"Rainless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that comes from the Atlantic; the Sierra Nevada and the Wahsatch range on the other, running parallel with them to the west, check and condense all the moisture that comes from the Pacific coast. In between these two great lines lies the dry and almost rainless district known to the ambitious western mind as the Great American Desert, enclosing in its midst that slowly evaporating inland sea, the Great Salt Lake, a last relic of some extinct chain of mighty waters once comparable to Superior, Erie, and Ontario. In Mexico, again, where the twin ranges ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Mount Shasta, and a breadth of from seventy-five to one hundred miles, with long and gradual slopes on the west, cut by deep canons. The climate of the Sierras is beyond an adequate description: the beautiful summer days are mild and rainless. The main peaks of the western range are: Mount King, Mount Gardner and Mount Brewer; those of the eastern range: Mount Kearsage, Mount Tyndall, Mount Williamson and Mount Whitney. Mount Whitney is the highest peak in the United States outside of Alaska, rising 14,898 feet ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... glancing up at the gray canopy of rainless cloud which hid the sky; "any day is a good day to be married on, but I ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... they found little shade in the cactus forest, but the green produced the illusion of it. They expected to find flowing or standing water, but they went on for many miles and the soil remained hard and baked, as it can bake only in the rainless regions ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sheep fed under the keepership of the antique-mannered shepherd lads and lasses; and in the opening of the bordering trees we saw the far-off and arid mountains, rugged and picturesque peaks. The Cretan summer for three or four months is rainless, and a valley where the vegetation is fed by the springs so abundantly as to sustain a perpetual flora is rarely to be met in one's travels there. I saw many new flowers there, and amongst them a perfectly white primrose, in every other respect like the common ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... were wheat, barley, and apparently sorghum (Holcus sorghum, Linnaeus), the doora of the modern fellaheen. Then as now the whole country, with the exception of a fringe on the coast of the Mediterranean, was almost rainless, and owed its immense fertility entirely to the annual inundation of the Nile, which, regulated by an elaborate system of dams and canals, was distributed over the fields, renewing the soil year by year with a fresh deposit of mud washed down from the great ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... and persuades the boy to accompany her to her 'Hermitage' which she assures him, is far more beautiful than his own. So soon as Rishyacringa is safely on board the ship sails, the lad is carried to the capital of the rainless land, the King gives him his daughter as wife, and so soon as the marriage is consummated the spell is broken, and rain ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... set off for the red rock at a canter. Wayland's horse followed at a long gallop. The broncho of the old clergyman with the heavier man lurched to a tired lope. They felt the eddies of dust as they tore ahead, saw the rainless clouds gathering low and gray far behind, saw the sun lurid through the whirls of red silt, saw the dust toss up among the lava beds like snow in a blizzard, then the sand storm broke, the dry storm of rainless clouds and choking dust flaying the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... your face as you ride. This can be borne with composure for five or ten minutes, but not for days and weeks at a time. The other felt hat may be as small and as cheap as you like. Only see that it combines the graces of comfort and becomingness. It is for evenings, and sunless rainless days. A small brown felt, with a narrow leather band, gilt buckle, and a twist of orange veiling around the crown, is ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... the difference between fertility and barrenness; it makes the difference between a cheerful and a melancholy landscape. As one travels north-eastward from Palapshwye to Bulawayo, and from Bulawayo to Fort Salisbury, one passes by degrees from an arid and almost rainless land to a land of showers and flowing waters. In Bechuanaland there are, except for three months in the year, no streams at all. In Matabililand one begins to find perennial brooks. In Mashonaland there are at last rivers, sometimes ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... winter. The coldest month is January, the hottest August. The mean annual temperature in the coast plains is 66 deg. F. Heavy rains prevail from December to March, and rain is not uncommon during other months also, excepting June, July, August and September, which are very hot and rainless. The average annual fall is 29 in. On the mountains and the high plateaus the winter is often very severe; snow lies for six months on the higher peaks of the Kabyle mountains. On the plateaus the temperature passes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... what we may call interior deserts. Africa has one such, though it is north of the centre, and extends to the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The only continent without this central nearly rainless field is South America, where the sole characteristic arid district is situated on the western slope of the Cordilleran range. In this case the peculiarity is due to the fact that the strong westerly setting winds which ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... rising; but we laid this to the speed of the train, fully twelve miles an hour. But once outside the shelter of our carriage, it was impossible to deceive ourselves any longer. The wind was rising, and the dry dust of many rainless months was rising with it, flying in dense, enveloping clouds. It was a curious sight that presented itself: a long, straggling procession of two or three hundred men and women, beating their way, heads downward, across the plains of Chili in what turned out to be a dust-storm of colossal proportions. ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... It disappeared like magic, as it always does in Egypt, when the Nile rises and washes all impurities away. There had been little or no cholera in Egypt since 1865, and there had often been as much filth as in 1883. It has never become endemic there, as it is a rainless country and generally too dry for the cholera ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... on the other hand, the floods, which come too late for the winter crops, are followed by the rainless summer months; and not only must the flood-water be controlled, but some portion of it must be detained artificially, if it is to be of use during the burning months of July, August, and September, when the rivers are at their lowest. ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... still lit up every night with torches. Here was the "Emporium of the whole world"; "countless merchants from all parts": the "country rainless and ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... end of May; a bright, rainless, and at times bitterly cold month it has been. But now the chill east wind has almost died away. Summer has come at last. Once more I am making for the Downs. Very seldom am I there at this period of the year; but before going away for several months, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... drain. desiccate, dehydrate, exsiccate^; parch. kiln dry; vacuum dry, blow dry, oven dry; hang out to dry. mummify. be fine, hold up. Adj. dry, anhydrous, arid; adust^, arescent^; dried &c v.; undamped; juiceless^, sapless; sear; husky; rainless, without rain, fine; dry as a bone, dry as dust, dry as a stick, dry as a mummy, dry as a biscuit. water ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... not be a very severe penance for an island on which the rainfall averages 124 inches per year; but when vegetation suffers from the cruelty of four almost rainless months, promises and slights amount to something more than mere discourtesy. How genuine the thanksgiving to the soft skies after an incense-stimulating shower. Insects whirl in the sunshine. Among the pomelo-trees is a cyclone ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... may have "named all the birds without a gun," but not the fairy-footed, ground-inhabiting, furtive, small folk of the rainless regions. They are too many and too swift; how many you would not believe without seeing the footprint tracings in the sand. They are nearly all night workers, finding the days too hot and white. In mid-desert where there are no cattle, there are no birds of carrion, but if you go ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... have described in many portions of our journey through Cyprus, the simple action of an insignificant stream, or of a solitary cattle-wheel, forms an oasis in the rainless desert of the Messaria, and the eye that has been wearied with the barren aspect of a treeless surface is gladdened by the relief of a sudden appearance of groves of oranges, lemons, and other shady trees, the result of a supply of water. Whenever such welcome spots ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... rainless month we had been hunting upon the plains, while only one hundred and fifty miles away Urga had had an almost daily deluge. In midsummer heavy rain-clouds roll southward to burst against "God's Mountain," which rears its green-clad ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... almost rainless region the most fruitful on the globe," remarked one of the managers of the tour. "By the aid of irrigation the Egyptian farmers can raise two or three crops every year. To do so, however, they must labor incessantly and give the land thorough cultivation. ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... things have abandoned the domain of intelligence. But it is true that the soul eagerly seeks for and receives the impressions of the world about it, and will be moved to a different creed or to a different poetry, according as the body perceives the sea or the hills or the rainless and inhuman places which lie to the south of Europe; and certainly the souls of those races which have inhabited the great zone of calms between the trade winds and the tropics, those races which have felt nothing beneficent, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... thickened to make a Californian hillside. It was November, but the season was late. The earth was washed bright by the early rains and not yet sodden with the later ones. The black, shaded loam, bare of grass, oozed the moisture it was saving for its evergreen redwoods against a rainless summer. In the dark clefts grew scentless things of a delicate, gnome aspect—gold-back fern, maiden-hair overlying dank, cold pools, sorrel, six-foot brake. No blossoms blew among all this greenery; only by that sign and by the wet, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... well imagine that the people of Acoma do not spend many of their waking hours in their apartments. In this warm climate, with its superb air and almost rainless sky, every one lives as much as possible out of doors, and a true child of the sun always prefers the canopy of heaven to any other covering, and would rather eat on his doorstep and sleep on his flat roof, than to dine at a sumptuous table or recline on a comfortable ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... table in the middle and seats all around, the sides were well banked up with sand bags and outside a small ante room where one could sit and smoke in the evening, and the roof was the sky and a very wonderful sky during those long rainless cloudless months. Round about the Headquarters, the Colonel, the Adjutant, the Doctor, the Sergeant-Major, had their dug-outs, and the Mess did for Orderly Room also. The Company Messes were not so elaborate, and were situated nearer the front line and close to our own dug-outs. We endeavoured ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... 'The Military Soudan,' stretches with apparent indefiniteness over the face of the continent. Level plains of smooth sand—a little rosier than buff, a little paler than salmon—are interrupted only by occasional peaks of rock—black, stark, and shapeless. Rainless storms dance tirelessly over the hot, crisp surface of the ground. The fine sand, driven by the wind, gathers into deep drifts, and silts among the dark rocks of the hills, exactly as snow hangs about an Alpine summit; only it is a fiery snow, such as ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... as to the weather for the month have been lavished upon us, the first week having produced but one passing shower. Amos Opie foresees a muggy, rainless period. Larry declares for much rain, as it rained at new moon and again at first quarter; but, as he says, as if to release himself from responsibility, "That's the way we read it in Oireland, but maybe, as this is t'other side of the warld, it's all the other way round wid rain!" ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... effort was the conveyance of water to the rainless country by the seacoast, especially to certain parts capable of being reclaimed and made fertile. Some of the aqueducts were of great length—one measuring ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... that they underwent some classic metamorphosis, translated to a rainless paradise, where they dreamed of battalions for ever inspected and the general salute ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... Power at length was pleased to show indulgence, and the north-west wind blew for three days on end, steady and strong, promising a rainless week. The scythes were long since sharpened and ready, and the five men set to work on the morning of the third day. Legare, Esdras and the father cut; Da'Be and Tit'Be followed close on their heels, raking the hay together. Toward evening all five took their forks in hand and made it into ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... April, the badger's spring-cleaning began in downright earnest. The old bedding of fern, and hay, and leaves was cleared entirely from the winter "oven," and, after a few windy but rainless days and nights, when the refuse of Nature's woodland garden was dry, new materials for a cosy couch were carried to the lair, and arranged on the floor of the roomy chamber where Brock's mother had brought him into the world. The badgers' ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... place it on the blaze. As night gathers without, the gale rises. It is a season of uneasy winds, and of strange, rainless storms, which perplex the fishermen, and indicate rough weather out at sea. As the house trembles and the windows rattle, we turn towards the fire with a feeling of safety. Representing the fiercest of all dangers, it ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Cascade and Sierra Nevada ranges, and also obtains in a fringe of country to the eastward of the mountain summits. The distinguishing characteristic of the Pacific type is a wet season, extending from October to March, and a practically rainless summer, except in northern California and parts of Oregon and Washington. About half of the yearly precipitation comes in the months of December, January, and February, the remaining half being distributed throughout the seven months—September, October, ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... fissures in the chalk bed of the stream, which runs as it were over the top of a long chalk sponge. In rainless summers there is only enough water to fill the bottom of the sponge, and the top channel runs dry. Brayley has some amusing calculations as to the amount of water ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... manures procurable by the American Farmer, guano from the rainless islands of Peru, is perhaps not only the most concentrated—the most economical to the purchaser—but by its composition, as we will show by analysis, the best adapted to all the crops cultivated in this country requiring manure. For wheat, especially, it is the one ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... not a breath of air stirring. The atmosphere seemed stagnant, like a pool on which the sun has beat during rainless weeks. The dried tops of the swamp grass and reeds pointed motionless to the heat-quivering sky. The dust cast up by our car hung over the road ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... least who is capable of reasoning about such matters), that it is not at all likely that it flows from snow. 29 The first and greatest evidence is afforded by the winds, which blow hot from these regions; the second is that the land is rainless always and without frost, whereas after snow has fallen rain must necessarily come within five days, so that if it snowed in those parts rain would fall there; the third evidence is afforded by the people dwelling there, who are ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... which continue the floral chain around December to the spring flowers of January. Thus, although the main bloom and honey season is only about three months long, the floral circle, however thin around some of the hot, rainless ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... eye a charming, if somewhat remote, background to Tarascon; this assurance having been given us by the landlady of the inn at Arles, of whom we hired a rather lumbering conveyance. The weather was not promising, but it proved a good day for the mediaeval Pompeii; a grey, melancholy, moist, but rainless, or almost rainless day, with nothing in the sky to flout, as the poet says, the dejected and pulverised past. The drive itself was charming, for there is an inexhaustible sweetness in the grey-green landscape of Provence. It is never absolutely flat ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... broods. Before we get far into this region we shall notice that one of its most typical features is the alkali-pool. Every few miles we come to a shallow basin of stagnant water saturated with salts of soda and potash. Still another characteristic of the Plains is their tremendous rainless thunder-storms. If we are fortunate enough to encounter one of these, we shall witness in one hour more atmospheric perturbation than has occurred within our whole previous experience on the Atlantic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... had crooned so long in the umbrella tree built a nest there and cooed on to his mate. The clear, rainless winter gave place to spring and the giant cactus burst into flower. It rained, short and hard, and the desert floor took on suddenly a fine mat of green; and still he did not come. He was like the rain, this wild man of the desert; swift and fierce, then gone and forgotten. Once ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... second wind, so to speak, "she has the bluest eyes I've ever seen. Why, Miss Cullen, you said you'd never seen anything so blue as the sky yesterday; but even the atmosphere of 'rainless Arizona' has to take a back seat when her eyes are round. And they are just like the atmosphere out here. You can look into them for a hundred miles, but you can't get to ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... sadly civilized Indians sold Kansas City and New Jersey-made curios—stopped and went on again along the rim of The King's Basin, through San Antonio Pass to the great cities on the western edge of the continent. But the town on the banks of the Colorado, in an almost rainless land, had little to build upon. Still on the street mingled the old-timers from desert, mountain and plain; from prospecting trip, mine or ranch; the adventurer, the promoter, the Indian, the Mexican, the frontier ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... a flame of pure fire, the feet like melting metal glowing in fire. And the whole countenance was as the sun in its noontime strength shining out of a rainless, cloudless sky. Humanity enveloped in deity, yet remaining true, full humanity. God within man immeasurably more than man, yet not overwhelming, not disturbing nor obliterating, any part of his humanity, rather making every ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... found their fulfilment a pleasant trick of Fortune's. To keep a bustling household in good spirits leaves small room for brooding, and he was famous for his hospitality. The partridges were plentiful that year, and a rainless autumn had come on the heels of a fine summer. So life went pleasantly with all, and the master of the place cloaked a very sick ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... the Tibeto-Burman family. North of the apex of the delta and the boundary between the deltaic and inland tracts, the rainfall gradually lessens as far as Minbu, where what was formerly called the rainless zone commences and extends as far as Katha. The rainfall in the coast districts varies from about 200 in. in the Arakan and Tenasserim divisions to an average of 90 in Rangoon and the adjoining portion of the Irrawaddy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... mental. We make our own conditions, it is true, and these react and have a deadening effect on us in the long run, but we are never wholly deadened by them—if we be not indeed dead, if the life we live can be called life. We are told that there are rainless zones on the earth and regions of everlasting summer: it is hard to believe that the dwellers in such places can ever think a new thought or do a new thing. The morning rain did not last very long, and before it had quite ceased I took up ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... no employment except to live, and they endeavoured to make the act of living as exciting as their old amusements had been. But accounts of foreign countries came more and more rarely to England; for when the fourth rainless year arrived, drought and famine had slain three-fourths of its inhabitants, and commerce and agriculture were alike suspended. When a vessel came as far up in the mouth of a river as the sinking waters permitted, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... the calendar, spring was well upon them, and the prairies would soon be flaunting new dresses of green. The calendar, however, had neglected to record the rainless heat of the summer gone before, or the searing winds that burned the grass brown as it grew, or the winter which forgot its part and permitted prairie-dogs to chip-chip-chip above ground in January, when they should be sleeping decently in their ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... Egyptian civilization was the proper irrigation of the alluvial soil, the turning of marsh into cultivated fields, and the reclamation of land from the desert for the purposes of agriculture. Owing to the rainless character of the country, the only means of obtaining water for the crops is by irrigation, and where the fertilizing Nile water cannot be taken by means of canals, there cultivation ends and the desert ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... wedding includes one in a garden, with a wedding procession under the trees, and tables out on the lawn—a perfect plan for California or other rainless States, but difficult to arrange on the Atlantic seaboard where rain is too likely ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... drew unto its end, the hot bright days Now gat from men as much of blame as praise, As rainless still they passed, without a cloud, And growing grey at last, the barley bowed Before the south-east wind. On such a day These folk amid the trellised roses lay, And careless for a little while at least, Crowned with the mingled ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... ploughing, and young grain and crops of all kinds need rain through April. In the northern part of the state the wet season begins earlier and lasts longer than in the south, while the southeastern corner is an almost rainless desert. ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... day when she had shown him the way to the deserted house he had packed up and left Creston River for Boston; but at the first station he had jumped on the train with a hand-bag and scrambled up into the hills. For two golden rainless August weeks he had camped in the house, getting eggs and milk from the solitary farm in the valley, where no one knew him, and doing his cooking over a spirit-lamp. He got up every day with the sun, took a plunge in a brown pool he knew of, and spent long hours lying in the scented ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... inexhaustible. In a rough, hilly, or mountainous country the finest farms and the densest population are found on the "bottom lands" along the streams. The flood plain most famous in history is that of the river Nile in Egypt. For a distance of 1500 miles above its mouth this river flows through a rainless desert, and has no tributary. The heavy spring rains which fall upon the highlands about its sources produce in summer a rise of the water, which overflows the valley on either side. Thus the lower Nile valley became one of the earliest centers of civilization, and has supported ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... official mother chattered on concerning her children's attributes, while I shifted uneasily in my chair and looked about the room for my hat—forgetting in my embarrassment that I was dwelling in a sunless, rainless city and possessed ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... down through the cool June air upon the lovely valley, rich in forest and flanked by gently-swelling, grassy hills. The tinkling murmur of the river which, after rainless months, had shrunk to the dimensions of a streamlet, except in the long, deep reaches, stole up from where it ran, crystal clear, over a low, ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... deaths are ascribed to Resht fever—a terrible disease, due to the water and the exhalations from the marshes surrounding the city. It is certainly the dampest place in the world. The sun is seldom seen, and one's clothes, even on a dry, rainless day, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... leaned over the parapet in the breathless stillness, his alert ear missed an accustomed murmur of the night. Baalbek was lulled to sleep by the ever-present tinkle of running water, the most delicious sound that can soothe an Eastern ear, accustomed as it is to the echoless silence of the arid rainless desert. ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr |
