United States or Tokelau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The long days were filled with impalpable dust and acrid haze suspended in the motionless air; the nights were breathless and dewless; the cold wind which usually swept down from the snow line was laid to sleep over a dark monotonous level, whose horizon was pricked with the eating fires of burning forest crests.
A trooper was silently making down the bedding of the other officers. The sand was soft and dry, no campfire was needed, no tent, no mattress. All four were hardened campaigners and the night was warm and dewless. For a moment or two Blake fidgeted about. Good wine and cigars were as acceptable him as to anybody.
"The Northern Lights," which, at their winter evening illuminations, seem to have shredded into wavy filaments all the rainbows that have spanned the chambers of the East since the Flood, and to upspring, in mirthful fantasy, to hang their infinitely-tinted tresses to the zenith's golden diadem of stars even they sport upon the same lofty concave of dewless blue, which looks through and through the lacework and everchanging drapery of their mingled hues in the most witching mazes of their nightly waltz, giving to each a definiteness that our homely Saxon tongue might fit with a name.
It is the ghost of unshed showers atomized dew, precipitated in life-bestowing avalanches upon a dewless and parched shore; it is the good angel that stands between a careless people and contagion; it is heaven-sent nourishment.
The mesenger returned, bringing a goat, and the good news that porters would be sent early next morning. We slept well in the cool and dewless air, with little trouble from mosquitoes. The voice of the cataract in its "sublime same-soundingness" alone broke the silence, and the scenery suggested to us, as to the first Britishers, that we might be bivouacking among the "blue misty hills of Morven."
The starlight of that dewless Sierran night was bright and cold and passionless. There was no moon to lead the fancy astray with its faint mysteries and suggestions; nothing but a clear, grayish-blue twilight, with sharply silhouetted shadows, pointed here and there with bright large-spaced constant stars.
They would pass over the brow into the dewless crops where Gihon, low and shrunken, could only guess what they were about when Abu Hussein flew down the bank to scratch at a stopped earth, and flew back into the barley again. As Farag had foretold, it was evil days for Abu Hussein ere he learned to take the necessary steps and to get away crisply.
We will call it a mild splenetic case, induced by the sultry weather, and the very slow on coming of the storm presaged by your dewless roses." He laughed naturally and pleasantly. Having confessed to what he regarded as a ridiculous succumbing of his buoyant spirit to atmospheric influences, he shook off the nightmare as if it had never sat upon him. Mabel was grave still.
It was a cool, tranquil, dewless night when they at last straggled out, mere black and white patches in the colorless moonlight. The brilliancy of the flower-hued landscape was subdued under its passive, pale austerity; even the gray and gold of the second terrace seemed dulled and confused.
You are just in season to enjoy the society of your sister," Frederic said, lightly, pointing to the billows of mingled white and red, tossing under Mabel's fingers. The new-comer approached the sideboard, leaned languidly upon her elbow, and picked up a half-blown bud at random from the pile. "They are scentless!" she complained. "Because dewless!" replied Mabel, with profound gravity.
Word Of The Day