. John had written [Greek: erchesthai], no one would ever have substituted [Greek: dierchesthai] for it.' But to construct the text of Scripture on such considerations, is to build a lighthouse on a quicksand. I could have referred the learned Critic to plenty of places where the thing he speaks of as incredible has been done. The proof that St. John used the uncompounded verb is the fact that it is found in all the copies except our two untrustworthy ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the sluggish stream with its flood-worn channel and its treacherous patches of quicksand, the wagon thus halted by the sheer nerve and quick-thinking of mother became a very small island in a troubled sea of weltering backs and tossing horns and staring eyeballs. Riders shouted and lashed unavailingly with their quirts, trying ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... by the excited animal before us. Mark the color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less, a slab of Egyptian granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and, mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man by the returning sea. You may write upon its fine-grained face with a ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... hath, and ever will be the fate of kings, who only listen to the voice of pleasure, thrown in their way by the sirens of administration, which never fail to swallow them up like quicksand—like a serpent, who charms and fascinates, bewitches and enchants with his eye the unwary bird; witness the fatal catastrophe of Rehoboam, who rejected the counsel of the wise and experienced, and ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... came to any visible water. It may be interesting to some of our readers to know that there are many of these curious rivers in western America, which, for miles disappear from the surface of the earth, and, probably, run through the quicksand beneath, as they reappear again. The outline of the river usually exists between the place of its disappearance and the place where the water again comes to the surface of the earth. By digging a few feet into the sand ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... to our own loss. Our kingdom of Phaeacia, as you know, is chiefly rich in shipping. In all parts of the world, where there are navigable seas, or ships can pass, our vessels will be found. You cannot name a coast to which they do not resort. Every rock and every quicksand is known to them that lurks in the vast deep. They pass a bird in flight; and with such unerring certainty they make to their destination that some have said that they have no need of pilot or rudder, but that they move instinctively, self-directed, and know the minds of their voyagers. Thus ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... expansion of the plans requiring a canal of maximum depth, instead of the pilot cut of fifteen feet, as originally planned; the insistence of the Levee Board that levees in the back areas must be raised to elevation 30; development of unforeseen and unforeseeable quicksand conditions in the various excavations; requirements of railroads for bridges of greater capacity and strength than needed; building of a power line to the Foundation Company's plant—not a Dock Board ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... Could a more perfect trap be devised by evil human ingenuity than this? Think for one instant of a bottomless pit of liquid soil, absorbing in its peculiar density. Think of all the horrors of a quicksand, which, embracing, sucks down into its cruel bosom the despairing victim of its insatiable greed. Think of a thin, solid crust, spread like icing upon a cake and concealing the soft, spongy matter beneath, covering every portion of the cruel ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... exquisite handiwork has peeled off by the acre, as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of the series are swallowed up in huge white scars, out of which a helpless head or hand peeps forth like those of creatures sinking into a quicksand. As for Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what one would call a mouldering city—for it has a certain well-aired cleanness and brightness, even in its supreme tranquillity—it affects the imagination very much in the same way as the Campo Santo. And, in ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Spain. He is a fine Latinist; quotes Latin verse; and keeps the mass bells everlastingly ringing; the Russians laugh at his royal masses! But in my opinion the sacred gentleman is either moral slush or a very deep quicksand. It astonishes me," said the Marquis du Plessy, "to find how many people I do disapprove of! I really require very little of the people I am ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... were mostly in grafting, then after a year or two of failure, probably largely due to the way we kept our scions, we had some results at the McCoy Nursery, with scions kept at home. The McCoy Nursery was about four miles from my place, and located in a sandy soil with a near quicksand sub-soil. At that location they were later reasonably successful in grafting, using the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... this non-committal remark was most discomfiting. I had a feeling that the moments were critical, and—they were slipping away. Should I leap into the tide of explanation? That way, perhaps, lay safety. Always the quicksand of Qui s'excuse, s'accuse, made me draw back. I became extremely nervous.... Feverishly I tried to think of a remark which would be natural and more or less relevant, and would pilot us into a channel of conversation down which we could swim with confidence. Of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... what he is, he replies a Ravi Das. Another tradition current among them alleges that their original ancestor was the youngest of four Brahman brethren who went to bathe in a river and found a cow struggling in a quicksand. They sent the youngest brother in to rescue the animal, but before he could get to the spot it had been drowned. He was compelled, therefore, by his brothers to remove the carcase, and after he had done this they turned him out of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Newhaven and the sea-beach; at first through pleasant country roads, and afterwards along a succession of bays of a fairylike prettiness, to our destination—Cramond on the Almond—a little hamlet on a little river, embowered in woods, and looking forth over a great flat of quicksand to where a little islet stood planted in the sea. It was miniature scenery, but charming of its kind. The air of this good winter afternoon was bracing, but not cold. All the way my companions were skylarking, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the river-bed were due to its quicksand formation, which was constantly shifting, shallowing here, deepening there, and it would have been sure destruction to horse and rider, if we stopped for a ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... a good block of timber returns to steam and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It will break up sometimes blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek, or make a sucking, scalding quicksand at the ford. These outbreaks had the kind of morbid interest for the Pocket Hunter that a house of unsavory reputation has in a respectable neighborhood, but I always found the accounts he brought ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... San Gabriel, at the spot where this action was fought, is about one hundred yards wide, the current about knee-deep, flowing over a quicksand bottom. The left bank, by which the Americans approached, is level; that on the right is also level for a short distance back, but beyond this narrow plain a bank fifty feet in height commands the ford and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... were engaged in fighting a common foe—the underground springs. When two parties are both in danger of being drowned they haven't time to fight. To speak of drowning is no hyperbole; the mud of Flanders in winter is in some places like a quicksand, and men have been sucked under beyond redemption. A common misery begat ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose—that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gradually, but surely, being sucked down into the quicksand of modern life. They stretch out their grimy hands to us in vain appeal, not for ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the prospect before them, and their horses snorted and started back at the horrible plain, as though it were some insidious quicksand, and even the riders themselves were seized with doubt and dismay. Suddenly they sprung from their saddles, as at some word of command, unbridled their horses, loosened their girths, and turned them loose on the desert, that they might find their ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... the seamen went out upon the dry flat and found the best bower cable parted, and the anchor so far buried in the quicksand, that it could not be raised. At ten o'clock the flood tide came rolling in, and presently set the brig afloat; the anchor was then weighed with ease, by means of a hawser previously bent to it, and the vessel rode by the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... [FN127] Arab. "Wartah"precipice, quagmire, quicksand and hence sundry secondary and metaphorical significations, under which, as in the "Semitic" (Arabic) tongues generally, the prosaical and material sense of the word is clearly evident. I noted this in Pilgrimage iii. 66 and was soundly abused for so ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... mass of horse and man, themselves scarcely to be disintegrated in the fall from so stupendous a height. The big white beaver hat of the child was found floating on the surface of a deep pool hard by, half quagmire, half quicksand, and would in itself have sufficed to dispel any doubts of his fate, had doubt been entertained. The burial was accomplished as best might be, and the dolorous incident seemed at an end. But throughout the dry, soft Indian summer the ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Little Sunbeam of the Home, or if Cabinet Ministers struck for a decrease of wages. I feel no security in facts, precedent seems no protection to me. The wisdom you can find in an Encyclopedia, or in Selfridge's Information Bureau, seems to me just a transitory adaptation to quicksand circumstances. ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... comment—and that night spent the ten minutes before she dropped off to sleep in pondering the impenetrable mysteries of the institution called marriage. She had married the solid Hermie, and he had turned out to be quicksand. She had not married the whipper-snapper Clint, and now he was one of the rich city's rich men. Had she married him against her parents' wishes would Clint Darrow now be complaining of her extravagance, perhaps, to some woman he had known in his youth? She ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... something of a chuckle he adds that a fleet of these ships bound for Ireland with a crowded company of all the godly persons of England—'piteous people, that be of sin destroyers', 'mourners for sin, with lamentation', and 'good rich men that helpeth folk out of prison'—has been wrecked on a quicksand and the whole company drowned. Next he has an ill-sounding report of his own last voyage to give. When that is finished Imagination proposes an adjournment for pleasures more active than conversation, where purses may be had for ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... many streams, all of which are rapid, for the greater part flowing over beds of lava and quicksand. In some of the wider fords stakes have been set so that the traveller may not get lost in crossing them on horseback during a dense fog. In the summer the frequent rains make travelling very unpleasant unless one is suitably equipped with water-proof garments. In the Hvita, or White ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... The road to the mouth of the Paria and to Lee's Ferry appears to have been found very little less rough than when traveled by the Mormon ox teams, and the river crossing was attended by experiences with quicksand and other dangers, while the pull outward on the south side was up a steep and ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... reformation. When ministry rests upon public opinion, it is not indeed built upon a rock of adamant; it has, however, some stability. But when it stands upon private humor, its structure is of stubble, and its foundation is on quicksand. I repeat it again,—He that supports every administration subverts all government. The reason is this: The whole business in which a court usually takes an interest goes on at present equally well, in whatever hands, whether high or low, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... mountain, but close under the base of the latter. This inlet he proposed to explore, and accordingly the sail was taken down, and the cutter was poled into the narrow creek. The water here was so shallow that the keel slid over the quicksand into which the oar sank freely. The creek soon became narrow, the water deeper, and of a blacker color, and the banks more densely covered with canes. These grew to the height of ten and twelve feet, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... loud grief subsided to a lower key, and her voice grew by degrees monotonous and despairing as the turning tide on a quicksand, before bad weather,—not diminished, but deeper drawn within itself; and the low moan came regularly with each breath, while the tears flowed steadily. The first wild tempest had swept by, and the more enduring ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... the old woman staring after them with her mouth open. It could have been only a few minutes later that they reached Quicksand Creek. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... free from the expectation that his father's sealed past at some instant would open and confront him with the terrible facts. For that reason he felt that the success he had gained as an engineer, a success won by relentless toil and solid ability, rested on a quicksand. For that cause he had welcomed engineering projects full of danger and by his indifference to that danger gained his name ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... towers remain close to the cliffs,—in former days the stronghold of the Homes. It is supposed to be the original of Wolfs Crag in The Bride of Lammermoor. We looked through our glasses at the spot where the unhappy Master of Ravenswood sank with his steed into the treacherous quicksand. ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... Hoorn was still shivering. Jan did not realize this until he had to brake the groundcar almost to a stop at one point, because it was not shaking in severe, periodic shocks as it had earlier. It quivered constantly, like the surface of quicksand. ...
— Wind • Charles Louis Fontenay
... signs indicative of a sand bar extensive enough to enable us to transport the wagon to the opposite bank; but although we found no less than four shoals in the course of our first day's search, three of them extended less than halfway across the river, while the fourth proved to be a quicksand in which we narrowly escaped losing both our horses, saving them at last only by the skin of our teeth and after nearly an hour's hard and strenuous labour. This occurred about three o'clock in the afternoon, and when ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... tremendous sadness came upon the doctor with this thought, enveloping him in a cloud of cold. His heart fainted within him, as at some great catastrophe. He could have wept like a man who finds the trust of his life ill-founded, the faith in which he has dwelt builded upon the quicksand. He fancied that Valentine instantly became aware of his distress, and that the knowledge swelled the mighty tide of the music of the Litany. And this thought struck him and roused the man in him, like the call of circumstance on valour, crying: "Will a man say that ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Little Giant's predictions to be true. The stream, a full foot in depth, flowed between banks higher than usual, and its waters, cold and sweet, were entirely devoid of alkali. Following it some distance, they found sloping banks free from the danger of quicksand, and crossed to the other side, where they made a ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... sir," said Nigel, edging his chair somewhat closer to the Quicksand, "although I cannot conceive what business I have either with mine ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... water, but a smooth surface of viscid slime, here luminous with the florescence of rottenness, there furrowed by a tiny runnel of moisture which sluggishly crept across it to the slow stream beyond. This quicksand, vile and treacherous, lapped the wall below the window, and more than accounted for the absence of bars or fastenings. But, leaning far out, he saw that it ended at the angle of the building, at a point twenty feet or so to ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... They left the quicksand behind and entered the village, passing among the groups of lodges. Here they realized more fully than on the hills the great extent of the Indian town. Its inhabitants seemed a myriad to Dick and Albert, so long used to silence and ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler |
