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tortuous
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  • But the story Mahmoud told most often when Zeitoun was growing up, the story he told when forbidding his children to live on the sea, was this one: Mahmoud was returning from Greece on a thirty-six-foot schooner when they ran into a black and tortuous storm.†   (source)
  • My head swarmed with tortuous thoughts of Roberta in somebody else's arms, but it was also my fault.†   (source)
  • This was quite complex because of a number of convolutions or tortuous areas in the dura and in the dural plains between their brains, as well as a large, abnormal artery running between the two brains which had to be sectioned.†   (source)
  • Phaedrus follows a long and tortuous path into the highest abstractions, seems about to come down and then stops.†   (source)
  • In the toilet, where I used to take the papers, it was tortuous to look for and exclude the unnecessary pages so that I could learn how he would finally outwit his latest adversary.†   (source)
  • Inhuman conditions at the best of times, tortuous experiments at the worst.†   (source)
  • Tortuously, through Baig, Mortenson explained his wife was expecting him home in a few days, and that all CAI projects had to be approved by the board.†   (source)
  • That is a wide region of sluggish fen where the stream becomes tortuous and much divided.†   (source)
  • The steep one-vehicle road dropped at such a perilous and tortuous slope, I turned around the first chance I could get.†   (source)
  • Strung out for miles in a stricken, tortuous, squirming line, the other flights of planes were making the same hazardous journey over the target, threading their swift way through the swollen masses of new and old bursts of flak like rats racing in a pack through their own droppings.†   (source)
  • At first, her tortuous endurance of second period was funny to me, but after a while, it got kind of annoying, not to mention distracting.†   (source)
  • He had finished the appendectomy, then two gastro-jejunostomies for peptic ulcer, three hernia repairs, one hydrocele, a subtotal thyroid resection, and a skin graft, but by his standards it had been tortuously slow.†   (source)
  • The second way was tortuous.†   (source)
  • Later, when I was sitting at my desk in English, I day-dreamed of slumping over and dying a slow, tortuous death so they each could see how much their ignoring me hurt.†   (source)
  • That might start Grigorievitch's mind exploring far too many tortuous channels, and if there had been a leak, he would find it hard enough to clear hiinself The guard saluted as he reentered the administration buildmg.†   (source)
  • On the appointed day, eight of us piled into the boat—five boys plus Chuck and Al, the two new California boys, and I—and started the long, tortuous journey to Bluffton.†   (source)
  • The whole family laughed with affection when they thought of Joe trying to learn to plow; his tortuous first furrow wound about like a flatland stream, and his second furrow touched his first only once and then to cross it and wander off.†   (source)
  • The guard went out, and the drunk began talking, tortuously reasoning with the Sunlight Man, who ignored him.†   (source)
  • Control had his reasons; they were usually so bloody tortuous it took you a week to work them out.†   (source)
  • There were only Clumly's ancient codes, the tortuous carvings on his tablets.†   (source)
  • Then he got into his shoes, a tortuous business, hooked his suspenders and hunted for cufflinks.†   (source)
  • He sipped from the bottle and sang snatches of Mexican songs as we climbed the tortuous mountain road.†   (source)
  • Tall, bearded, slimmer than in her dreams of him, but with strong-looking hands, workman's hands, with tortuous, full veins.†   (source)
  • Beside us is the rocky cliff and the tortuous single-lane road which snakes its way to the New Denver hospital.†   (source)
  • That meant that once she got the babies out, she'd have to do an emergency hysterectomy, no easy task in pregnancy, what with the uterine arteries being tortuous, thickened, and carrying half a liter of blood a minute.†   (source)
  • She maneuvered a turn, joints creaking and clicking, and, moving tortuously on her two heavy canes, led them toward a gloomy ten-foot-high oak door that opened off the hallway to the left.†   (source)
  • Ten minutes later, Hodge seated in his car again, the Judge came out, walking slowly, as if not from age and drunkenness but by laborious choice, and climbed tortuously into his car and ground on the starter, with the key off perhaps, and at last got the motor going.†   (source)
  • And furthermore, the more difficulty and tortuousness there were, the more he felt safe.†   (source)
  • But what goes on in the twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.†   (source)
  • I go beneath ground tortuously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell.†   (source)
  • That, in itself, was strange, for in Atlanta every respectable newcomer hastened to present his credentials, to tell proudly of his home and family, to trace the tortuous mazes of relationship that stretched over the entire South.†   (source)
  • That is the tortuous method preferred, in each of the meanderings of his indefatigable novel, by the oblique Ts'ui Pên.†   (source)
  • I drove in the last lorry, through tortuous lanes where the overhanging boughs whipped the windscreen; somewhere we left the lane and turned into a drive; somewhere we reached an open space where two drives converged and a ring of storm lanterns marked the heap of stores.†   (source)
  • In his moment of terrible vision he saw, in the tortuous ways of a thousand alien places, his foiled quest of himself.†   (source)
  • She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin.†   (source)
  • I see the low, long shore; I see the tortuous lanes of stamped mud that lead in and out among ramshackle pagodas; I see the gilt and crenellated buildings which have an air of fragility and decay as if they were temporarily run up buildings in some Oriental exhibition.†   (source)
  • He knew the fine old cities already as though he had trodden their tortuous streets from childhood.†   (source)
  • It was gravel on rock bottom, tortuous, but open, with infrequent and shallow downward steps.†   (source)
  • Then he plunged down beneath the tortuous vault of the spiral staircase, and once more descended.†   (source)
  • A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.†   (source)
  • Here was a man after his own heart—a tortuous and indirect person playing a hidden game.†   (source)
  • The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel.†   (source)
  • She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on such occasions, and which was like a large steady light thrown across the tortuous darkness of the situation.†   (source)
  • XX When Dick got out of the elevator he followed a tortuous corridor and turned at length toward a distant voice outside a lighted door.†   (source)
  • Far across that wide waste began the slow lift of uplands through which Deception Pass cut its tortuous many-canyoned way.†   (source)
  • He kept on and on, threading tortuous passages through rock-strewn patches, keeping to the old road where it was clear, abandoning it for open spaces, and always going down.†   (source)
  • But with it came dreams even more tortuous than those of the night before and from which several times he started up in fright or in pursuit of some strange fancy.†   (source)
  • Joan knew that only an Indian could follow the tortuous and rocky trail by which Kells had brought her in.†   (source)
  • Great disorder consisting of the following items: (1) seven or eight empty cardboard boxes, with tissue-paper tongues hanging panting from their mouths; (2) an assortment of street dresses mingled with their sisters of the evening, all upon the table, all evidently new; (3) a roll of tulle, which has lost its dignity and wound itself tortuously around everything in sight, and (4) upon the two small chairs, a collection of lingerie that beggars description.†   (source)
  • The canyon was narrow and tortuous; Hare could not see ahead or below, for the projecting red cliffs, growing higher as he descended, walled out the view.†   (source)
  • All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage.†   (source)
  • Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river.†   (source)
  • An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways.†   (source)
  • The streets were narrow, tortuous, and mostly evil-smelling, with a mixture of stale fish and damp cellar odours.†   (source)
  • In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles—Las Tours, the Towers.†   (source)
  • The two men went along some tortuous passages and up a dark staircase and came to a secluded room where one of the stewards was uncorking bottles for a few gentlemen.†   (source)
  • The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light.†   (source)
  • Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land.†   (source)
  • He saw himself lingering in Cordova on the bridge that spanned the Gaudalquivir; he wandered through tortuous streets in Toledo and sat in churches where he wrung from El Greco the secret which he felt the mysterious painter held for him.†   (source)
  • So, perhaps, as Sir Andrew gradually directed Marguerite through the tortuous streets of Calais, many of the population, who turned with an oath to look at the strangers clad in English fashion, thought that they were bent on purchasing dutiable articles for their own fog-ridden country, and gave them no more than a passing thought.†   (source)
  • The most unhappy aspect of their relations was Dick's growing indifference, at present personified by too much drink; Nicole did not know whether she was to be crushed or spared—Dick's voice, throbbing with insincerity, confused the issue; she couldn't guess how he was going to behave next upon the tortuously slow unrolling of the carpet, nor what would happen at the end, at the moment of the leap.†   (source)
  • Into this maze of rocks they threaded a tortuous way, climbing, descending, halting to gather wild plums and great lavender lilies, and going on at the will of fancy.†   (source)
  • He crashed through cedars, threaded a tortuous way among boulders, made his horse slide down slanting banks of soft earth, picked a slow and cautious progress across weathered slopes of loose rock.†   (source)
  • Having reached the summit of his vengeance by a long and tortuous path, he saw an abyss of doubt yawning before him.†   (source)
  • It wore, to his eyes, a tortuous air, and his fault was that he was not quite sure that anything in the world could really be as candid as this request of Miss Stackpole's appeared.†   (source)
  • She went out of the town by a tortuous back street, and drove slowly along, unconscious of the road and the scene.†   (source)
  • Verdi's music did little to comfort him, and he left the theatre and walked homeward, without knowing his way, through the tortuous, tragic streets of Rome, where heavier sorrows than his had been carried under the stars.†   (source)
  • Pathfinder was as simple as the Quartermaster was practised; he was as sincere as the other was false, and as direct as the last was tortuous.†   (source)
  • As if the aspiring city had become puffed up in the very ground on which it stood, the ground had so risen about Bleeding Heart Yard that you got into it down a flight of steps which formed no part of the original approach, and got out of it by a low gateway into a maze of shabby streets, which went about and about, tortuously ascending to the level again.†   (source)
  • Moreover every shop pitched out half its contents upon trestles and boxes on the kerb, extending the display each week a little further and further into the roadway, despite the expostulations of the two feeble old constables, until there remained but a tortuous defile for carriages down the centre of the street, which afforded fine opportunities for skill with the reins.†   (source)
  • But Commander Farragut was unwilling to attempt this tortuous passageway and maneuvered instead to double Cape Horn.†   (source)
  • In this manner Cosette traversed the labyrinth of tortuous and deserted streets which terminate in the village of Montfermeil on the side of Chelles.†   (source)
  • The boat moved on,—freighted with its weight of sorrow,—up the red, muddy, turbid current, through the abrupt tortuous windings of the Red river; and sad eyes gazed wearily on the steep red-clay banks, as they glided by in dreary sameness.†   (source)
  • He cast a haggard eye over the double, tortuous way which fate had caused their two destinies to pursue up to their point of intersection, where it had dashed them against each other without mercy.†   (source)
  • I, who was looking on, an eager and curious spectator,—I, who was watching the working of this mournful tragedy,—I, who like a wicked angel was laughing at the evil men committed protected by secrecy (a secret is easily kept by the rich and powerful), I am in my turn bitten by the serpent whose tortuous course I was watching, and bitten to the heart!†   (source)
  • Ten minutes later, the cavaliers of the watch fled in terror before a long procession of black and silent men which was descending towards the Pont an Change, through the tortuous streets which pierce the close-built neighborhood of the markets in every direction.†   (source)
  • A peculiarity of this species of war is, that the attack of the barricades is almost always made from the front, and that the assailants generally abstain from turning the position, either because they fear ambushes, or because they are afraid of getting entangled in the tortuous streets.†   (source)
  • The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwining their branches; and then the tortuous lines, the Rues de la Plâtrerie, de la Verrerie, de la Tixeranderie, etc., meandered over all.†   (source)
  • Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies, jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements and scars on its walls, terrible,—such was, retrospectively viewed, the antique sewer of Paris.†   (source)
  • The ground of the University was hilly; Mount SainteGeneviève formed an enormous mound to the south; and it was a sight to see from the summit of Notre-Dame how that throng of narrow and tortuous streets (to-day the Latin Quarter), those bunches of houses which, spread out in every direction from the top of this eminence, precipitated themselves in disorder, and almost perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to the water's edge, having the air, some of falling, others of clambering up…†   (source)
  • He thanked Providence for having sent this happy idea to him; but, as he was preparing to cross the Place, in order to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the city, where meander all those old sister streets, the Rues de la Barillerie, de la Vielle-Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la Juiverie, etc., still extant to-day, with their nine-story houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of the Fools, which was also emerging from the court house, and rushing across the courtyard, with great cries,…†   (source)
  • When, still a little fellow, he had dragged himself tortuously and by jerks beneath the shadows of its vaults, he seemed, with his human face and his bestial limbs, the natural reptile of that humid and sombre pavement, upon which the shadow of the Romanesque capitals cast so many strange forms.†   (source)
  • He moved the bucket slightly, so the surface formed a reflecting pool, and pulling his face into the tortuous grimace men use when they shave, began to scrape his cheeks.†   (source)
  • Unfortunate ascendant tortuous, Of which the lord is helpless fall'n, alas!†   (source)
  • As when a ship, by skilful steersmen wrought Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the wind Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail: So varied he, and of his tortuous train Curled many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, To lure her eye; she, busied, heard the sound Of rusling leaves, but minded not, as used To such disport before her through the field, From every beast; more duteous at her call, Than at Circean call the herd disguised.†   (source)
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